COVID Mitigation Worked

 

Without a Plan

The impact of vaccines and behavior on US cumulative deaths from COVID-19

 America’s improvised strategy to fight COVID-19—public and private behavioral changes to slow transmission until vaccines could be deployed—prevented close to 800,000 deaths in the country. The ad hoc effort’s effectiveness is surprising because public health officials could not precisely target mitigation as they lacked precise information on the routes and mechanisms of the disease’s transmission.  -Brookings

What Worked?

Hand Washing

Masking

Social Distancing

Isolating

Testing

Lockdowns

Ad hoc measures to keep us safe were the best things we could do with no plan in place until the vaccine was developed. Research suggests without the ad hoc measures, COVID would have cost over two million lives instead of one million. It is estimated that vaccine hesitancy cost an additional 273 thousand lives.

There were two forces at work. The first group, people who had a a good idea of what needed to be done, forged ahead with solutions. 

The second group, people who were blown away by the enormity of the task, spent an inordinate amount of energy looking for somebody to blame. They looked for conspiracies from the CDC and HIH. They blamed the World Health Organization. They blamed China for deliberately releasing the virus as a form of warfare. Another conspiracy theory claimed it was a plot by the establishment to deny the president in his bid for reelection. None of this was supported by the facts. All of it got in the way, and put all of us at risk.

Thank God the first group persevered.