The Next Pandemic Test – The Atlantic

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Suddenly the pandemic looks different. Like my colleague Katherine J. Wu writing relatively low rates of COVID-19 yesterday winter and spring marked “the longest period of near-normality humanity has seen since the start of 2020.” But it is premature to call this the start of a After. I called Katie to discuss it.

First, here are three new stories from Atlantic:

No obvious pattern

Kelli Maria Korducki: You write that while it’s true that things are better now than they were a few years ago, that’s not an entirely fair comparison to make. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Katherine J. Wu: Think about what we are comparing to. Two and a half years ago, we didn’t even have vaccines. And two years ago, we were at the point where vaccines were barely reaching broader sectors of the population. We didn’t have Paxlovid. It was still very difficult to get rapid tests. We were just beginning to put together our entire COVID toolkit. So, of course, things are better now than they were back when we had virtually no tools. But now that all those boxes are checked, shouldn’t we aim higher?

Kelly: Where are we below? And what would it take to improve those results?

Katie: No one can reasonably expect us to get to the point where things look exactly like they did in 2019. That’s just not the world we live in. But we have, for example, shown how well things can go when a majority of the population is freshly vaccinated. And people were still taking behavioral precautions. We still haven’t returned in the summer of 2021 down, when you adapt to infection mitigation and treatment tools that we didn’t have then that we have now. I think if people were more willing to keep up to date with their vaccines and mask up when needed, we’d be in a better place.

Kelly: Looking ahead, what are the best scenarios that the researchers anticipate for the coming months?

Katie: At best, within the realism of how Americans are likely to act, it’s basically that the virus cuts us a break: we don’t get massive Omicron-like events where the virus mutates or evolves in such a great evolution. jumps that it bypasses our vaccines and totally reinfects everyone, and the healthcare system is overwhelmed. The realistic ideal situation is that our current lull in cases and deaths persists, and the current situation is such that it will continue from now on, with perhaps a seasonal surge of infection in the winter. And maybe even this summer will be super, super quiet.

There is an even more ambitious scenario in which we do better to ensure that people who do not have health insurance have access to treatments and vaccines in a more equitable and systematic way. But I think that’s rather unlikely, to be honest with you.

Kelly: And the worst possibilities?

Katie: Basically, let there be any variant that takes over. It wouldn’t even have to be as bad as Omicron has been compared to Delta. And the big concern is that people aren’t keeping up to date with their vaccines – the uptake rate with bivalent boosters is still very low and worrying. Most of the experts I talk to are very worried that taking the COVID vaccine every year will be much worse than taking the flu vaccine, which is already bad enough. And knowing that the population is letting its guard down is a potential recipe for disaster even in the absence of new variants, where more serious disease could arise.

Kelly: You also note that researchers see this summer as a sort of predictor of where things might go. How?

Katie: I think people forget about summer, especially because a lot of the reporting in the United States is very East Coast-centric. But in the southern United States, summer is really THE indoor season for many people – indoors is where the air conditioning is – and people are perfectly happy to congregate outdoors well into December, January and February. We’ve seen some of our biggest waves of COVID happen in the summer, and it’s certainly no coincidence.

I predict summer will play a major role in determining what the typical annual COVID calendar really looks like. Are we going to have big winter and summer peaks every year? Will this virus eventually adopt a more cohesive flu-like pattern, where it is largely restricted to winter? We don’t have an idea yet. We don’t have enough data.

Last summer was a very heavy summer with the BA.5 variant. This summer could be another echo of that, or it could be completely different. This is the kind of situation where a lot of experts are trying to figure out what’s going on. There is no obvious pattern yet.

Related:

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Evening reading

Nobody in the movies knows how to swallow a pill

By Daniel Enger

Read the article completely.

More than Atlantic

cultural break

Read. “Ozymandiasa poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley and part of a year of high school education by our editor, Jeffrey Goldberg. then read Atlantic writers about educators which changed their lives.

Show. Lucky Hank (streaming on the Roku Channel), a series that features Bob Odenkirk as Professor going through a midlife crisis.

Play our daily crosswords.

PS

For something completely different, Katie recommends a new Atlantic history on a possibly under-reported characteristic of a certain buzzy drug. She says, “Ozempic has been in the news a lot lately. But my colleague Rachel Gutman-Wei puts a delicious, slightly crude new spin on the subject with her article on the drug’s bizarre side effect: sulphurous, rotten-egg-like burps. And There you go.

-Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.