Via STAT, Helen Branswell writes: How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S. Excerpt from an excellent article:
There’s no point in sugar-coating this. The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a raging dumpster fire.
Where a number of countries in Asia and Europe have managed to dampen spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the point where they can consider returning to a semblance of normalcy — friends from Paris just emailed me pictures from their Sicilian vacation — many international borders remain closed to Americans.
On Sunday, Florida reported more than 15,000 cases — in a single day. South Korea hasn’t registered 15,000 cases in the entire pandemic to date. One day last week the U.S. recorded more than 68,000 cases.
The website Covidexitstrategy.org has updated its previously tri-colored U.S. map, which showed states as either green, signifying they are trending better; yellow, making progress; or red, trending poorly. A fourth designation, called “bruised red,” signals states with uncontrolled spread; criteria for this category includes hospitals nearing capacity both in terms of overall beds and ICU space. Already 17 states are wearing bruised red.
The virus suppression gains earned through the painful societal shutdowns of March, April, and May — the flattened epidemiological curves — have been squandered in many parts of the country, dejected public health experts agree. A vaccine for the masses is still months away. What can be done?
One thing is clear, according to public health experts: Widespread returns to lockdown must be a last resort — and may not be doable.
“It would be really a morale breaker,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told STAT. “The stress and strain that people were under during prolonged lockdown is the genesis of why, when they were given the opportunity to try and open up, they rebounded so abruptly. Because what I think happened is, they overshot.”
But this is not a binary choice between societal lockdowns and the “party like it’s 2019” approach that put the country in the bind it’s in now. With that in mind, STAT asked a number of public health experts for a single suggestion of how we get ourselves out of this mess. We got lots.
