'It's a slaughter,' Continued:
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The nation is caught in a “perfect storm,” says Dr.
Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, a medical not-for-profit organization, and medical contributor to Yahoo News. “People are getting really tired of wearing masks, not seeing loved ones,” Blackstock says. Many have resorted to
smaller gatherings that have more potential to spread the virus than people may realize.
And all this is happening as temperatures drop with the approach of winter. Viruses tend to spread
more rapidly in colder weather. People returning indoors, after months of trying to live outdoors as much as possible, will only facilitate that spread. “The timing couldn’t be worse,” Blackstock says. “And we aren’t even really in the thick of it yet.” That will likely come in January and February, the depths of winter.
Without quite saying so, the White House has adopted the herd immunity approach favored by Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford neuroradiologist who became Trump’s coronavirus whisperer in late summer, after a series of appearances on Fox News.
That strategy posits that absent a vaccine or effective therapeutics, it is best to let the virus burn through the population, while keeping the most vulnerable people safe.
The less-vulnerable would become infected but, in doing so, acquire antibodies that, when present in sufficiently high numbers in the general population, would stop the spread of the virus. This is the model that has been tried
in Sweden, whose approach has been
touted by political conservatives and some medical professionals in the United States.
Criticism of Atlas and his approach has been withering from the medical community. “He has no expertise in any of this stuff,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s school of public health, told NPR in September. Blackstock, for her part, estimates that a hands-off approach would lead to several million additional — and needless — deaths from COVID-19 across the United States.
Trump insisted in the closing days of the election campaign that the public would barely hear about the deadly virus after Election Day on Nov. 3. “ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!” he
complained on Twitter.
Neither Trump nor Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House coronavirus task force, has held a briefing on the pandemic in many weeks.
The White House disputes the notion that the pandemic is no longer a priority. A staffer on the White House coronavirus task force told Yahoo News that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House task force, “are still engaging with the states to understand developments in their areas and work through potential mitigation strategies.”
Birx also recently authored a memorandum in which she argued that the nation was “entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic.” And she disputed the notion proffered by Atlas, that lockdowns were the only means available to public health officials. “This is not about lockdowns — it hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April,” Birx wrote. “It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.”
The Birx memo appears to have been ignored.
Blackstock says that
public health officials must resort to a clear, centralized approach, instead of letting each state make pandemic-related decisions as if it were a country of its own. She says that a “harm-reduction approach,” popularized during the fight against HIV/AIDS — in which Birx has been a leader for three decades — could work against the coronavirus. But that would require clear messaging on masks, as well as a greater availability of rapid coronavirus tests.
It hardly helps that Trump and his supporters have maligned experts within his own administration. Trump said at a political rally ahead of the election that he
may soon fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has consistently been the most trusted member of his coronavirus task force. Steve Bannon, the former White House chief political strategist, said last week on his radio show that Fauci
should be beheaded.
In a statement forwarded by a press staffer, CDC Director Robert Redfield said that the nation has entered “a critical phase of the pandemic. That’s why it’s so important that all of us remain diligent in our efforts to defeat the virus —and to protect ourselves, our families and our communities.
“Stopping this pandemic is going to take all our tools: handwashing, masks, social distancing and, hopefully quite soon, vaccines. Taken together, these tools offer the best chance of getting our communities, schools and health systems back to normal sooner.”
President-elect Biden could implement a national mask mandate and take other steps to clarity and standardize the nation’s response. But there is little he can do to hasten the development of a vaccine. Nor can he keep people from attending house parties or crowding into bars.
Hotez says that therapeutics are coming, as is a vaccine. For now, however, the nation will have to steel itself with patience. “We just have to get through this winter,” he says.
