By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, February
01, 2022
Do you feel like the decline has received
as much attention as the incline in late December and January?
Second, the daily rate of deaths —
traditionally a lagging indicator — has increased 30 percent, to 2,558 this
morning. Has that figure received as much attention as the
increase in cases?
Third, the Delta variant is now just about
gone. As of January 22, 99.9 percent
of all Covid-19 cases where the variant was genomically identified were Omicron; Delta is now down to one tenth of 1 percent.
This is an oddity in coronavirus coverage,
something that runs counter to the media’s traditional preference for the
dramatic over the mundane, and whatever conscious or subconscious preference
for bad news over good news exists. The good news is that the early assessments
of Omicron were correct. Omicron is
much, much less likely to kill you — otherwise, our death rates would have increased tenfold the way
our caseload did.
As I noted
over the weekend, one-third of all U.S. Covid-19 cases
since the start of the pandemic have occurred since early December. The Omicron
wave infected a lot of Americans — more than 25 million, and remember that our
figures are undercounts because not everybody who tests positive on a home test
is going to notify their doctor or local health authorities.
The bad news is that because Omicron is so
contagious, it was and remains more likely to work its way toward the people
who are particularly vulnerable — mostly but not entirely the unvaccinated
elderly, the immunocompromised, those with comorbidities, and those with
genetic factors that make them less likely to fight off the virus. I write
“mostly but not entirely the unvaccinated,” because even the fully vaccinated
elderly or immunocompromised may not be able to fight off the virus, depending
upon other health factors.
Washington
State’s department of health offered some updated numbers which showed that, from February 1, 2021 to December 28, 75 percent of the state’s 5,057
Covid-19 deaths during that period were individuals who were unvaccinated.
Vaccine skeptics can argue until they’re blue in the face, but the evidence is
overwhelming: Vaccination makes it much less likely that you will die from
Covid-19. Does this mean everyone who is unvaccinated will die if they catch
Covid-19? Of course not. But the vaccine trains your immune system to be
prepared for a run-in with the virus.
But it is also worth noting that fully
vaccinated people can still die from Covid-19, and in Washington’s numbers, 262
people — 5.2 percent — were partially vaccinated when they died, and 995 people
— 19.7 percent — were fully vaccinated when they died.
With the Omicron wave declining and no
sign of a new variant coming along to replace it, we may finally — finally! —
be at something akin to herd immunity. There is a demographic out there that is
stuck in a mid 2021 mindset (if not a March 2020 mindset) that sees every
mitigation step as necessary because of those darn unvaccinated people. But those
unvaccinated people are down to 13 percent of the adult population, and less than 15 percent of those over age twelve. This country has
administered more than 539 million shots. We’ve experienced the biggest,
fastest, and most wide-ranging vaccination effort in human history.
Of the remaining unvaccinated Americans,
about 20 million are kids under age five, and kids
between six months and five years might become eligible for vaccination by the
end of the month.
It is time to stop using the small
minority of unvaccinated Americans as an excuse for keeping various measures in
place forever.
A week ago, I noted that
Glenn Youngkin had the upper hand in the school-mask-mandate battle. The position of masking all kids, no matter what, even if they have
learning disabilities, speech issues, hearing issues that require them to read
lips, etc., is untenable, and becomes less and less defensible as the case rate
comes down. A week ago, Virginia had about 57,000 confirmed and probable
Covid-19 cases. This week, that figure is down to about 42,000.
Allowing people to get back to their
normal, pre-pandemic habits must be a national priority — and not just
because Monmouth
polling finds that 70 percent of Americans “agree with the sentiment that ‘it’s time we accept that Covid is
here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives’ — including 78 percent
of those who report having gotten Covid and 65 percent of those who say they
have not been infected.” More than two years of constantly having to fight over
when you must wear masks, whether you’re wearing the right masks, are you
vaccinated, are you boosted, did you remember your vaccination card, is your
child’s school open, is it safe to come into the office, are too many people in
that room, how long should you self-isolate, and so on have frayed Americans’
nerves to the breaking point.
This morning, Marisa Iati of the Washington
Post offers an article that seems to begin as a denunciation
of fed-up Americans’ behaving badly:
An
airplane passenger is accused of attacking a flight attendant and breaking
bones in her face. Three New York City tourists assaulted a restaurant host who
asked them for proof of vaccination against the coronavirus, prosecutors say.
Eleven people were charged with misdemeanors after they allegedly chanted “No
more masks!” and some moved to the front of the room during a Utah school board
meeting.
Across the
United States, an alarming number of people are lashing out in aggressive and
often cruel ways in response to policies or behavior they dislike.
But about halfway through, Iati focuses on
the extraordinary and unprecedented struggles we’ve all been through, now
entering a third year:
Some of
those behaviors appear to be the result of living through a long-lasting public
emergency with no clear endpoint, the experts said. As the omicron variant
rages across the country, it is again unclear when the pandemic restrictions
will end. For some people, this kind of catastrophe strains their coping
resources and causes them to act in ways that they normally would not.
“We’re
just not meant to live under this level of tension for such a prolonged
period,” said Vaile Wright, senior director of health care innovation for the
American Psychological Association. “So what that ends up doing is it really
wears on our coping abilities to the point where we aren’t able to regulate our
emotions as well as we could before.”
This doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to
physically attack flight attendants, restaurant hostesses, or school-board
members. But it does mean that the tools for fighting a contagious virus that
public-health experts deem best are not always going to be the ones that are
best for people’s whole health, particularly over long stretches. The Chinese approach of welding
apartment doors shut to ensure the infected don’t leave their homes is probably
quite effective at stopping the spread. It’s also de facto imprisonment without trial, for committing no
crime. If the “most effective” policy stops the spread of the virus but
simultaneously drives people crazy, then it’s no longer the most effective
policy. And as we’ve seen in the case numbers discussed above, it’s possible
that no set of public-policy choices was ever going to mitigate the spread of
Omicron much.
In certain circumstances, the precautions
against Covid can be more harmful than Covid itself. The Wall Street
Journal has a dark,
depressing, eye-opening report about all of the deaths that are consequences of the pandemic,
beyond the direct infections:
Meantime, U.S. drug
overdose deaths, already at record highs, soared about 30
percent in 2020, and early data show the toll may
have worsened last year. The
pandemic was destabilizing
for people already struggling with addiction, or trying to seek sobriety, parents of recent overdose victims say.
It was
harder for Nick Fort to find addiction treatment, due to full beds and Covid-19
restrictions, according to his mother, Sally Fort. Though he sought help many
times through years of struggles, he overdosed and died at 30 on a mix of
fentanyl and cocaine at his suburban Des Moines, Iowa, home in early November.
A dog
lover with a rescue named Bailey, Mr. Fort had been open about the challenges
he faced, including a felony record linked to his drug problems, his mother
said. He made clear that if he died, he wanted others to know what happened in
hopes of erasing the stigma about addiction, she said.
“He had
issues for many, many years,” Mrs. Fort said. “Covid certainly didn’t help it,
because it drove him into isolation more than before.”
Isolation isn’t good for people. Our
decisions about Covid-19 must start accounting for the other, not-so-visible
costs of the “safest” approach.
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