News Desk :
On May 14, I went for a jog, amazed at my newfound freedom. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just signed off on the vaccinated shedding their masks outdoors. In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, on a cloudless spring day, I pondered what seemed like a miraculous paradigm shift: Apparently, I no longer had to fear that my fellow joggers would kill me, or I them.
After 14 months of calculating risks – the hazards of an elevator ride or doom from a grocery store trip – it was suddenly easier to imagine a Covid-free future. We had a president strongly committed to stamping out the virus. America could lead the world in rolling out vaccines. And on July 4, albeit with caveats, President Biden announced, “Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”
We all know what happened next: Within weeks of those remarks, cases spiked, I.C.U.s overflowed, and we were reminded yet again of Covid’s power to outwit us. That hoped-for independence now feels like something different: a standoff, with the killer on the other side of a door we’re barricading shut.
Even as cases decline again and vaccination numbers rise, a once-unthinkable idea is breaking through any assumptions that we would vanquish Covid-19. Dr. Anthony Fauci laid it on the line at a White House press briefing this month: “It is going to be very difficult – at least in the foreseeable future and maybe ever – to truly eliminate this highly transmissible virus.”
That SARS-CoV-2 could be with us forever is a dark thought. But pulling that mental lever may be just what we need to organize effectively for the very long haul, dramatically improve our pandemic response and embed safeguards into our everyday lives. “It’s an unpleasant message,” said Dr. Matthew Hepburn, who, since we spoke, has become a special adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “We all want it to be over. But contingency planning for long-term response is absolutely essential.”
Indeed, optimism could serve as “one of the biggest obstacles” to making those plans, said Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of Wellcome, a global health foundation headquartered in London. If we think Covid-19 is going away, then we will drop our guard and not make essential investments now.
Rather than debate how to end the pandemic, we need to debate how to live with it. “We have to start thinking, planning and coming to grips in every way that this is now a human endemic infection and it’s never going to go away,” said Dr. Farrar.
What could a future with Covid-19 look like? To answer that question, I turned to Ali Mokdad, the chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington. An epidemiologist and statistician, he began the business of projections for his hospital system at the start of the pandemic: How many beds would it need to care for infected patients? With a 15-person team, he did the math.
Now, with a 60-person team and 7,700 global collaborators, he is releasing projections of the pandemic’s spread four months out for every country in the world, as well as sharing his pandemic models with the White House Covid-19 task force and others.
From his unique vantage point, Dr. Mokdad can literally map how our desire to prematurely claim victory, rather than accept the virus’s continuance, has led us to throw off restrictions, with deadly effect. He just revised his projected body count for the United States upward, to at least 828,000 total pandemic deaths by Feb. 1, 2022. Masks, which so many Americans abandoned when it seemed the end of the pandemic was in sight, could still make a difference: If 95 percent of Americans wore a mask, his model projects roughly 56,000 fewer deaths by Feb. 1.
In the more distant future, Dr. Mokdad does not see “independence from a deadly virus,” to quote our president. “We would expect that the transmission will never go to zero,” Dr. Mokdad told me. “The virus is going to be with us for a long time” – meaning that deaths, and efforts to prevent them, could continue for years.
Serious people are now trying to plan for what living with SARS-CoV-2 will look like, a potentially bleak exercise but one also brimming with scientific promise.
Courtesy: The New York Times
