The Virus Is Winning
Magical
thinking won’t protect us.
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 6, 2020, 7:41 p.m. ET
·
When
Michael T. Osterholm, a prominent epidemiologist, heard that the White House
coronavirus task force was “ramping up” its work this month, he was elated.
Maybe now the United States would finally tackle the virus with the seriousness
needed.
Then he realized that he had misheard.
The task force wasn’t “ramping up” but “wrapping up.”
“I
was in shock,” said Osterholm, a professor at the University of Minnesota.
“We’re just in the second inning.”
The
White House plan to disband the task force is in characteristic disarray, with
President Trump reversing course on Wednesday and saying that the task force
would continue but change its focus. The confusion perfectly reflects the
incoherence of the American “strategy” toward Covid-19.
Vice
President Mike Pence had earlier said that the disbanding of the task force was
possible because of “the tremendous progress we’ve made” against the virus.
Hmm.
It’s actually the virus that has made tremendous progress, eclipsing heart
disease to become the No. 1 cause of death in the United States. In less than
two months, we have lost more Americans to the coronavirus than in the Vietnam,
Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined.
While Spain and Italy have emerged from their Covid-19 outbreaks
and enjoyed significant falls in new infections, that has not happened in the United States. For five weeks, new daily
infections in the United States have been stuck roughly in the 25,000 to 30,000
range, declining only a bit.
Even
the small decline in new cases in the United States is misleading, for it’s
simply a result of great progress in the New York City metropolitan area. Exclude
New York and new cases in the United States are still increasing.
Still Climbing
The number of new cases in the United States, outside New York
City, continues to climb while cases in Italy and Spain have plummeted.
About
half of states are easing some restrictions this week. But to manage the
reopening safely, we need massive levels of testing and contact-tracing — and
one more sign of how we have bungled our Covid-19 response is that while
testing has, very belatedly, increased significantly, on most days the United
States is still testing fewer people per capita than
Britain, Iceland and Portugal.
Trump announced back
on March 6 that “anybody that wants a test can get a test”; this is still not
true.
Nor
have we compensated for testing kit shortages by embracing widespread testing of sewage to look for the virus in
wastewater, as the Netherlands has done.
Even in impoverished Pakistan, sewage testing has been widely used to
monitor polio virus outbreaks, so the United States should be able to use
sewage testing for surveillance of the coronavirus and early identification of
hot spots.
While
the United States has poured $3 trillion into relief from the effects of
Covid-19 — money that will run out soon and that hasn’t prevented young
children in one in six households from not having enough to eat —
the nation hasn’t invested nearly enough in science and in the scientific
tools, like testing, vaccines,
therapies and research, to combat it.
“We’re
significantly hampered by lack of funding,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist
at U.C.L.A. who studies transmission of the coronavirus by people who are
asymptomatic.
Bravo
to those local leaders who acted early and saved many lives — I’m thinking of
Govs. Jay Inslee of Washington, Gavin Newsom of California and Mike DeWine of
Ohio — but governors are now in an impossible situation.
It
makes sense to experiment with reopening in areas with fewer infections
(perhaps using randomized controlled trials to gain a better
understanding of what is safe), and epidemiologists note that there’s a particularly good case to
be made for reopening parks and beaches if social distancing is practiced. But
we still don’t have the testing and contact-tracing to be confident that we can
get the easing right or to clamp down quickly when we get it wrong.
And Trump and Pence still seem
oblivious.
“By
Memorial Day Weekend we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us,”
Pence told Fox News
only two weeks ago. That magical thinking seems to be shared by many
politicians and investors alike.
Let’s
be very clear: There’s huge uncertainty, so we need great humility in looking
ahead, but most epidemiologists anticipate a long, wrenching struggle against the
virus.
“If
we have a big wave in the fall, it’ll make everything we’ve had so far seem not
all that serious,” said Osterholm, whose infectious disease institute recently
issued an excellent and sobering
report about the road ahead. “But that’s the reality of this. I
tell people my job isn’t to scare you out of your wits; it’s to scare you into
your wits.”
A
new Columbia University study suggests that
we may face a rebound in deaths by late this month because of the easing of
restrictions, just as a model used by the Trump administration shows deaths
increasing to 3,000 daily by June 1.
“This is here to stay, in all
likelihood, until we have a vaccine, and a vaccine could be a year or two
away,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. “Or it could be never.”