This month has brought some good news in the battle against COVID-19, as well as some bad news.
On the positive front, Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine had proven 90% effective, which is significantly better than expected. Additionally, the pharmaceutical giant expects to be able to distribute tens of millions of doses to those in most urgent need starting before the end of the year. If all goes well, the vaccine will be more widely distributed early next year, and the United States will be able to move on from this mess by the spring.
The bad news is that the fears of many public health officials are becoming true, as all indications are that the U.S. is in the midst of a brutal surge in coronavirus infections. While it’s true that the record 150,000 in daily infections has to be adjusted to take into account that the U.S. is doing a lot more testing than it was months ago, even by other metrics, things are looking pretty bad.
Specifically, the percentage of tests coming back as positive eclipsed 9% for the first time since May. Especially troubling is that unlike in the initial wave when cases were surging in select places, this time, hot spots are developing across the country. This means that as hospitals reach capacity, it won’t be as easy to shift resources into multiple trouble spots, as was the case with New York earlier this year. Already, hospitals have reached capacity in North Dakota, creating such a desperate scenario that the state has authorized nurses with COVID-19 to continue working.
Adding to the concerns is that Thanksgiving is about to kick off the holiday travel season. With families traveling from around the country to convene for communal meals and spending extensive time in close contact, the risks are enormous. To date, family gatherings have been one of the leading ways that the coronavirus has spread.
Unfortunately, the U.S. enters this season with the public health community having squandered its credibility with the American public.
Early on, the American people were told that they had to go into lockdown for just a few weeks. The purpose, everybody was told, was to “flatten the curve,” so there wasn’t a huge spike in cases at a given time that could collapse the medical system.
The problem was that even after the curve had been flattened, and the medical system was in no way in danger, officials for months lobbied against efforts to reopen activity. “Flatten the curve” was replaced by some vague notion of returning to normal when things were “safe.” While the nation did not remain in perpetual lockdown as it had in March, large public gatherings have still been canceled. People have done without typical rituals from Memorial Day to July 4 to Labor Day. And most importantly, in much of the nation, schools remain closed, despite the detrimental impact on children and families and the scant evidence that the virus poses a danger to either students or teachers or that schools have been a source of community spread.
On top of this, public health officials, political leaders, and media figures have demonstrated hypocrisy. Though they warned against large gatherings, they cheered Black Lives Matters protests and pro-Biden victory celebrations in large cities. Though they advocated stringent rules that shut down businesses and canceled weddings and funerals, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to get a maskless hair cut, and California’s lockdown-happy leftist Gov. Gavin Newsom attended a birthday party for a lobbyist pal at the elite French Laundry in wine country. As Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered residents against traveling out of state, she went to Delaware for Joe Biden’s victory speech, later claiming — with a straight face — that it was “essential” travel.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has already issued a “stay at home” (i.e., lockdown) order and asked for families to cancel Thanksgiving. Other state and local governments are already tightening rules, and we suspect that other such orders are going to follow.
But given the credibility that has been shredded over the past eight months, leaders can probably count on a lot more civil disobedience than they did in the spring.
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci said recently that the American public had “no appetite” for another round of lockdowns and instead urged Americans to take prudent actions in terms of maintaining social distancing, washing hands regularly, and wearing masks when social distancing is not possible. That strikes us as a much more prudent idea than a second wave of mass lockdowns.
