The Hill says, “For nearly two years, Americans have looked carefully at coronavirus case numbers in the country and in their local states and towns to judge the risk of the disease.” (See story here.)
Actually, I haven’t done that. I looked at what Covid-19 does to people, then quit going in public if I didn’t have to, wore the best masks I could get, socially distanced, used hand sanitizer, wiped surfaces, etc. And then got vaccinated and boosted as quickly as I could. I’ve stayed healthy, and have escaped the virus scourging America and the world.
Anyway, the danger was driven home when Covid-19 killed my friend and the owner of this blog, Dr. Steven Schwartz of the University of Washington School of Medicine. His death from Covid-19 on March 19, 2020, was one of the first in Washington state. He began feeling seriously ill on a Friday, went to the hospital the following Monday, and died the next day. That was really fast and deadly.
Case counts do tell a meaningful story. We’ve learned Covid-19 variants come in waves. Johns Hopkins’ “Covidtracker” website (here) tells us nearly 1 in 6 Americans have been infected. Government officials and businesses have used case data to tell them when to order lockdowns, close schools, shutter plants, etc. (Florida’s governor apparently doctored the data, then sent men with guns after a whistleblower who blew his cover.)
The general public learned how to misuse the case data to create a false sense of security: “Surging case numbers signaled growing dangers, while falling case numbers were a relief and a signal to let one’s guard down in terms of gathering with friends and families and taking part in all kinds of events.”
It’s a story again because of Omicron, the fourth wave. This variant spreads like a crown fire in trees. Experts simply say, “Many people are going to get omicron.” Some insinuate everybody will. That kind of makes general case counts irrelevant, while making hospital case counts more relevant than ever. The game plan appears to be keeping Omicron from overwhelming hospitals, doctors and nurses, and medical resources.
As The Hill puts it, “an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins … said that Americans all need to shift to focus on hospitalizations over cases” now. As in keep yourself out of the hospital.
Omicron is different from the previous variants, not only because (a) it spreads easier and much, much faster, (b) doesn’t make people as sick, and (c) is somewhat vaccine-resistant, although mRNA shots with boosters are still very effective against it, but also because “Omicron in a way is the first test of what it means to live with COVID-19” as America shifts from the pandemic phase “into the endemic phase,” which means it’s never going away and we’ll have to live with it from now on.
The current situation is something like this: “Many states have been seeing staggering numbers of positive tests and lines for COVID-19 testing that stretch for several blocks. Washington, D.C., and New York state have set records in recent days for the number of new cases reported as omicron barrels through the population.” And, as you’ve probably seen in the news, airlines are canceling hundreds of flights as crews get sick, stranding passengers in airports far from home.
Among things pointed out by Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown professor of global health, is that masking and social distancing are still necessary for now to keep the health system afloat. Looking ahead at the future, he says,
“We can’t live our lives in a bubble to prevent us from getting a pathogen that’s so contagious that you can’t avoid it if you’re going to be circulating and living a life in this world. What it means to transition to a … more normal life is you have to focus not so much on preventing cases, but on preventing hospitalizations and deaths.”
And that means getting vaccinated, and boosted when recommended, because already most hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated population, and people who remain unvaccinated will continue to risk such outcomes for the foreseeable future.
They risk something else: Organ damage. In another story (here), The Hill reported that NIH scientists have “found the virus can spread widely from the respiratory tract to almost every other organ in the body and linger for months,” including the heart and brain. This isn’t just in seriously ill patients; they found “the virus had replicated across multiple organ systems even among patients with asymptomatic to mild COVID-19.”
This ought to scare people still resisting vaccination. How often have you heard people say they don’t mind dying, but don’t want to live as a vegetable? We already know “long Covid” is contributing to the labor shortage by keeping people out of the workforce for up to a year after they’ve supposedly recovered.
In January 2021, The Observer, a New York-based online newspaper, was already reporting that “COVID-19 can cause permanent lung scarring so severe that could only be fixed by lung transplants,” based on a study published in a medical journal, and quoted a Texas surgeon as saying, ““Everyone’s just so worried about the mortality thing and that’s terrible and it’s awful. But man, for all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is — it’s going to be a problem.” She reports seeing lungs in worse shape than heavy smokers’ lungs. (Read that story here.)
An article published today, December 27, 2021, says, “A study shows the new coronavirus could seriously damage the brain and central nervous system, leading to psychosis, paralysis and strokes.” (Read it here.)
How much more incentive do you need to get vaccinated, if you haven’t yet? Covid-19 is a lottery; even unvaccinated, you may get a mild case, or no symptoms at all. But you also might end up devastatingly ill, or dead. The point is, once the virus finds you, as it almost surely will sooner or later, you don’t get to choose. Without vaccine protection, mildly or desperately ill seems to be pretty random.