At the onset of the pandemic, Americans were inundated with that notorious graph. Its two bell curves, one narrow and lofty and the other wide and flattened, are ingrained in our collective memories. It does not warrant much description. It lacked much description anyway. It presents no concrete numbers on caseload or health care capacity from which to make public health judgements. Perhaps it was the graph’s simplicity that at least temporarily united Americans behind widespread mitigation efforts.
But, do we remember what the graph was truly attempting to symbolize? Our public health officials, politicians, and media seemingly do not.
Back in March, Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D., director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Division of Infectious Diseases, set forth with the purpose of flattening the curve. She remarked, “By flattening the curve, you’re essentially trying to challenge the health care system with the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time,” Six months later, we seem to have forgotten an important piece of what she and other public health experts were saying. Covid infections are not any lower with the bevy of government-mandated rules, they are merely delayed.
Lockdowns, social distancing, and de-densification of public spaces contributed to the reduction of cases at any given time and bought hospitals time to prepare for an inevitable influx of patients.
We are now almost 200 days into the fabled “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” and it has become obvious that the goalposts have shifted.
On September 23rd, Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, the state with the most Covid deaths per capita, declared, “Even as the numbers of deaths we report every day continue to be low, we cannot take any solace in that. Our goal must be to get them to zero. Not three or five, or seven like today. Zero.”
Our infallible governor Andrew Cuomo has taken an equally ridiculous position, trumpeting the slogan, “stop the spread.” The slogan is hardly an empty pronouncement. New York positivity rates remain exceedingly low, yet it took a lawsuit and 200,000 jobless hospitality workers for his and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s permission to reopen indoor dining at even 25% capacity. He also set an arbitrary threshold at which colleges must lockdown, blindsiding schools across the state. None of this bears any relation to flattening the curve. Heavy handed rule-by-decree governing is the flavor of the year for America’s Democrat governors.
This shift is entrenched in the notion that the key is delaying the spread of the virus until a vaccine effectively ends the pandemic. There are several governors and mayors who share this mindset.
They have scientific weight behind this approach. In April, a team of researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a sobering study showing “intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available.”
This approach is a far cry from the prevailing lecture of the ‘flatten the curve’ folks. But at a minimum, it is somewhat measurable. Discover a scientific breakthrough and life will go back to normal. Right?
That was the conventional wisdom until Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, delivered another goalpost shift on a vaccine. On September 25th he said, “when the vaccine comes, we look at it as an important tool to supplement the public health measures that we do.” This is mind-boggling. A vaccine that triggers neutralizing antibodies in a large percentage of those who take it was supposed to be the ticket back to normalcy.
The graph Dr. Fauci and the rest of the administration showcased in March should not be forgotten. Of course, there is a segment of the population that, even with a vaccine, will continue to dutifully wear masks and make sure to condescend others who refrain. They will go to bed with the mask on and wake up in the morning to slam their neighbors on Facebook for throwing a party the night before. That is not the issue. The issue is that people in positions of power are using their pulpit to pontificate about irrational Covid expectations.
The effortless solution to these fearful comments that bombard our daily news feed is to ignore them. Brushing aside hysteria and living our lives as normal will become especially enticing when a vaccine becomes available. Unfortunately, the favorite to win the upcoming Presidential election has something to say about that.
Asked in August if he would “shut down” the country if scientists recommended it, former Vice President Joe Biden, without hesitation, asserted, “I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists.” His troubling and frankly unforgivable lack of regard for the Constitution aside, Biden is operating in dangerous territory. Simply deferring an executive’s responsibilities to technocrats who make mistakes and often disagree is problematic. Would we apply this standard to economists or military leaders? Of course not. The truth is, if one looks hard enough, they can find anyone with a fancy title who agrees with their preconceived notions.
Dr. Fauci’s comments and the larger issue of moving the goalposts on Covid begs the question: If a vaccine cannot release us from this prolonged state of economic and social chaos, what can? When the dust settles on this pandemic and jobs are permanently lost, lives crippled by depression and anxiety, futures ruined by a loss of real education and health care, and a country drowning in a mountain of debt, our leaders will have a lot of questions to answer for.
