Rising infections cloud success of vaccines
When Laura Forman arrived at work a few weeks ago, something was missing. The refrigerated truck for bodies that had overflowed Kent Hospital’s morgue during the COVID-19 surge was gone.
“Coming up to the hospital and seeing that space where it had been, I cried,” said Forman, the physician who heads the Warwick, R.I., hospital’s emergency department. “It was the most powerful symbol of hope.”
But this week, hope gave way, yet again, to concern. The rate of coronavirus infections is rising again — in Rhode Island and across the nation. It is clouding the success of the U.S. vaccination program, at least for now.
“We’ve been watching the numbers really carefully, and the difference over the last week has been palpable for us,” Forman said. “It’s worry at this point. It’s worry about our community. It’s worry about our families, because most of us have unvaccinated kids and family at home.”
The virus that has kept an entire planet toggling between hope and dread for the past 14 months is having yet another go at the United States. The spread of highly contagious new variants of the virus, coupled with prematurely relaxed safety precautions in some places, has set off new alarms, all the way up to President Joe Biden.
“You look out the front window and it’s raining,” said Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “but from the back window, it’s sunny. And your house is literally on the cusp of the storm and you don’t know which way it’s going to go — stormy, or is it going to be sunny? That’s sort of where we are in COVID.”
Three days after Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, lifted his state’s mask mandate and restaurant occupancy limits in early March, Houston waitress Tracy McKenna said she served a customer who complained about her soda and food tasting odd. Problems with taste and smell are telltale signs of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Four days later, McKenna, who is not vaccinated, had trouble breathing and tested positive for the coronavirus. The symptoms advanced to a severe cough and fatigue. McKenna’s partner and toddler also contracted the virus.
“What little protections we had were out the window,” McKenna, 41, said in an interview conducted over Twitter because of her symptoms. “I was/am incredibly frustrated, because I was already putting myself at risk dealing with people who couldn’t care less about me, and now there would be a lot more of them.”
In Wellington, Fla., nurse and lactation consultant Deborah Montgomery has no such frustration. She was fully vaccinated in early February.
“I kind of felt a little guilty that I was able to get it so easily because I’m a health care worker,” said Montgomery, who is also a union delegate at her hospital, Palms West, in Loxahatchee, Fla. “I have 100 percent relief. Knowing that I’m not going to transmit this to any of my little, itty-bitty patients that I take care of, or that I’m going to take it from one room to another room. I don’t worry about taking it home to my family.”
It was inevitable that some people would receive vaccines ahead of others, even with the shots now being distributed at a rate of about 2.8 million per day. A panel of experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recommended the priorities adopted by the federal government, pushing health care workers and vulnerable nursing home residents and staff members to the front of the line.
But it was not a given that, with the end so near, the country would face the possibility of another major surge in infections. That is the result of the growth of highly transmissible variants of the virus, including one first detected in the United Kingdom that is now responsible for 26 percent of U.S. infections, along with some governors’ decisions to throw open places where people can gather indoors and rescind mask requirements. Those moves came despite numerous pleas from federal officials that it was too early.
“We can’t afford to let our guard down,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at Wednesday’s White House briefing on the virus. “We are so close, so very close to getting back to the everyday activities we all miss so much.”
As that progress occurs, infections and hospitalizations are increasing. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most reliable barometer of infections, reached 66,009 on Thursday, according to reports from state health departments analyzed by the Washington Post.
On Wednesday, Walensky said the United States was averaging 4,900 hospitalizations per day, 300 more than the previous week.
Case counts are rising sharply in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, West Virginia and elsewhere. In Rhode Island, where Forman is preparing for another spike, the rate of positive tests ticked up from 2 percent last week to 2.4 percent this week, according to state data. That is still well below the crisis level the state reached in December, but it is heading the wrong way.
Other states are experiencing declines in case counts, some of them substantial, including California, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and Arizona.
Almost nowhere is the crisis worse than Michigan, which has seen its seven-day average rise from 1,030 on Feb. 21 to 5,663 on March 31. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, recently asked the Biden administration to surge vaccine doses to the hard-hit state and other hot spots. One local official there said the vaccination effort is lacking in intensity.
“This is the worst emergency crisis that we’ve been in our lifetime,” said Pamela Pugh, who was the chief public health officer for the city of Flint during the height of the city’s water crisis and a longtime resident of Saginaw. “They say that we’re in a race for time, (but) we can’t say that, we can’t know that and then distribute the vaccine in the way that we have.”
Likewise, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, a Democrat who has been in a legal brawl with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, to preserve his city’s mask mandate, said Abbott is confusing the public.
“Communication and messaging is really important, and that’s why I was real frustrated when the governor said, ‘We have to remove our mask mandate, but I still urge everyone to wear masks,’ ” Adler said. “In my mind, that’s a contradictory message to people. They don’t know what to believe at that point.”
A spokeswoman for Abbott, Renae Eze, said in a statement, “People have ‘learned and mastered’ how to protect themselves and loved ones from coronavirus and ‘do not need the government to tell them how to do so.’ ”
Glen Nowak, a former media relations director at the CDC, said in public health, one foot is always on the gas and the other is always on the brake.
“There’s a lot of caution about what to say, and that’s probably driven by fear,” Nowak said. “If you’re not cautious, and something bad happens, people will hold you responsible for that. If I warn you and something doesn’t happen, that’s not as bad as if I don’t warn you and something bad does happen.”