Don’t relax just yet: COVID horror show isn’t quite finished
Warm weather, a full dose of vaccine, and positive economic indicators had me full of hope Sunday night that the worst of the pandemic is behind us.
“Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?” my wife interjected during dinner.
Journalists do not need horror movies to know things can always get worse. In 1997, I thought I’d seen the worst Minnesota flooding in 500 years when a heavy snowpack rapidly melted. But as if to say, “hold my beer,” a spring blizzard dumped blinding ice and snow on rescuers and made it impossible for firefighters to respond when downtown buildings started experiencing electrical fires.
The latest COVID-19 news is mixed. COVID-19 was in retreat but has plateaued. A quarter of adult Texans are vaccinated, but sign-up rates are slowing. Businesses are reopening, rehiring and reviving, but many
consumers remain fearful.
If you have hugged friends for the first time in a year, and you’ve enjoyed a meal at a restaurant, you may want to enjoy it while you can. Because SARS-CoV-2 will evolve if given half a chance, and Americans are letting their guard down.
Fewer people are respecting personal space, more are skipping their masks, and too many are relying on others for herd immunity, especially in Southern states such as Texas.
A third of Texans are unwilling to get their shot and putting our economic and public health recovery at risk. Perhaps as you read these words, the virus is mutating inside the body of an East Texas antivaxxer, becoming vaccineresistant and ready to spread to others.
If this happens, we will have wasted billions of dollars on vaccines and will lose trillions more when the economy slows again.
Ironically, the more progress doctors make in slowing infections and reducing fatalities, the more politicized vaccination becomes, according to an Economist magazine/YouGov poll.
“Half of those who reject vaccines (52 percent) also say it is safe for them today to socialize (compared to just 30 percent of all Americans). Another 45 percent say it is safe for them to go without a mask now. Just one in five Americans overall
(21 percent) think it is safe to go maskless today,” the pollsters report.
As a militant anti-vaxxer anecdote, consider the woman who told the New York Times she is selling counterfeit CDC vaccination cards on Etsy to help people evade the “tyrannical government.”
Those who reject vaccines create a reservoir where the virus will mutate. While there is no guarantee a mutation will defeat the vaccines, there is a real risk.
For proof, look no further than the variants known as B.1.351 and B.1.1.7, first detected in South Africa and Britain. As a recipient of the Pfizer vaccine, I’m disturbed by an Israeli study showing the mutations can infect the inoculated.
“These results overall suggest that vaccine breakthrough infection is more frequent with both (variants of concern), yet a combination of mass-vaccination with two doses coupled with non-pharmaceutical interventions control and contain their spread,” the study found.
The non-pharmaceutical interventions are social distancing, mask wearing, and minimizing exposure to the unvaccinated; the same interventions allowed China and Taiwan to get their outbreaks under control before vaccines existed.
Public health measures remain the most effective tools to stop pandemics, but societies that put individual desires ahead of community health create a playground for coronaviruses.
This is why I am disappointed that the Biden administration will not help businesses determine who is vaccinated
and who is allying themselves with the virus. Equally disappointing is the number of companies that are not requiring employees to get vaccinated if they can do so safely.
By enabling anti-vaxxers to breed and spread variants, we allow them to impose an enormous tax on the result of us. We all pay for developing new vaccines and treatments, not to mention the pandemic’s health and economic costs.
Even with deadly variants, we have so much work left to do. Texas state health officials need to conduct statistically significant surveillance testing so we can get firm numbers on virus and antibody prevalence.
We also need to export vaccines. The World Health Organization on Monday warned that COVID infections in most of the world are spiraling out of control. If the United States does not develop a home-grown vaccine-resistant variant, another country may export one.
We always need to remember that disasters are more complex than we think.
In 1993, a barge struck a railroad trestle in Alabama, causing Amtrak’s Sunset Limited to plow into the river. Then the train’s fuel floating on the Mobile River’s surface ignited, creating a sea of fire. For the passengers who thought it couldn’t get any worse, there were alligators on the riverbank.
The movies are not the only place where monsters can make a comeback.