2020 has been an awful year. Hurricanes, wildfires, murder hornets, unjustified shootings, a divisive Presidential election, and, of course, a pandemic. Most of us are spending unprecedented amounts of time sheltering in place, millions have lost their jobs, the economy is sputtering, and over a quarter million of us didn’t survive to Thanksgiving. If you haven’t been depressed at some point, you haven’t been paying enough attention.
Within the last two weeks, though, there has finally been
some cause for hope. Whether you want to
credit Operation Warp Speed or just science doing what it does, we are on the
cusp of having vaccines to battle COVID-19.
First Pfizer/BioNTech,
then Moderna,
and most recently, AstraZenica,
announced vaccines that appear to be highly effective.
We’re having our Paul Revere moment, only this time
with good news. The vaccines are
coming! The vaccines are coming!
It strikes me, though, that our enthusiasm about these vaccines says a lot about why the U.S. has had such a hard time with the pandemic; indeed, it tells us a lot about why our healthcare system is in the state it is. We’re suckers for the quick fix, the medical intervention that will bring us health.
Unless you were alive when Woodrow Wilson was
President, COVID-19 has been the worst public health crisis of our
lifetime. It took some time for us to
fully realize how bad it was going to be, and, even then, most of us
underestimated exactly how bad that would be.
We may still be underestimating how bad these next few months
will be.
We knew, of course, that we didn’t have any vaccine
for this new virus, and that, at best, it would take some time to develop one. We didn’t initially know what to expect
when someone became infected, didn’t know the right treatments, didn’t know which
therapeutics might help. We weren’t even
really sure how COVID-19 spread. There have
been many hard-won lessons.
What we did know, though, was that we needed to take
precautions. Physical distancing, limiting
social gatherings, wearing masks, contact tracing; we knew these things would
help. They wouldn’t prevent COVID-19
from spreading, they certainly wouldn’t cure it once infected, but they would mitigate.
We couldn’t even do those right.
Mask wearing became a political issue. It is not a coincidence that some of the
areas with the lowest percent of people wearing masks are among the hottest
spots for spread of COVID-19, such as North Dakota, which has the highest
COVID-10 death rate in the world right now.
While overall mask wearing has improved from the
spring, to the point as many as 90% of Americans claim
they usually wear a mask in public, it varies widely, as illustrated below:
Similarly, business shutdowns and stay-at-home orders have
faced great resistance, again more along political lines than to intensity of
COVID-19 cases. There are no doubt grave
economic impacts to them, as we’ve seen, but whatever such measures we tried in
the spring are now seen as a price we are no longer willing to pay.
The CDC pleaded
with us to celebrate Thanksgiving at home with only the people we live
with. Do we listen? Of course not; nearly 40% of us plan
to attend large gatherings. Over a
million Americans flocked to the airport yesterday
– the highest daily number since mid-March – with millions more expected to
travel between now and Thanksgiving. That
is admittedly down from previous years, but at a time we are regularly breaking
daily records for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, it seems rather foolhardy.
Why should we worry?
There’s a vaccine coming.
Of course, no vaccine has yet been approved, none is
in full production, there are tremendous
production and logistical issues to overcome. It will take many months to have enough supply
to vaccinate enough people to make an impact on COVID-19’s spread.
Equally troubling, experts estimate
that, even with a vaccine that is over 90% effective, over 70% of people have to get
vaccinated. That may be a problem; fewer
than 60% of Americans say
that would be willing – and that’s up from earlier in the year. Even healthcare workers, who are expected to
be first in line when vaccines become available, are not
yet convinced they’ll take it.
There may be a light at the end of this particular
tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel.
We’ve all got pandemic fatigue, we all want COVID-19
gone, we all want to go back to our “normal lives,” but we don’t seem quite
able to bring ourselves to do the things we should in order to help bring those
about. Somehow, we assume, doctors and
scientists will fix things for us. It’s
par for the course.
We don’t do enough about our diet and exercise; it’s
easier to just take pills for our high blood pressure and bad cholesterol. We don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, so
we take supplements
to get the necessary vitamins and minerals.
We don’t stay active enough, so we end up with hip and knee
replacements. We claim to worry about
the safety of vaccines, but give processed food manufacturers carte blanche to tailor
their products to maximize our consumption.
We debate the
need for universal coverage, but don’t spend nearly enough time talking about food
or housing
insecurity. We not only can’t persuade
ourselves to take climate change seriously, we don’t even care to ensure that
our water
and atmosphere
are safe now.
It’s easier to trust health care to protect our
health than to take responsibility ourselves, even though medical care is
estimated to only account for 10-20% of our health. So why wear a mask? Why social distance? Why stay in our family bubble? Soon there will be a vaccine.
We need to stop acting like the proverbial damsel in
distress waiting to be rescued, and start taking more responsibility for our own
health – for COVID-19 and all the health issues we face.
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