The Never-Endemic Story

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, November 19, 2021

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci sometimes changes the numbers on us, doesn’t he? You may remember when he shifted his prediction for when the U.S. would reach herd immunity to COVID-19. Was it new evidence about the disease? No — of course not. “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” He actually had told the New York Times possibly as much as 90 percent vaccination was required.

 

This week we had another shift. Back in March of this year, Fauci told CNN that the U.S. shouldn’t ease restrictions to prevent COVID-19 until the number of new coronavirus cases falls below 10,000 daily. We got very close to this number in the early summer months before the Delta wave hit. Last week the U.S. reported a daily average of nearly 83,500 new COVID cases. Fauci said that COVID cases may need to fall to 3,300 per day to enable a return to what he called “a degree of normality.”

 

To put that number in perspective, Ireland had 5,483 new infections reported last Friday, and 89.1 percent of Irish people over the age of twelve have been vaccinated. Ireland has a total population comparable to Alabama’s, just under 5 million. If a nation of 5 million, with that high rate of vaccination, can’t stay under 5,000 new cases a day, what hope does the U.S. have with a population over 330 million?

 

Or let’s put it another way. Assume that COVID is now endemic — and we will be facing it every year like the common cold and the flu. In a normal year, we experience tens of thousands of symptomatic flu cases per day during flu season. In other words, for the foreseeable future and for as long as we continue to test aggressively for COVID-19, we will still be short of Dr. Fauci’s terms for “a degree of normality.”

 

Oh, and let’s not let that phrase go without comment. Is that really all that’s on the table? A degree of normality?

 

Vaccines have already come to market, and the U.S. has just gone through its fastest uptake of a vaccine in history. We are, if reports are to be believed, shortly going to be sold a new therapeutic drug that does wonders for COVID patients, reportedly stopping them from developing a serious or life-threatening illness when they contract the virus.

 

In the face of that reality, and the reality that the strains on hospital systems are becoming much more the normal strains that we lived with for decades previously, what possible reason could there be for talking about mere “degrees of normality”? By the definition of public health as it existed 18 months ago, the current situation looks like a phenomenal triumph and victory.

 

But yet, we are nowhere near getting a declaration of victory by public-health officials. Instead they are fooling themselves into more winter lockdowns, longer durations of masks, and impositions such as social distancing. Politicians in Europe are increasingly engaged in an attempt at scapegoating the remaining unvaccinated for policies that politicians imposed.

 

COVID is endemic. We have the best pharmaceutical tools we’re going to get. And health-care systems have learned a great deal about how to treat COVID patients effectively. The virus itself is evolving, just as expected — to be more transmissible but less deadly.

 

A degree of realism means ending any mitigation effort we don’t want to carry on in perpetuity.