Only one way out of the pandemic
Will the pandemic ever be over? We’ve tried hoping, waiting for and wondering whether it would end, to no avail. With a resumption of regular business and a more effective variant fueling a fourth surge, perhaps more of us can finally agree it’s time to make it go away.
That means, above all, that more of us have to be vaccinated. And since we’ve already tried waiting and hoping for that, let’s force the issue by making vaccination the price of admission to society. In the meantime, effective and largely painless precautions such as masks make sense.
As the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently noted, vaccination is the ultimate solution to this repetitive cycle of “pain and suffering.” Despite extensive reports of socalled breakthrough cases among the vaccinated, the unvaccinated account for over 95% of hospitalizations and deaths.
What the breakthrough cases appear to show is that the delta variant of the coronavirus is more easily carried and transmitted by vaccinated people than its predecessors, though they’re unlikely to spread it as efficiently as the unvaccinated. In any case, the greater apparent transmissibility of the variant makes it that much more important to protect as many people as possible from severe COVID by increasing inoculation rates.
The Bay Area has been at the vanguard of vaccination requirements for public and private employees as well as customers of restaurants and other businesses, and the movement toward such mandates shows signs of working. The nation reached at least one shot administered to 70% of adults on Monday, albeit a month later than President Biden planned, buoyed by the most average daily vaccinations in a month.
State and federal officials should maintain the momentum by requiring vaccination to enter more public facilities and helping the private sector do the same by easing vaccination verification. Yes, some share of the population will never get vaccinated, but many merely need their apathy or hesitancy to become more inconvenient than getting a shot.
Bay Area officials also continued to take the lead Monday on another precaution by mandating masks indoors, which is appropriate until surging infections abate and vaccination rates increase. It’s also become clear that dropping most restrictions on gatherings, as California did in June, was a mistake. While lockdowns aren’t warranted or feasible, limiting indoor crowding would be wise in places where unvaccinated people are or might be present. Pretending the pandemic is over is no substitute for making it so.