The good news: The United States has a window of opportunity to strike back at Covid-19 before things get much, much worse.
The bad news: That window is closing fast. And the country seems reluctant if not to seize the moment.
Winter is coming. Winter means cold and flu season, which is only sure to complicate the task of finding out who is sick with Covid-19 and who suffers from a lesser threat of respiratory infection. It also means that cherished outdoor liberties that connect us to pre-Covid life – pop-up restaurant patios, picnics in parks, trips to the beach – will soon be out of reach in the northern parts of the country.
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Unless Americans use the increasing weeks between now and the onset of “indoor weather” to curb transmission in the country, this winter could be Dickensianly pale, public health experts warn.
“I think November, December, January, February will be difficult months in this country without a vaccine,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
It is of course possible that some faxes could then be approved, thanks to historically rapid scientific work. But there is little prospect that large numbers of Americans will be vaccinated at the time to prevent the harsh winter of Osterholm and others.
Human coronaviruses, the distant cold-causing cousins of the virus that causes Covid-19, circulate throughout the year. Now is typically the low season for transfer. But in this summer of the failed response of America’s Covid-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is spreading across the country, and pandemic-weary Americans seem more interested in restarting Covid lifestyles. then in suppressing the virus to the point where schools can reopen, and remain open, and restaurants, cinemas, and gyms can function with some restrictions.
“We should focus on no transfer before we open the schools and we put children in the way – children and teachers and their carers. And that, if that means no gymnastics, no cinemas, that must be it,” said Caroline Buckee , associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.
“We now seem to be choosing free activities for more than child safety in a month’s time. And I can not understand that trade.”
While many countries have succeeded in suppressing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the United States has failed miserably. Countries in Europe and Asia are raising their concerns about a second wave. Here the first wave rises, and smells the countryside, as in urban parts of the country. Although there has been a slight decline in cases over the past few weeks, more than 50,000 Americans a day are diagnosed with Covid-19. And those are just the confirmed cases.
To put that in perspective, at this rate, the US has recovered in a week more cases than Britain has accumulated since the start of the pandemic.
Public health officials had hoped the virus would diminish with the hot summer temperatures and the tendency – this year increased – of people to take out their recreational activities. Experts believe that people are less likely to send the virus outside, especially if they wear face masks and keep a safe distance from each other.
But in some places, people have thrown out Covid warnings for the wind, and in the process fled for public health flights. Kristen Ehresmann, director of infectious disease epidemiology, prevention and control for the Minnesota Department of Health, points to a large, three-day rodeo held recently in her state. Organizers knew they had to limit the number of attendees to 250, but refused; thousands attended. In Sturgis, SD, it was expected that a quarter of a million motorcyclists would descend on the city this past weekend for an annual rally lasting 10 days.
Even on a smaller scale, public health authorities know that some people are leaving their guard. Others have never embraced the need to try to prevent the spread of the virus. Ehresmann’s father was recently invited to visit some friends; he went, she said, but wore his mask, his elbow babbling instead of shaking hands. “And the people kind of acted, ‘Oh, you drank that Kool-Aid,’ instead of, ‘We all have to do this.'”
Ehresmann and others in public health are flummoxed by the phenomenon of people refusing to recognize the risk posed by the virus.
“Just this idea of, ‘I just do not want to believe it, so it will not be true’ – honestly, I did not really treat it because it was more related to illness,” she said.
Buckee, the Harvard expert, wonders if the magical thinking that seems to have infected swaths of the country has to do with the fact that many of the people who died were elderly. For many Americans, she said, the disease has not yet affected their lives – but the movement restrictions and other response measures have.
“I think if kids died, this would be … a different situation, quite honestly,” she said.
Epidemiologist Michael Mina regrets that an important opportunity to wrestle the virus under control is lost, as Americans ignore the realities of the pandemic in favor of trying to resurrect the life of the Covid.
“We will continue to pursue every opportunity we have with this epidemic to bring it under control,” said Mina, an assistant professor at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham. and Women’s Hospital.
“The best time to squash a pandemic is when the environmental characteristics slow down the transmission. It’s your one chance a year, really, to use this extra assistance and get transmission under control,” he said, expressing his frustration. .
Restoring transmission would require people to continue to make sacrifices, to accept the fact that life post-Covid life cannot continue as normal, not while so many people remain vulnerable to the virus. Instead, people sadly dismiss the bends of coronavirus suppression efforts, apparently convincing that a few weeks of sacrifice in the spring was a one-time solution.
Osterholm has been warning for months that people were being misled about how long the restrictions on daily life should be in place. He now thinks the time has come for another lockdown. “What we did before and more,” he said.
The country has fallen into a dangerous pattern, Osterholm said, where a spike in cases at a location leads to some temporary restriction of people who eventually become alarmed enough to start taking precautions. But as soon as cases start a plateau or decrease a bit, victory over the virus is declared and people think it is safe to restore normal life.
“It’s like a phenomenal all or nothing, right?” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You’re all locked up or you get so upset from lockdown that you decide you’ll be in full bars … you can have indoor parties without masks. You can do all the things that will get you in trouble.”
Osterholm said with the K-12 school year repaid in some parts of the country or set to begin – along with universities – in a few weeks, the transmission will start up and cases will start climbing again. He predicted that the next peaks “far from the peak we will have just experienced. The winter will only strengthen that. Indoor air,” he said.
Buckee thinks that if the country does not change the trajectory it is on, more shutdowns are inevitable. “I can see no way we will have restaurants and bars open in the winter, honestly. We will have to reopen. Everything will close again.”
Fauci aims to reverse the reopening measures, with a strong messaging component aimed at explaining to people why sending transmission will now pay later. Young people in particular need to understand that even if they are less likely to die from Covid-19, statistically speaking, transmission between 20-somethings will eventually lead to infections among their parents and grandparents, where the risk of serious infections and fatalities outcome is higher. (Young people can also develop long-term health problems as a result of the virus.)
“It’s not just them in a vacuum,” Fauci said. “They distributed it to the people who will be hospitalized.”
Everyone needs to work together to get things to more manageable levels, as the country hopes to prevent “a catastrophic winter,” he said.
“I think we can get it under much better control, between now and mid-to-late fall if we get flu or we get what it is we get in fall and winter. I’m not giving up,” he said. said Fauci.
But without an all-in effort “the cases will not come down,” he warned. “They are not. They just are not.”
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