Trump may corral U.S. into herd immunity
In most countries if you started to see your hospitals were overflowing, you would react in some way. And there doesn’t seem to be a reaction. Dr. Ashleigh Tuite of the University of Toronto on the situation in the U.S., where many states are seeing dramatic spikes in the number of coronavirus cases.
What would it take to reopen the border? You know, the big one with the United States of America. Yeah, those guys.
It’s an unknowable, like so much else. But it is hard to imagine it happens this year, honestly. The other day the president of the United States said he tried to discourage COVID-19 testing, and he wasn’t joking, because to joke you need a sense of humour, even a dark and vicious one. This president of the United States can no more joke than he can do a backflip, or name all 50 states.
“I don’t kid,” said Donald Trump, of saying he wanted less testing for a virus that has killed over 123,000 Americans since Feb. 29.
The virus is sloshing around that giant infected bathtub of a country, and is now washing over Florida, Texas, Arizona, mostly red states, so many. On Tuesday it was reported Florida would no longer count intensive care beds in its thresholds for reopening, a month after the state fired a data scientist for refusing to falsify public data on deaths and illnesses, and hospitalizations were reported to be rising fast after a week of staggering growth that topped 4,000 cases in a day. (Canada, with 35 million to Florida’s 21 million, only ever topped out at 2,500.)
In Texas, hospitalizations jumped 10 per cent, and Talking Points Memo reported the Trump administration planned to pull testing funding from 13 sites across five states, including two in Dallas. Twenty-six states have seen net growth in the last 14 days, and another nine are holding steady.
In some circles, conservatives are threatening to meet contact tracers at the door with guns. In others, masks are a signal not of public health consideration but of political fealty.
And the president said, not for the first time, that he wanted less testing so he would have fewer cases. It’s not because he lacks object permanence. It’s because he can only deal in the superficial, and he thinks he would look better if nobody knew how many cases there were, and people were left to die in obscurity.
Dr. Ashleigh Tuite of the University of Toronto is one of our elite epidemiological modellers. Tuesday, she said something that stopped me in my tracks.
“If they continue, they may achieve herd immunity before they have a vaccine,” says Tuite. “Even if there’s a vaccine by the end of the year, by the time it gets manufactured and delivered … it could happen.
“We haven’t even reached the fall yet. Most epidemiologists are worried about the fall.”
Herd immunity is a march through fields of death. Back in March, Britain lurched down a road based on that strategy, and backtracked when it turned out their numbers were wrong, and up to 250,000 Britons could die. People have no natural immunity to a new virus, and we still are far from sure how antibody-based immunity would work. Herd immunity is a horror.
“In most countries if you started to see your hospitals were overflowing, you would react in some way,” says Tuite.
“And there doesn’t seem to be a reaction. From the perspective of the country, you would expect leadership to move in some way, to say, something is going wrong here, we need to think about how we’re responding to this. And you just don’t see that.”
She has a back-of-the-napkin calculator where you can plug in the case numbers, plug in the basic reproductive number, or R0, and it will tell you how long it would take to go down to zero. The U.S. already has almost 1.3 million active cases and 123,000 deaths, more than double any other country. We plug in 1.5 million cases and set the reproductive number at 0.7 — good, but not exceptional. It is impossible to imagine the United States being exceptional at epidemic response, right now.
But with 1.5 million cases and a magical shift to a steady 0.7 R0, it would take about 200 days for the United States to reach single digits. That’s January of next year. And of course, that’s not going to happen.
“It’s going to take a while,” says Tuite. “If you look at an epidemic curve, the point where it turns is when each case makes less than one new case. And then you still go down the entire other side of the epidemic curve. Even if you were able to magically stop transmission today, you would still have all the cases that are incubating. This is going to keep growing for a while.”
So what does America look like in three months? Or six? Assuming the best-case scenario, Trump loses the election in November, Joe Biden takes over in January, and the pandemic has been allowed to run wild for months, the first wave never really abating, into the second wave of the fall.
“I can’t even imagine what the U.S. will look like in six months,” says Tuite. “I can’t even imagine.”
America is the sick man of the world. The New York Times reported the European Union has a draft list of criteria for allowing international travel once borders reopen July 1, and that the U.S. isn’t even close to reaching it.
When Canada closed the border by mutual agreement on March 21, the Americans counted 4,777 cases.
Tuesday, Texas’s governor warned the state would have over 5,000 new cases for the day. Tuesday night the president spoke to a megachurch in Arizona, full to the brim and without evident masks, run by holy men who claimed they had technology that kills 99.9 per cent of the virus in 10 minutes.
Public health authorities said he shouldn’t speak there, but he did. Arizona is also seeing spikes in cases and hospitalizations.
We don’t know what America will do about the border. They wanted to put troops there, way back in the pandemic; if they decide unilaterally to open, we still have the Quarantine Act.
But from a Canadian standpoint, it’s simple: we love our special friends, our main trading partner, our continental neighbour, flaws and all. But the border won’t be open for a long, long time.