The pandemic isn’t over
As more and more people in New York and around the nation get vaccinated against COVID -19, it’s tempting to think the pandemic is all but over. It isn’t.
Yet even as cases rise alarmingly, especially in New York and New Jersey, there seems to be an almost inexorable momentum to drop our collective guard. It’s as if we learned nothing from the mistakes of the past year. And it’s a particular concern to see New York joining this bandwagon, setting the stage for what’s shaping up to be a fourth wave that could set back so much of the progress this state has made in recent months.
No, we’re not seeing — yet — a massive surge like we witnessed in January, when the U.S. saw as many as 300,000 new cases of COVID -19 a day. But the trend lately hasn’t been good, with the nation averaging 66,000 new cases a day this week, and the running averages look a lot like they did during the pandemic’s second wave last summer. New York ranks second, after New Jersey, for new daily cases.
The good news is that more and more people are getting vaccinated, with a little more than 30 percent of New Yorkers having received at least one dose and 18 percent completing the vaccine series.
The less-good news is that the rate of full vaccination is still far below the 70 percent level that experts say is needed to achieve “herd immunity,” in which enough people are immune to the virus that rapid spread in the population is unlikely.
The bad news is that the cottage industry of pandemic contrarians and kooks is as active and viral as ever, thanks to social networks and a right-wing mediascape that treats ignorance as a conservative virtue.
And so a sensible idea like President Joe Biden’s plan for a “vaccine passport” — a voluntary program in which people could present proof of vaccination in order to gain access to participating airlines, hotels and other businesses — is cast as an Orwellian plot or even the biblical “mark of Satan” in the mind of Rqanon U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If we’re to avoid what the director of the Centers for Disease Control calls the “impending doom” of a fourth wave, states must revisit their recent moves to relax pandemic restrictions. In New York, that means Gov. Andrew Cuomo may need to reconsider steps his administration has taken to allow more access to nursing homes, restaurants, wedding venues and other establishments and events. It’s hard not to notice that these popular moves keep coming as the scandals around the governor keep growing. Whether that’s coincidental or not, only Mr. Cuomo and his most trusted advisers know for sure.
But as we’ve heard in recent days from members of former President Donald Trump’s pandemic task force, ignoring sound public health advice — for whatever reason — can have grave consequences. Apparently seeking redemption for her own failure to speak out against Mr. Trump’s incompetence in dealing with the pandemic, his task force coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, suggests that most of the more than 550,000 Americans who have died from COVID -19 would be alive today had Mr. Trump and his administration taken it seriously.
New York and America are too close to putting this pandemic behind us to squander this chance for any reason — ignorance, politics, popularity or even good but misguided intentions. We’re almost there, but the more we rush, the longer it may take.