It’s Too Soon to Write Covid’s Obituary
The Coronavirus Continues to Spread, Abetted by Politics and Selfishness
What was it Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) was purported to have said, that reports of his death were exaggerated?
The same can be said for the Covid pandemic, which continues to spread thanks to a more virulent — if not deadlier — variant and a shocking level of vaccine hesitancy (and outright anti-vax sentiment) among Americans.
The number, sadly, show a virus maintaining its hold. The chart below — from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control — graphically represents the trend line for infections:
The chart shows daily cases dating back to the beginning of the pandemic, with the red line representing the seven-day average, which smooths out anomalies in the data. What the chart shows is that daily numbers in the United States remain high — at about 75,000, and have remained at that level for about two weeks. We did not hit the 70,000 mark for a seven-day average until Oct. 25, 2000 — about nine months into the pandemic. Deaths have slowed, overall, but they remain high when compared with the April through July of this year and May through October of last year.
Politics has played a role, too, going back to the early days of the pandemic. Many Trump-supporting Republicans bought into the then-president’s irresponsible equation of masks requirements with tyranny (there’s some debate as to whether Trump was leading or following), and later turned their ire against the vaccine and vaccine requirements.
The result has been a geographical division in which Trump states and GOP counties have the highest rates of infection, which allows the virus to continue festering, mutating and spreading.
In New Jersey, for instance, calls on the right to end vaccine and mask mandates have increased, conservatives apparently emboldened by Gov. Phil Murphy narrower-than-expected re-election win. But the state’s numbers are tracking the national ones with the higher case loads happening in more conservative counties in the southern and western part of the state.
New Jersey is doing better than most states, with 103 cases per 1,000 residents compared with a national figure of 151 cases per 1,000. But the disparity among the counties is shocking, with the case numbers in Republican-leaning counties exceeding the national numbers in most cases and those in Democratic counties falling well below. There have been an average of 160.8 new cases per 1,000 residents in Monmouth County and 168.8 cases per 1,000 in Ocean County. The numbers in Middlesex are half that at 82 cases per 1,000, while in Mercer they are 97. Republican Sussex had the highest number at 192.2, while Democratic Hudson had the lowest at 56.1, despite having a lower median income level and there being a language barrier for many in the county.
The winter months are coming. We will be indoors more, and the fear is that we will be lulled into a false sense of security because vaccine numbers are good (could be better) and many businesses are relaxing their facemark requirements.
This is shortsighted. To the extent we have controlled the spread of the virus, it has been because of the use of masks, social distancing, and the vaccines. There is fear of a winter surge, however, and hospitals throughout the Midwest and West are in crisis mode.
We need to get people vaccinated, and we need to keep wearing masks, social distancing, and doing the things that worked early on to slow the spread of the virus. This may require mandates, but it doesn’t have to, as long as each of us stops focusing on ourselves and realizes that these efforts are about protecting the people around us. We can’t expect perfection, nor should we assume we will completely eradicate the virus. But we can be conscientious, part of a larger community that is as worried about our neighbors as we are about our “rights.”* (Too often, we toss this word around without thinking, without understanding what it actually means. But that is another discussion.)
The goal is to limit the spread, to lessen the likelihood that large numbers of us will get sick, to ease the impact on our fragile healthcare system, and hopefully allow the novel coronavirus to weaken and be just another minor virus among many we come in contact everyday. Writing its obituary, as some are doing, will not make it go away.