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For millions
of Americans who believe that COVID-19 is real, dangerous, and
requires a plan of action, Joe Biden’s election to the
presidency has finally offered a path out of the seemingly
never-ending pandemic. Indeed, compared to President Donald Trump’s
approach
- which centered on financing the development of vaccines, but did
little else to mitigate the spread of the virus or even to ensure
proper distribution
of vaccines
- Biden’s approach seems, in the words of one commentator,
“maddeningly
obvious.”
But in truth,
it is not nearly enough.
Naturally, we
are optimistic. Biden has a plan
and Trump didn’t. But our optimism is a mirage. The new
president does not aim to eliminate the virus. Rather, he wants to
“[m]itigate spread through expanding masking, testing, data,
treatment, workforce, and clear public health standards.”
This is a
fancy way of saying he plans to manage the pandemic so that
infections and deaths don’t overwhelm hospitals and ICUs all at
once. He simply wants to try to spread out the pain. Is that the best
we deserve?
True, there
are vaccines being manufactured, distributed, and deployed as fast as
possible via the patchwork and chaotic systems that were forced to
develop under Trump’s non-existent leadership.
But already we
are seeing new
variants
of the virus develop as it festers through cities across the world,
variants that are less responsive to vaccines, forcing vaccine
producers to scramble to develop more effective booster shots. Even
Biden himself admitted that Americans must prepare for hundreds
of thousands more deaths
from the pandemic this year before seeing relief.
Meanwhile,
California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to have simply given up,
announcing - to most people’s shock - that since deaths and
infections in the state dropped slightly, it was time
to lift some restrictions.
The most populous state in the nation, which has also been the latest
epicenter of the disease, may see some “potential
economic rewards”
as per one report describing Newsom’s decision. In other words,
people may start to die again, but at least businesses may start to
reap profits once more. Somehow we are supposed to take heart from
that callous calculation.
Between
Biden’s federal plan to mitigate the virus and state-level
approaches that place profits over people, we are likely to remain
stuck in this deadly pandemic, treading water, for many more months -
unless the newly seated president takes drastic short-term measures.
All he has to do is look to the East.
Scientists
have seen far greater success
at ending the pandemic in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea,
Vietnam, New Zealand, and Australia. Certainly, some island nations
have a geographic advantage in being able to bar all air travel to
help eliminate the virus, but large nations like China, South Korea,
and Vietnam have proven that one need not be a small island in order
to successfully tackle the disease. These nations have the benefit of
experience with earlier deadly diseases, and early on they adopted an
“elimination strategy” rather than mitigation.
There are
scientists in the United States calling for such measures as well.
Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex
Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other
complex systems and works with initiatives like CovidZero
and the COVID
Action Group.
In an interview,
he explained to me that “there is no point in time where it’s
not worthwhile to get rid of this within a period of five to six
weeks.”
Yes, it is
true that were the United States to take an elimination approach to
COVID-19, we would be done with this pandemic in a short period of
time, and like many Eastern nations, we could have been done with it
months ago had we had leadership with foresight. What Bar-Yam is
proposing is that the United States adopt the same strategy that
nations like China and Vietnam took.
He explained,
“if we start now, taking really strong action, much of the
country would actually be cleared of the disease in about four weeks,
and a lot of it, if not all of it, would be cleared by six weeks.”
At that point, “we could start getting back to normal within a
few more weeks, just being careful how we reopen,” he said.
By “strong
action,” Bar-Yam means a complete halt to all travel and a
strict social distancing for a short four to six weeks. While this
sounds horrifying to a population already weary of 10 long months of
restrictions, it is a sensible way to squash the disease. Anyone who
is infected with the disease at the beginning of the strict shutdown
would not be infected at the end of the shutdown.
Even
accounting for the time that it takes for an infection to spread
within one’s household, by four to six weeks, intra-household
transmission would be over with, and none would remain infectious.
Meanwhile, inter-household transmission would have been stopped via
the strict measures.
Coming out of
the harsh shutdown, we would emerge into a world largely free of the
disease. Only at that point would a strategy of masking, testing, and
contact tracing of the type that Biden is offering actually be
effective at stopping small outbreaks. We would still need mass
vaccinations, but the shots would be more likely to work if we stop
the virus from spreading and thereby mutating.
In order to
adopt the necessary elimination strategy against the pandemic, the
United States faces two hopelessly insurmountable challenges: the
intransigence of a population that has been fed
misinformation and believes
the virus is a hoax,
and the refusal of politicians
to pay Americans to remain at home rather than having to choose
between employment and infection.
If returning
to normalcy is what most Americans want, and resumption of economic
activity is what politicians and businesses want, the fastest, most
efficient way to get there is to spend the four to six weeks
eliminating the relentless pandemic rather than months and perhaps
years hopelessly trying to mitigate it, and ultimately failing.
Bar-Yam
explained that the longer we wait to take strong action, the harder
it will be to take it and the worse the crisis will get. He painted a
grim picture of the near future saying that the new highly
transmissible variants could overwhelm health care facilities by
March 2021. An incredibly strict shutdown would be difficult to
accomplish but offer rewards so high that it would be worth the pain.
After all,
millions of Americans have been stuck in a semi-shutdown for months
with no end in sight. It is akin to a wounded patient opting for a
painful surgery that has a guaranteed outcome of success rather than
accepting endless band-aids to staunch the bleeding and prolonging
the pain indefinitely.
Offering a
tantalizing view of what Americans could enjoy if we followed an
elimination strategy, Bar-Yam said that the reopening wouldn’t
be the kind of haphazard approach we are using now where an endless
cycle of reopening and shutting down throws society into chaos and
puts normalcy ever out of reach.
It would be a
slow yet methodical reopening, “which is what people are
experiencing in Australia almost all the time” right now,
Bar-Yam said. When outbreaks do emerge (say, from an international
traveler), they are very small, and quick localized action can squash
them without disrupting society as a whole.
We do not have
to accept Biden’s prediction that 200,000 more Americans will
die. Adopting an elimination strategy minimizes infections and the
terrifying
long-term health effects
of surviving COVID-19, and it minimizes the massive rising death toll
that we seem to have become numb to.
The New
York Times
assessed the state of Wuhan, China, a year after the pandemic was
first declared. The city that became synonymous with death and
suffering, offering a grim preview of the disease to the rest of the
world, is now largely back to normal.
Except that
the Times,
in noting that today’s Wuhan “heralds a post-pandemic
world where the relief at unmasked faces, joyous get-togethers and
daily commutes conceals the emotional aftershocks,” made no
mention of the starkly different approaches that China and the United
States have taken against the novel coronavirus. Americans are
unlikely to return to the pre-pandemic normal that Chinese residents
now enjoy simply because we are not trying to eliminate the virus
like China did.
This article was produced by Economy for All,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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