COVID: The long view

We're going to have to get used to living in limbo

We have long since divided ourselves into a blue America and a red America.  Now we appear to be separating into what we might call a well America and a sick America.  The divisions over COVID aren’t going away any more than our political divisions, which means we’re going to have to get used to living in a world that is somewhere in between.

What has become clear over the month of July is that there is no absolute, steady truth about this disease.  Since vaccinations began being administered on a wide basis in the spring, we have thought that vaccines were the answer.  If enough of us could get vaccinated, we would achieve the almighty goal of “herd immunity” to the virus.  That was the light we were told was at the end of this tunnel we’ve been in for the past 18 months.

Well, the outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts changed everything.  People who were largely vaccinated gathered in the small town on Cape Cod for the July 4th weekend, and more than 1,000 of them came down with the disease in the weeks following.  This showed us two things:  being vaccinated doesn’t completely protect you from either getting or transmitting the disease, but getting vaccinated will protect you from coming down with a case bad enough to put you in the hospital and die.  Of the thousand people who contracted COVID in Provincetown, only seven required hospitalization, and none died.

This means the vaccines worked.  But it also means the hope of achieving herd immunity if enough people get vaccinated is over.  There is no light at the end of the tunnel.  We’re in it, and we’re staying there.

The tunnel isn’t equally dark everywhere.  States with high rates of vaccination have low rates of COVID infection, and fewer people are needing to be hospitalized.  But in states like Florida, where less than half of eligible citizens are fully vaccinated, the disease is raging.  On Friday, Florida reported a record-breaking 23,903 new infections, the third day in a week the state broke its own COVID infection record.  Yesterday, Florida reported 13,747 hospitalizations for the disease, with 2,753 of those patients in intensive care.  In Arkansas, COVID infections are up more than 40 percent among adults over the last two weeks, and shockingly, the infection rate in children under 12 is up 690 percent since April.  (Children under 12 are not yet eligible for the COVID vaccines.)

Even in states like New York, where 62 percent of the eligible population has been vaccinated, there are infection hot spots.  One of them is the county on Long Island where I live. 

Trying to keep up with the COVID numbers is impossible.  I know because I’ve tried.  You can’t just look at a map to see where your state stands, or how your county is doing.  There are multiple maps:  rates of vaccination; rates of infection; deaths by population; community transmission; hospitalizations; even population vulnerability.  When you look at the maps you’ll see some states left blank because they just don’t report their numbers.  Texas, for example, doesn’t like sharing some of its COVID statistics; neither does Georgia. 

Not that it would help to keep track of COVID statistics by state, or even by county, because location doesn’t tell you that much, not even when you break things down into red and blue.  The latest vaccine numbers show 17 states that voted for Biden have delivered at least one dose of vaccine to more than 60 percent of their populations, while 16 Trump states haven’t vaccinated even 50 percent of their populations.  But within all of those states, red and blue alike, there are places where the vaccination numbers are excellent, and places where they’re abysmal.  You can live in places in Alabama and be safer than you are in certain counties in New York. 

Which means that no matter where we live, we are in limbo.  We cannot isolate ourselves from a disease that doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or if you live in a red state or a blue city.  If you travel by air, or even if you drive across state lines and just stop for gas and food, you travel with everybody – the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike – and there is no way to tell who is who.  Some vaccinated people might skip wearing their masks, while people who are unvaccinated wear them. I can’t tell them apart.  Can you?

It matters when governors and legislatures like those in Florida and Texas and elsewhere pass laws against mask mandates for school children, and it certainly matters when they indulge in vaccine skepticism and actively downplay the threat of COVID.  But what we should be learning is that it matters more what we do as individuals.  Counties don’t get vaccinated.  We do.  States don’t put on masks.  We do. 

Learning that even vaccinated we can become infected with COVID and pass it to others tells us all we need to know about this disease.  It’s everywhere, and none of us are completely safe.  Some epidemiologists are beginning to hint at a comparison between living with COVID and living with the common flu.  Coming down with a bad case of the flu can land you in the hospital, especially the elderly and the very young, and the flu kills somewhere between 20 and 60 thousand people every year.  There is a scenario in which we will get a new COVID vaccination every year, right along with our flu shots.  But so far, COVID has shown itself to be far, far more deadly than the common flu, and it remains to be seen if we can bring down COVID deaths to where they become individual tragedies instead of a pandemic of dying.

We are certainly better off than we were this time a year ago, but we haven’t returned to the way we were two years ago.  There is no telling when, or even if, that will come to pass.  For right now, the best thing we can do is live our lives the way all of us were taught to drive:  defensively.  Just as drunken fools behind the wheel are not responsible for every automobile death, fools without masks aren’t the cause of all deaths from the virus.  All it takes is a current of air and an invisible molecule and a twist of fate not even medical science has power over.  In the end it isn’t ourselves or each other who make us sick and dead.  It’s the virus.

We are living in limbo with this disease, all of us, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless.  We’ve got the vaccines, we can get booster shots when they come along, we can wear our masks, we can take care in public places – especially indoors -- and we can vote.  We can’t vote out the disease, but we voted out the last fool who lied us into a pandemic and refused to wear a mask, and we can use our votes to get rid of other fools like him.   There is hope for us yet.