The news that the president and the first girl have been diagnosed with COVID-19 serves as a clear reminder that this pandemic will not happen soon.
We live in a world with conflicting narratives about the clinical understanding of coronavirus and the way forward to save it from suffering and save lives. People don’t know what to believe. This confusion becomes even more damaging as we enter flu season, and optimism about a vaccine can cause america to let its guard down.
I was acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at dawn at the dawn of the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and we understood at the time that a full-rule pandemic as we live it today would be a marathon, not a sprint. an opportunity for our country to explain its project and focus on an apolitical pandemic. Here are five reasons why the final line of the coronavirus pandemic is not in sight and why Americans and our government remain vigilant:
1. A reference vaccine is not a certainty. Vaccines vary in terms of coverage and transmission relief. While the smallpox vaccine and measles vaccine protect the flu vaccine by more than 95%, the flu vaccine, the most productive way to reduce the threat of influenza, reduces the threat by less than 50% in some years. At this stage, we cannot be sure that there will be a vaccine, and even if there is one, how effective it will be.
Cold weather and low humidity are friends with the virus. The hope that the summer heat will cause the coronavirus to never materialize. The United States experienced the opposite, in fact, when Americans began to relax, socialize, and resume the pre-pandemic. These behaviors have led to spikes throughout the solar belt and other parts of the country. While we now see that the degrees of infection decrease in many of those old summer hot spots, we should not forget that the bloody weather will take us inland, where proximity makes spread more likely and climate replacement helps keep viruses in the air for longer periods.
3. La maximum number of Americans remain vulnerable to infection. While this year might seem like a life to many of us, the pandemic is still at the beginning of its life cycle. The deaths of more than 200,000 people in this country is a CDC Director Robert Redfield said last week that 90% of america’s population is a member of the country’s population. The U. S. remains vulnerable to the virus, but it is not an indication that the threat across the country has been infected. has not been particularly reduced.
4. America’s economic wounds will not heal anytime soon. A public fitness emergency turns double for the general population, with medical attention first and economic consequences near. This pandemic illustrated it in a devastating way. And even today, unemployment figures show that the country has only regained a portion of the 22 million jobs lost since the spring. How disproportionately it has an effect on other people of color and low-income Americans, whether in terms of physical fitness and financial suffering, will have to generate political attention in the short or long term. The Cares Act signed at the end of March, which provided for everything from food aid to moratoriums on home evictions and unemployment assistance, works thanks to smoke taxes and many of the aid have already expired or will expire until the end of year. . In addition, the country still wants help and investment for testing, non-public protective devices and basic physical care facilities that are imposed during a pandemic. The structural vulnerabilities that affected too many communities before the pandemic require our attention during and after it. All users in this country deserve to be able to adhere to CDC’s fundamental rules in case of infection.
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5. A vaccine for young people is in at least one year. As a parent and pediatrician, I sense the importance of bringing young people back to school. It’s important in many ways. And while we’ve noticed that young people do much more with COVID-19 than adults, the threat of hospitalization and unknown road headaches is real. Children have also been shown to contribute to the spread of the virus, but a child – The friendly vaccine may not be available until the fall of 2021 at the latest. With more than 70 million young people in the United States who may not be vaccinated next year, we will have to resist the temptation to let our guard down, whether in our schools, homes, or communities. We want to make sure that all schools have the resources they want to minimize the threat to students, teachers, and staff. Since schools are largely funded through asset taxes, we want to allocate federal budget funds so that all young people have the opportunity to be informed in an environment.
Can we achieve a non-unusual position of humanity in the way we understand each other and in the way we understand the desires and considerations of all people?Can we use this defining moment of the pandemic to restore our thinking and priorities so that the most vulnerable communities (black, Latin American, Native American, and low-income staff) have the help they want for this pandemic and thrive because of it?
We will have to be grateful to live in a country where our leaders in the highest degrees of government can get the most productive care in times of crisis and we want to do everything we can as a country to make sure that every user in this country has what they want, whether they live on Pennsylvania Avenue or Main Street in the United States.
Dr. Richard E. Besser is president and ceo of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey; follow him on Twitter: @DrRichBesser
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