Bill can help end crisis if we are smart

For more than a year, health professionals have been crying out for a full-fledged national effort to beat the coronavirus and stop the carnage that COVID-19 has wreaked across the United States. But what we got from our federal government, after the initial stage of denial, was a trickle of half-measures and a torrent of passing the buck. That’s finally changed.

A few days ago, President Joe Biden signed a modified version of his American Rescue Plan, which will allocate tens of billions of dollars for vaccination programs, testing and disease surveillance, and personal protective equipment to get Americans through the pandemic. That’s good news for the American people. No longer will health officials be fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

Although legislators voted largely along party lines for the final bill, throughout the negotiations, the funding measures for coronavirus response efforts received bipartisan support. Biden called for them as part of his original plan, and Republican senators included them in their own COVID relief proposal. Public health should not be a partisan issue. We all want to get back to some semblance of normalcy as safely and quickly as we can.

The tragic absurdity of this past year is that even before the vaccine, we had plenty of opportunities to stymie this pandemic. But the scourge persists, because the federal government never adopted a medically sound public health roadmap, provided the funding needed to make it a reality, or delivered clear and consistent evidencebased messages — until COVID-19 had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

We could have heavily invested in tests and PPE a year ago. We came up short. Our federal, state and local leaders could have encouraged people to stay home as much as possible and wear masks consistently when interacting with anyone outside of their immediate households. Not enough of them did.

Although that’s now changed in many parts of the country, there’s still a lot of work to do. Now that Congress has signed off on the tools and resources to fight back, we can choose to change the pandemic’s trajectory. We need to provide essential workers with effective protective gear, implement widespread frequent testing to identify and isolate new infections, and vaccinate broad swaths of the public as soon as possible.

There have now been more than 535,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the United States. That’s as if the entire populations of Atlanta or Sacramento disappeared. One study puts the toll a different way, emphasizing that COVID-19 has cost 3.9 million years of life in the United States. Even for survivors, many lives have changed irrevocably. Experts estimate that about 10 percent of COVID-19 patients experience prolonged symptoms. That means the number of Americans who could suffer long after their initial illness equals the population of Chicago, our third-largest city — with potentially millions more to come.

In the names of the hundreds of thousands who are no longer with us, and the thousands we can still save, let’s all commit to putting public health first. That means making some difficult political decisions. However, several state governors from both parties are caving to pressure instead of leading, and they have started lifting or easing restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. That’s a grave mistake. Dr. Anthony Fauci recently expressed dismay at such moves, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns of a potential fourth surge of infections.

As many health experts have already noted, this unforced error is like stumbling at the finish line of a marathon, fumbling at the ten yard line, or whatever sports analogy hits home for you. Public officials should keep many COVID-19 restrictions in place until we reach the level of vaccination — 75-85 percent of the population — that medical experts say we need to achieve “herd immunity”’ and neutralize the virus’ hold on our daily lives.

At the time of writing this piece, just over 10 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That number is rapidly increasing, but bottom line: When it comes to being safe enough to “reopen” the U.S., we’re not there yet.