As efforts to suppress the first outbreak of Covid were implemented in the spring, we heard a lot about "bending the curve." The idea was to stop the rapid transmission of the disease - lower the R0 - so that hospitals could cope with the caseload, we could work on therapeutics and perhaps develop a vaccine. At the time, health experts all stressed that this was important, because "the fall and next winter will be worse."
Guess what.
Rose Twitter kept making the argument that our poor Covid response because we didn't have Medicare For All. But that was only a slight problem. The problem was a public health infrastructure that had been weakened by GOP neglect and then dismissed by Trump's ignorance. Even countries with universal health care had bad results in the spring if they adopted faulty public health measures.
We are now seeing cases explode in place like the Czech Republic and Switzerland that had good responses in the spring. While the US is seeing cases explode again, it's not necessarily doing worse than similar countries. Cases per million is only slightly worse than Germany.
Here is where it gets interesting. Everyone has a degree of "Covid Fatigue." We are certainly seeing it with our students. Covid Fatigue married to a huge spike in cases that will require various forms of lockdowns, mask mandates, selected closings, travel restrictions and the like will run headlong into people tired of altering their lives for a disease that frankly isn't likely to kill them. Covid is just so damned random: strong enough to kill you or permanently damage your health, yet also unlikely to do so.
It's a nightmare virus from a public health standpoint.
Dr. Fauci is now saying "normal" won't return until NEXT fall. I'm prepared to believe him, as he's generally been a lot more accurate in his predictions than Donald Trump and Fox News.
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