COVID19 settles in to stay awhile
Mass confusion about masks, numbers, and just about everything
“Let me be blunt, too many countries are headed in the wrong direction, the virus remains public enemy number one,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from the U.N. agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
“If basics are not followed, the only way this pandemic is going to go - it is going to get worse and worse and worse.”
The scattered response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States forces leaders at every level to face the reality that the epidemic of COVID-19 in the United States is uncontrolled, and there is little chance that any kind of containment is going to be effective, now that the virus has spread so widely throughout many American communities.
Containment works only when testing and other methods are in-place to rapidly identify who is infected so that they can be isolated and prevented from spreading the virus to others. Even with advances on testing (including new saliva tests and even better ones in the pipeline — much easier than a swab high up into the nose!) even the best-prepared cities don’t have enough people to do contact-tracing and other legwork in order to chase after each infected person and everyone they may have encountered recently. This Los Angeles Times article goes into great detail on how California’s COVID-19 testing program fell short.
Here are today’s top stories:
Researchers are identifying new biomarkers associated with severe COVID-19 disease. This would help target treatments to those most vulnerable.
California joins places going back to tighter closures as COVID-19 cases surge. Hong Kong re-closed schools. Even Disney is shutting its Hong Kong park, while its operations in Orlando have reopened - complete with “mask-free relaxation zones.”
New York had a 24-hour period with no COVID-19 deaths, but new data indicates that some New Yorkers are throwing caution to the wind. New infections are up among younger adults, similar to what has happened throughout the nation.
Harvard researchers who published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in May about the use of masks in hospitals published a follow-up letter to clarify that their research supports the use of widespread face coverings. The follow-up was necessary because some of the anti-mask crusaders have incorrectly claimed the May article rejected widespread face coverings. That’s what happens when people read a headline but not the full article.
Don’t get too caught up in the numbers. (They are pretty bad, no matter what.) But there’s also confusion building over backlogs. For example, Florida’s breathtaking tally of new cases in the past several days may include cases that actually were detected a week earlier, but the data shared publicly reflected all the test results that the state health department received on that day. The same people who are campaigning against public health actions are already using this to cast doubt on the overall crisis.
For an eery glimpse of what the future may be like, this March article from The Atlantic forecast our current period reasonably well. What’s alarming is that even the “worst case” scenario in March did not envision that six months into COVID-19, the USA would still lack both a national strategy and a clear commitment or consensus about how to confront the public health crisis. This was the prediction in March:
It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.