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. 

Playing politics with our health

 Trump's political appointees are playing games with our safety and well-being. Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services are scuttling reports from the CDC they believe might be unflattering to the president. Why? Because the reports might hurt his chances at reelection.

This is from the the NY Times.

The Times reconstructed the White House’s push for a plasma therapy, and found a pattern that helps explain the intensifying concern that President Trump could demand pre-Election Day approval of a vaccine.

For instance, in August, President Trump called the director of the National Institutes of Health, demanding fast action to approve expanded use of convalescent plasma to treat the coronavirus. Even though it didn’t come, Mr. Trump announced the expansion of the treatment anyway, with the F.D.A.’s approval, on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

Tensions over the White House’s urgency to show progress against the pandemic, which has killed more than 193,500 people in the U.S., are also playing out at the Department of Health and Human Services, where political appointees have repeatedly meddled in weekly outbreak reports prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Where's our integrity? Where's our ethics? Where's our compassion for our fellow human beings? Where's our common decency? Where's our love for all people? This last question is supposed to be a bedrock value of Christianity. What does this say about his so-called Christian supporters? We're way too deep into partisan politics. It's needs to end, now!