USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: COVID isn’t vanishing. It’s making a comeback.
“We’re rounding the turn on the pandemic.”
Donald Trump said that three times Tuesday to a packed rally of supporters ( many without face masks) in Johnstown, Pa.
But if America is turning a corner on the coronavirus, it’s in the wrong direction.
When Trump began floating his rounding- the- turn mantra weeks ago, the number of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths had, indeed, been declining since early summer. But that has changed.
There were more than 50,000 new infections in the U. S. during a recent 24- hour period ( with a seven- day average of nearly 47,000). That’s at least double the daily infections of any other country in the world with the exception of India, which has four times the population of the United States. America already has more COVID- 19 deaths — more than 217,000 — than any other country.
Some 36,000 Americans were being treated in the hospital with COVID- 19 this week, a 25% jump over mid- September, and months ahead of a winter that many experts fear could be a brutally infectious season when people will be indoors where the virus more easily spreads. Even with lower death rates, total fatalities could approach 400,000 by Feb. 1, according to a leading model.
“I hate being kind of a doom- sayer,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said during a recent interview on the Today show, “but I am worried about where we’re heading. Fifty thousand cases is a lot, and it’s a lot for the middle of October.”
News of this turnaround has been obscured by election coverage, a White House super- spreader event and the president’s own bout with the disease, for which he was treated with cuttingedge therapies, including some unavailable to most Americans.
Even as Trump declared “it is disappearing,” COVID was making a comeback. More than 20 states have set records for new infections. In Wisconsin, where cases are piling up, a field hospital was built on a state fairground near Milwaukee.
And despite Trump’s campaignfueled optimism — “Vaccines and cures are coming fast!” he tweeted this week — vaccines will likely not be widely available until summer, according to congressional testimony by Robert Redfield, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Thankfully, the news isn’t all bad.
While daily COVID deaths remain alarmingly high at around 700, the number isn’t rising ( although deaths do tend to lag infection trends).
Deaths, as a percentage of infections, seem to be continuing to decline. Doctors are getting better at treating COVID with the antiviral remdesivir and steroids like dexamethasone, or practices such as placing patients on their stomach to improve breathing or using pulse oximeters for early detection of pneumonia. Newer interventions such as experimental monoclonal antibody cocktails, provided to Trump on an emergency basis, hold out strong hope of benefiting COVID patients.
Meanwhile, masks and social distancing remain powerful tools for avoiding the disease, and a growing majority of Americans favor using face coverings, despite the reluctance of Trump and members of his administration to set the best examples. Minnesota state officials have linked 16 infection cases there to a Trump rally Sept. 18.
Others, like the NBA, have shown how to do things right. With a strict regimen of sanitization, mask- wearing, daily testing and restricted movements, professional basketball pulled off a successful season inside its Orlando “bubble” without a single case of infection.
It seems like forever since this outbreak began, and COVID- weary Americans are long past wishing it was all a bad dream. Another dark season looms, in the United States and abroad, before science rides to the rescue.