The predominant news about Covid-19 was so bleak for so long. But the facts have changed, perhaps more quickly than the main news stories.
Vaccines show “spectacular” results for borrowing a recent sentence from Dr. Anthony Fauci. Hospitalizations are declining. The variants are a curveball, but “it simply duplicates the idea that we need to vaccinate people as quickly as possible,” says CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
The new administration activates what it calls a “government-wide response.” Government experts speak freely to the press and the public. The president no longer repeats conspiracy theories. At this point a prudent optimism is guaranteed, with some emphasis on caution, but without losing optimism.
Some observers have pointed to a disconnect between the data and the public discussion about the pandemic.
Zeynep Tufekci “For most of us, it’s best to stop scrolling through detailed discussions about what lowers of neutralizing antibody titers, and so on, mean.
he wrote last week. “We have to go through the wacky winter, with precautions, but the news about the future has been really good for months.”
This news about the future is mainly about the effectiveness of vaccines.
David Leonhardt of the New York Times wrote on Monday: “Vaccine news continues to be excellent, and public discussion of vaccines remains more negative than the facts justify. Here is the key fact: the five vaccines with public results eliminated Covid-19 deaths. They have also drastically reduced hospitalizations. “
Sometimes detailed data from clinical trials overshadows the most important point, which is that vaccines are largely effective in preventing symptomatic disease – “which means fewer hospitalizations and subsequently fewer deaths,” as he told me Wednesday in at night CNN Health executive producer Ben Tinker. . “Additional preliminary data on the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in conjunction with Oxford University, suggest that it may also be effective in preventing the transmission of the virus. This would be even more welcome in the urgent effort to stem the tide of new cases. “. Each update only highlights the need to get more doses to more people as soon as possible …
WH reports three times a week
Technical difficulties hit the first briefing of the WH Covid-19 response team on January 27, but video conferencing has been working well ever since. Covid-19 chief Jeff Zients, Fauci, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and other officials held briefings last Friday and last week’s three business days.
Zients said Wednesday, “I hope that in five briefings, we will begin to establish a pattern for providing the American people with the facts they need about the crisis and our response, driven by our experts and scientists.”
View of Lockhart
Quoting Clinton-era press secretary Joe Lockhart’s new column for CNN.com: “Something unusual is happening in Washington, DC: media briefings, and many of them. Senior officials they actually answer them “. Keep reading …
Partisanship drives hesitation
Of course, the magnitude of the crisis is mind-boggling. As Zients said, “vaccinating everyone in America is one of the biggest operational challenges we have ever faced and we will not stop working until this mission is completed.”
Right now the demand for shots far exceeds the supply. But at some point there will be a gap between supply and demand. New polls from the University of Monmouth find that 50% of Americans plan to “get the Covid vaccine as soon as they are allowed to” and that 6% already have it. (This latest figure is already obsolete, as more than a million doses are administered each day.) Monmouth found that “another 19% say they’d rather let other people get it first to see how it goes.” “24% say they will probably never get the vaccine if they can avoid it.”
>> “Reluctance to get the vaccine is motivated more by partisanship than by any demographic factor,” commented polling station director Patrick Murray. “It says a lot about the depth of our partisan division that could affect public health like that.”
>> Media Matt Gertz, lead member of the issue: “Steve Doocy should receive the live COVID vaccine on the air.” It has other suggestions for Fox …
One death per minute?
As all “Rent” fans know, there are 525,600 minutes a year. There may also be many deaths from Covid-19 in the United States in March. Bulletin reader H. Steven Moffic, MD, made that point on Wednesday. His latest contribution to Psychiatric Times deals with the measure of death per minute and the “prolonged mourning of Covid-19.”
>> According to CNN’s Ben Tinker, “an overall forecast released Wednesday by CDC now projects that there will be 496,000 to 534,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United States on February 27.”
>> On Wednesday, the death toll in the U.S. exceeded 450,000, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins. The United States went from 400,000 to 450,000 dead in just 15 days. Since deaths are a lagging indicator, “the recent decline in hospitalizations gives us hope that the death toll will begin to decline in the coming weeks,” Walensky said Wednesday.
