Warnings ignored?
Officials tell public to stay home to stop virus spread, but will people follow guidelines?
WASHINGTON» America is not in shutdown, but every day, it edges closer to something like that. With minimal help from the White House or Congress, governors and mayors are trying desperately to tamp down a fall surge in coronavirus infections without crashing their economies - or inciting a revolt from pandemic-fatigued constituents who want this ordeal to be over.
In Newark, N. J., Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka announced what he described as a 10- day “lockdown” starting Wednesday - although city officials say this is an ask, not an order.
In Denver, Democratic Mayor Michael Hancock on Friday pleaded with residents to stay
home for the next month. “I know this is hard. I know you hate this,” Hancock said.
In Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine this month announced that he would enforce a statewide mask mandate. And Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, also a Republican, put a limit on how many guests can be invited to a household gathering: zero.
But it is not clear that the measures imposed across the country in the past few weeks are stringent or timely enough to halt the dismaying autumn surge of coronavirus infections that already has put some hospitals into crisis and driven up death tolls. The numbers have gone from ominous to disastrous in a few weeks. More than 170,000 people a day on average are becoming infected, and more than 85,000 are hospitalized.
That is before millions of people congregate for the holidays, many of them having journeyed home with an invisible pathogen potentially along for the ride.
“Most governors are trying to fight a forest fire of infection with garden-hose measures, and they aren’t even aiming at the right targets or starting at the right time,” warned Anne Sosin, program director at the Dartmouth College Center for Global Health Equity.
Timing is key, experts say. Modest restrictions can be effective if imposed early, said Toby Phillips, executive director of the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, a project that has been collecting pandemic-response policies from 190 countries.
His organization considers “early” to be when a state or country has no more than 40 new cases per day per million of its population. Once the number goes over 200 cases per million, that’s considered “maximum risk.” The United States is now over 500 cases per million, Phillips said.
“The moment for acting early with a fast response has passed,” he said.
Taiwan, Vietnam and China had success with swift measures that combined targeted restrictions with strong communication. Taiwan has never had a full shutdown, Phillips pointed out, because people are conscientious about wearing masks and reducing interactions with others.
But in the United Kingdom, where Phillips lives, weeks of a curfew were not enough to stop the escalation of cases.
“The most expensive way to deal with the virus is to delay the pain until the point when you have to put the economy into a lockdown,” he said.
Several vaccines have proved effective and in coming weeks probably will be approved and begin to be distributed. But that will take months. The shortterm future of the pandemic in the United States - and the severity of the crisis that President-elect Joe Biden will inherit Jan. 20 - depends largely on individuals’ choices in the coming days and weeks.
Pandemic fatigue, personal hardships and a lack of financial resources have combined with anti-government sentiment and science denialism to drive a wedge between what public health officials say should be done and what people are actually doing.
In addition, many people remain unpersuaded that the novel pathogen and COVID-19, the disease it can cause, warrant sweeping restrictions on commerce, schooling, sporting events and other cultural activities. They do not think the virus is as dangerous as public health experts claim.
These attitudes to some degree echo President Donald Trump’s message that the “cure can’t be worse than the disease.” But they are also shaped by personal experiences over the past nine months, said Michael Mugavero, an infectious- disease physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“What is the public health messaging that aligns with people’s very real, lived experiences?” Mugavero said. “At the end of the day, for most people, their lived anecdotal personal experience supersedes any broader health data.”
Political leaders and the general public alike are loath to see the imposition of the kind of economy-crushing shutdowns seen in the spring during the first pandemic wave. But that may be the only option if hospitals become so overwhelmed that they start turning away seriously ill or injured patients, or have to ration care because of staff and equipment shortages.
There are no painless options. Many of the new restrictions have sparked protests, derision and second- guessing. State and city leaders have been accused of doing too little or too much.
Exasperated parents have protested the abrupt closing of in-school learning in public schools in New York City, which still permits restaurant patrons to dine indoors and work out in fitness centers. Curfews, ordered in states from Massachusetts to California, have been met with jeers about the virus’s inability to tell time. Some local law enforcement agencies publicly vowed not to enforce limits on family gatherings.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican who issued a mask mandate this month, let a two-week ban on household gatherings expire Monday, saying the government should not tell people what they can do inside their homes.