TALKING TURKEY — Let’s state the obvious: Living through a pandemic sucks. It’s hard to balance every decision we make against the threat of getting sick or getting others sick. It’s why we are all now anxiously awaiting an end to the pandemic, desperately searching for signs that it’s safe to go back to the way our lives were just a year ago.
Right now, there are many reasons to be optimistic. New daily Covid cases have fallen nearly 75 percent to around 64,000 a day from a January peak of around 250,000 a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The pace of vaccination is quickly picking up, with many of the most vulnerable groups — seniors, nursing homes residents and health care workers — getting inoculated against Covid.
At the same time, there’s a big divide between Covid researchers right now — between those who think the end of the pandemic is around the corner and those who think the worst is yet to come.
A not-insignificant group of researchers believes that falling case rates are the result of growing immunity. The idea is that enough people in the country have already gotten Covid or been vaccinated to dramatically slow the spread. The virus, the thinking goes, has found its easy prey and by the spring we can plan a Las Vegas getaway.
Yet there are just as many reasons to fear the future. In just 12 months the country has recorded half a million Covid deaths. New variants are circulating that are far more contagious. The researchers who are banking on immunity are extrapolating from a supposition that a large number of people who haven’t been tested have still gotten infected.
We don’t know the true nmber of Americans who have been infected. We don’t know whether a mild or asymptomatic infection confers durable immunity to Covid. The vaccination drive could hit a wall because not enough people sign up. We don’t know the right number for herd immunity — anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent of the population might need some level of immunity before the pandemic is over.
The biggest black swan to lose sleep over is a vaccine-resistant variant. The more the virus circulates, the more likely it is that such a variant surfaces. And despite the dramatic drop in positive tests, the pace of Covid cases is still high in the United States. Our best bet is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, not just in the U.S but across the world.
There won’t be a ticker-tape parade when the pandemic ends, a day when we can rip off our masks and start making out with strangers in Times Square. The end of the pandemic will be halting and gradual. Most researchers say that even once lots of people are vaccinated there will still be Covid outbreaks, hopefully limited ones. Even once we are all back in schools and in our offices, once we are traveling and throwing parties, the psychic toll of the pandemic will linger. We can never truly go back to a pre-pandemic world.
But if things go smoothly, vaccinations pick up and no vaccine-resistant variants emerge, a sense of normalcy should return by the fall, Jeremy Kamil, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University, told Nightly. The faster we vaccinate people and tamp down on new cases, the more likely that we can safely host a giant Thanksgiving dinner.
By Renuka Rayasam
www.politico.com
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