BEWARE: COVID-19 is not in our rearview mirror

Ayear has passed and we are exhausted. We have watched family, friends and neighbors get sick and die from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses have shuttered. People have lost their jobs and been financially ruined.

Many people are working from home and their children are attending classes remotely, as schools shut down. The normal things we once took for granted — attending church, visiting family and friends, enjoying a simple night out — have been ripped away and replaced by isolation. The pandemic continues to grind us down.

But as the rebirth of spring is felt in the air, there also is a sense of optimism. Vaccines that will hopefully protect us from the disease have been developed and their distribution is substantially improving. While the number of new infections has plateau at last summer’s record high, it has declined from the winter holiday spike. The number of deaths and hospitalizations also has declined.

There now is a dangerous temptation for us to prematurely declare victory over a disease that still rages and to drop necessary precautions — wearing face masks, social distancing, avoiding large gatherings.

“There is so much that’s critical riding on the next two months,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a briefing last week. “How quickly we will vaccinate versus whether we will have another surge really relies on what happens in March and April.”

Spring break fever is spreading across the nation like the ripples of a big rock thrown into a still pond. Yielding to pressure from their restless citizens, governors in many states are throwing aside public health advice and opening up local economies to activities long considered “super spreader” events. Many even are dropping the basic requirement that people wear face masks.

They are replacing mask mandates with weak calls of “encouragement,” but leaving the decision up to “individual choice” and to beleaguered local businesses to enforce. It a “back to the future” situation. Remember early last year, when the few who wore masks were harassed and attacked by pandemic deniers?

How safe are these decisions to disre

gard medical evidence and prematurely open states’ economies? Will this newfound freedom cause another spike in cases?

The reality is that health experts have more questions than answers as to where the pandemic is headed. The vaccines appear promising, but we still need to determine how long the protections will last and if they will protect us from variants that now are spreading.

The B.1.1.7 variant, first spotted in the

United Kingdom, is spreading fast in the U.S. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, noted on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” that four weeks ago the variant made up “about 1 to 4 percent of the virus that we were seeing in communities across the country. Today, it’s up to 30 to 40 percent.”

Infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist Dr. Celine Gounder further noted that the highly contagious variant has been “catastrophic” in Europe. “It has driven up rates of hospitalizations and deaths and it’s very difficult to control.”

“What we’ve seen in Europe, when we hit that 50 percent mark, you see cases surge,” Osterholm said, noting other variants identified as from South Africa and Brazil also are spreading, but at a slower rate. A “home grown” variant also has been identified in an Oregon case.

Variants will continue to evolve among the nation’s unprotected population. A protective “herd immunity” develops when more people are immunized. So far, more than 60 million Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. More than 31.2 million have received two doses. That’s only about 9.4 percent of the U.S. population.

“I understand the need to want to get back to normality, but you’re only going to set yourself back if you just completely push aside the public health guidelines — particularly when we’re dealing with anywhere from [50,000] to 70,000 infections per day in the United States,” said infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Heed the warning from White House pandemic adviser Andy Slavitt: “It may seem tempting, in the face of all this progress, to try to rush back to normalcy, as if the virus is in the rearview mirror. It’s not.”