"It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%" of the population, the number that would create herd immunity and halt the spread of the virus. "This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can," Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA TODAY Editorial Board. Michael Osterholm told USA Today this week: And nowhere has the virus been allowed to reach fully into the country. But for most of America, the virus has not yet been allowed to gain a foothold. Situations as strange and varied as the virus is unpredictable. Meat packing and processing houses nationwide. The exceptions to this narrative are painful. “Even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.” “We always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios,” he said. Markel called it “very gratifying to see our work used to help save lives.” But, he added, “it is also horrifying.” Howard Markel, author of “When Germs Travel” and one of the architects of the “W” Social Distancing policy, recently told the New York Times:ĭr. Bush Administration, whey will all tell you they never thought it would work to the degree it did. If you read the interviews with the architects of Social Distancing as national pandemic policy during the George W. This lowered the dreaded R-naught (R0) to a figure so low, the virus had great difficulty spreading. The effort was hugely successful! The virus did eventually arrive, but largely found fewer human hosts than expected, based on this universal adoption of these inventions. What was the effect of all this? The interventions government implemented – social distancing, closing schools and business and government and shopping and dining and exercising and congregating – all those interventions wound up actually beating the virus to Main Street. Of course, Florida still has been hit, but not nearly as bad as the Northeast. The Tampa Bay Times story I have linked to is a commendable narrative on just how quickly Floridians made their independent decisions to stay home and not go outside.
Or, more accurately, hasn't been decimated yet. A state that, by all rights, should have been decimated by the virus.Įxcept it wasn't. Nowhere was this more apparent than in sunny Florida, the third largest state in the Union, a state with the highest population of the elderly, numerically and per capita. But even before the political leaders started formulating policy and making decisions, the American people did their own calculus and decided the risks of traveling and venturing outside of their homes was too great. They almost universally reacted en masse, and the same way. Then back again to the West Coast, and San Francisco.īased on this deluge of information, and armed with the historical accounts of what the nation and their communities went through in 1918, political leaders listened to the health care professionals advising them. Then our attention turned to New York City. Seattle, with its world-class public health infrastructure, endured what we thought were the first cases. Then the cases started in the United States. China - no, Italy! - became the focus of the world's attention. Social media became the filter for commentary for a lot of this information. The 24-hour news cycle pumped the images of suffering and death from all over the world, onto televisions and devices across America. People were able to obtain all kinds of information rapidly. Testing began at a rate never before seen globally.Īt the same time, the Internet - light years ahead of where it was in 2003 - became an information (and disinformation) hub. The dizzying speed with which this new SARS-CoV-2 virus’ sequence was then digitally transmitted to PCR testing machines all over the world was a marvel of collaboration and a testament of just how far we have come with medical technology in seventeen years. Compare that to the original SARS virus in 2002-03, when it took some twenty weeks to sequence. In January of this year, it took Chinese researchers less than a month to sequence the genome of that we now call SARS-CoV-2, the virus that produces COVID-19 illness.
First was the rapid sequencing of the coronavirus’ genome. There are several reasons why the COVID-19 Mexican Standoff has occurred. And the virus has us in the same position. Here's what really happened: Due to our swift and thorough actions, we have the virus in a COVID-19 Mexican Standoff. That is not an accurate depiction of what has happened, however. That the lockdowns, isolation and closure of everything was an overreaction. Some say it is because the virus is an underachiever. Everyone is asking the same question: Why have we not been overwhelmed, coast to coast, by this novel coronavirus? It is a legitimate question.
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