Once again, U.S. at pandemic crossroads

Source: Politico | September 7, 2020 | Joanne Kenen

A brief opportunity to bring down the caseload before cold weather sets in may be squandered.

The United States has a narrow window to force the coronavirus into a partial retreat before the one-two punch of school openings and colder weather brings a widely feared rebound.

It’s blowing it, again.

Until vaccines and drugs arrive — and top scientists say they aren’t as imminent as President Donald Trump keeps promising — the tools to fight the virus remain the same: testing, masks, all the things Americans have been hearing about but not always doing since March. They are crucial right now. New cases have fallen from the pandemic’s second peak this summer, creating a brief chance to wrestle the caseload lower — not to zero, but low enough to blunt the impact of the new infections expected this fall.

“We could be on our way to much less infection,” said Nicole Lurie, who was HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response in the Obama administration.

But the Trump White House isn’t doubling down on Public Health 101, even as new hot spots emerge, in both the South and the Upper Midwest. Trump devoted only a few sentences to basic precautions in his pre-Labor Day weekend press briefing, followed by the upbeat assessment that “we’re really rounding the turn.” He is relying on a new adviser, Scott Atlas, a conservative physician he saw on Fox News who doesn’t have a background in public health or infectious disease but holds views aligning with Trump’s desire for faster and broader economic reopenings.

The pandemic peaked once in late April before settling at about 20,000 new cases a day. When the country rushed to reopen, the virus pounced, this time in the South. Infections peaked again around July 24, at a whopping 60,000 cases daily and then slowly flattened to around 40,000 now. That’s still dangerously high; one influential model just upped its estimate for U.S. deaths by January to more than 400,000 — just over double the current death toll of nearly 190,000.

“We squandered February and March. We squandered April and May. And now, there has been progress in a lot of areas — but we need to see much more,” Thomas Frieden, who led the Center for Disease Control in the Obama administration, said in an interview. “And we are a global laggard.”

Entering the final stretch before the Nov. 3 election, Trump is addressing largely mask-free campaign audiences and doubling down on his prediction that a crisis-ending coronavirus vaccine is just around the corner. His own vaccine chief told NPR last week that’s “extremely unlikely” in October or November.

“We need both a public health and a biomedical response,” said Ashish Jha, a global health expert newly installed as the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. Mixed messaging from the government, he said, “driven by a desire to say everything is going great” doesn’t get people to wear their masks.

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