Health

Americans Still Live With Attitude Towards the Risk of COVID-19 2020. It’s Time for That to Change


As the pandemic has developed and most Americans have sought vaccines for protection, and as those who choose to forgo vaccination become infected (often more than once), the risk COVID-19 for most Americans has fallen. It is estimated that more than 90% Americans have some degree of immunity to COVID-19 through vaccination or previous infection.

Along with this wall of immunity, the approaches used when we had few tools to stop the spread no longer provide the benefits that always justify the cost of social disruption, reduce the classroom experience and drag the economy.

But we have been slow to align our strategies with evolving notions of risk. CDC is expected soon update its policies, moves away from national recommendations and instead relies on popular local measures, its guidance on protective steps everyone should take. This community standard may not be sufficient. We’ve enabled restrictions but haven’t turned them off as conditions change. In many cases, that’s because we’re still basing on the same metrics we used at the start of the pandemic. These risk-measuring concepts have remained largely fixed since that time, even as people took precautions against the virus.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, we shared a common sense of the threat and were willing to make great sacrifices in response to it. As the pandemic has grown, and its burdens have accumulated, that social organization has become frayed. We now need to move from measures that are generally applied, to tactics implemented individually by people who are assessing their individual risk against their level of caution. This means that we must accept regional and local variations in measures adopted at the state level. The role of government is to make sure people have the tools they need to make those choices.

Critical steps in 2020 to reduce healthcare mortality and stress when we are overwhelmed no longer make sense. But what anchors that change? Even when actions are adjusted based on risk, in many cases it comes too slowly. Without deliberate guidelines, it is difficult to assess why one pose should give way to another, and how to make these decisions.

We will never go back to the many tragic steps we had to take in the spring of 2020 when we were overwhelmed by the first wave of the virus. Take 45 days to slow the spread launched by President Donald Trump to try to mitigate that devastating first wave. Thinking about those extreme measures, it’s hard to remember today how bad it was at the time because we didn’t tie the debate to a consistent measure of how dangerous and dangerous it was. rehibilitate.

New York City’s healthcare system has collapsed. We used hospital ships and pruning tents in Central Park to try to manage a devastating cascade of disease and death. The White House rightly judged that if other American cities fell, the nation would be overwhelmed. At the time, a White House official told me that under such circumstances, the federal government would be out, and it would be impossible for another city to “treat New York.” It is an allusion to the extraordinary support New York has received. Comment stuck with me.

Read more: Omicron waves are receding but the pandemic is far from over

Remember that the CDC was unable to fill in diagnostic test that can tell us where COVID-19 is spreading and where it’s not yet, so we can’t target our steps to cities where the virus has broken out. We don’t know where COVID-19 is or where it isn’t. We misjudged the scope of the seeding underway in cities like New York and Seattle. People still argue that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu, with a case fatality rate of 0.1%. By July 2020, when the first wave subsided, 0.25% of New York City’s entire population had died from COVID-19, but only one-fifth of the City’s residents had been infected.

The threat from the continued march of COVID-19 is a dire prospect. Our tools to limit its spread did not exist. And our hole doesn’t seem to be bound. We have no immunity. We don’t have an effective drug. We didn’t know how to properly care for patients admitted to our ICU. We had to slow the spread and give ourselves some time to get a response in place. At the height of the epidemic in the winter of 2020, more than 6,000 people in the US died each week for retreat alone.

That is 2020.

Now in 2022, we need to leave the concept of risk in 2020. Prevalence that was rated “moderate” this time last year, when we were largely unvaccinated, could be a new “low” as our vulnerability has decreased. Especially when we’re dealing with a more contagious but less severe strain of bacteria like Omicron.

Since then, many Americans have acquired immunity through vaccination and consecutive infections. By some estimates, nearly 70% of Americans have been infected at least once. About 87% of adults have had at least one dose of the vaccine. We have a growing stock of therapies that can treat sick people and dramatically reduce their risk of hospitalization or death. The US will soon be producing nearly half a billion “at-home” COVID tests per month. We have also seen significant advances in patient care.

However, many other structures remain in place, even when omicron wave has begun to decrease. Until recently, many children still wore masks in school, with no uniform standard of when it would end. When Omicron peaks, some reverted school for distance learning. Offices are closed in many major cities. Some states and businesses are still delegating vaccines, trying to coerce dwindling vaccine stocks at ever-increasing costs, even as many unvaccinated people may have been infected. sick, some people have more than once.

Read more: Why the number of COVID-19 cases doesn’t mean they’re used to

Trust in public health has been eroded because we have been too slow to adapt to the steps we have taken to change our perception of risk. Some people are adopting their own measures to reduce risk and are voluntarily choosing to avoid crowded places, wear masks and take other precautions. Many people are vulnerable to COVID-19 because of age or health conditions, and those who remain worried should have access to tools and support to stay safe. Parents’ anxiety is understandable amid fear of the virus and steps to keep children, especially toddlers, safe. But for those who feel more confident about diminishing risks, we can only ask the public so much in the long run. There is a cumulative effect from the interruption. People are exhausted. People’s livelihoods and mental health have been damaged by the diminished lives we have had to compromise around. Many children have not known a normal school day for two years. Intermittent interruptions have a cumulative amount. We never agree that the costs can outweigh the benefits. The problem is that we have no way to measure these trade-offs and no framework for deciding when to turn things on and equally important to turn them off.

Let’s debate pandemic and endemicity. There is no clear nomenclature for what it means when the virus becomes a persistent but manageable threat that does not dominate our lives. Public health leaders have different definitions of what it means for a pandemic to give way to endemicity, with COVID-19 being part of a list of predictable circulating pathogens. . The simplest way to define that transition is when persistent waves of infection are no longer raging across the country and COVID-19 settles into a more predictable pattern over the seasons. Some people, myself included, think that 2022 will be the year we make this transition. Others still rate the risk as high that another unexpected variation emerges and derails that forecast.

Even so, it remains a constant and persistent risk and requires us to be more vigilant about respiratory diseases, especially in winter when these pathogens are most prevalent. We will need to protect facilities where vulnerable people congregate and motivate people to keep getting vaccines. We will need to improve air quality and filtration in indoor settings. We’ll need to ensure broad access to testing and create new cultural norms around staying home from work or school when you’re not feeling well. We should widely distribute home diagnostic tests so that consumers always have a small stockpile on hand. Masks can be used on a voluntary basis and become a tool for certain environments and for short periods of time to cope with the peak of the epidemic. We must also continue to innovate, investing in therapeutics that can treat the sick and make it available to their wide distribution.

But as long as we remain mired in a 2020 doctrine of measuring prevalence and how it correlates with risk, we will not be able to adjust public health measures for declines and losses. the flow of the virus or find a common ground for risk management in our lives.

COVID-19 will remain a scary virus for the foreseeable future, but we must learn to live with it. Federal health officials guided us through one of the most difficult periods in our nation’s modern history, and helped preserve lives, even as we lost more than $900,000. his cell.

We have slowly found a way to coexist with this virus. We now need a glider to what normal becomes and a new math to guide how we adapt to COVID-19 even if we never completely beat it.



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