Celebrate reopening. But don’t lose sight of the forever virus.
By Editorial Board,
WHAT IF the population of Baltimore or Milwaukee was wiped off the face of the earth? That is just approximately the scale of loss of life in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic so far. At more than 600,000 deaths, it is one of the gravest mass casualty events of the past century, and the actual toll is likely higher. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed about 675,000 Americans. Last week’s grim milestone is equal to deaths from cancer in all the United States in 2019. It is 200 times greater than the deaths on 9/11.
Those who have survived must surely rejoice that a return to normalcy is coming in some parts of the country, largely due to another history-shattering event, the development and mass deployment of highly efficacious vaccines. New York and California have reached a level of about 58 percent of the population with at least one dose and are throwing open the doors. Hopefully, the laggard states will catch up for a summer of recovery and renewal.
Yet the sober truth is that the pandemic has not ended either here or abroad. Nor is it going to come to an abrupt end. In a perceptive article titled “The forever virus” published in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs, Larry Brilliant and co-authors caution that the virus “is not going away” and cannot be eradicated. “Rather than die out, the virus will likely ping-pong back and forth across the globe for years to come,” they say, generating new variants that can threaten our normalcy once again. They note that more than a half million new cases are reported each day; every infected person harbors hundreds of billions of virus particles constantly reproducing; while most mutations are duds, the sheer quantity of them creates a pressure cooker for new variants and potentially intense outbreaks.
The new delta variant is one result, first identified in India, now predominant in the United Kingdom, and rising fast as a share of U.S. infections, reaching 10 percent. A British study using genomic sequences showed the delta variant carried a 64 percent increase in the odds of household transmission compared with the alpha variant that swept the world earlier. While current vaccines with two doses are effective against delta, this variation, now labeled a “variant of concern” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offers a glimpse of why it is impossible to be sanguine about a rapid end of the pandemic. Huge pockets of people are still unvaccinated and thus vulnerable. More infection means more changes and then more variants.
Dr. Brilliant and his co-authors, Lisa Danzig, Karen Oppenheimer, Agastya Mondal, Rick Bright and W. Ian Lipkin, say the answers must include rigorous vaccination, smart new strategies for disease tracking, surveillance and response, and reform of the global system for fighting pandemics.
So go ahead and toast the reopening, never forgetting those who have been lost. But don’t lose sight of the forever virus — because it will not lose sight of us.
Read more: Ashish K. Jha: The delta variant is a rising threat in the U.S. We have to redouble vaccination efforts. Leana S. Wen: Coronavirus vaccinations for young children should be an urgent priority The Post’s View: Huge disparities in vaccination rates are creating islands of vulnerability across the country
