A view of 10-foot-diameter social estating circles at Mission Dolores Park in San Francisco on August 6, 2020.
PUBLISHED August 27, 2020
What America needs is a way out. COVID-19 has killed another 175,000 people in the United States, more than the number of Americans who have died in each and every armies clash since the Combined Korean War Thirty Million are out of work and many are under threat of wasting their homes. Millions of students cannot go to school when many are threatened and quarantined.
After six months of the worst public fitness crisis in a century, fitness experts across the country say America is perfectly capable of arranging a comeback if it accepts the truth and exploits it for its ingenuity.
First, we will have to fight and achieve the obvious: keep moving away from society and fight for the universal use of masks. Close high-risk spaces such as churches, bars and casinos. Spend time outdoors. Limit crowds. Wash your hands Build touch search. If it does, the United States could go from 40,000 new infections a day to “the number of new cases in which it can count on hands and feet,” says Andy Slavitt, former interim administrator of President Barack Obama’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. . National Geographic.
“There’s no big secret, it’s not very mysterious,” Slavitt says. “You can break the back of this thing if you do that. “”With a concerted effort, we can do it in six weeks,” he adds.
But given the national problems to date, many experts are also pushing to follow a new path based on innovation, particularly less expensive and faster tests that millions of people can take at home every day. they are just starting this procedure because there is immediate evidence but they are not approved by the government or require medical supervision. There is also a massive deployment infrastructure if the government or company decides to use it.
To demonstrate ease of production and bureaucratic restrictions, Abbott Laboratories recently announced plans to produce 50 million immediate checks according to the month through October. The company says the check costs $5 and takes 15 minutes, but still requires a nasal pattern and can only be administered through a fitness professional, such as a pharmacist or school nurse. The user should also have symptoms and a prescription. You can’t pass the new control on your own.
For now, Americans will have to settle for harsh truths. We will have to continue to replace our behavior, all of us, to prevent coVID-19 deaths. The virus will continue to alter life in general until a vaccine is developed and distributed in giant quantities, or unless we adopt an entirely new technique to test. This may not take place in months, or a year, perhaps longer. The magnitude and duration of the interruption of our routines depends to a large extent on how many bases we are following lately (if COVID-19 vaccines are mandatory, this is how it might work).
“As long as there is a member of society, a demographic group, who is not seriously looking to get to the end of the removal of this, will continue to burn and burn and burn,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute. Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Harvard Chan School of Public Health said in a webcast on August 5.
This, of course, has been the case.
After a spring of cuts in business, the United States has wasted its summer, reopened the economy, and resurfaced the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, that is, in the south and west, which had been largely saved from the start. Last week, Mississippi discovered cases of viruses in schools in 71 of the 82 counties, and several universities revoked the resolve to teach in person, some after on-campus outbreaks.
“None of this is surprising,” says Jeremy Konyndyk, a fitness policy researcher at the Center for Global Development. “All this predicted. That’s the exasperating thing. It’s not like, my God, we did well, and it didn’t work. . »
No shortage of complaints has highlighted our initial failures. Supply chains failed to secure mandatory medical equipment, adding much-needed non-public protective gear that fitness staff needed. The states have come out of lockdown too aggressively. The tests took a week or more to produce results, making them too slow to give a clue as to who else an epidemic might have occurred. Political leaders have distributed conflicting and confusing advice.
And they still are. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was supposedly under pressure from the White House, issued new guidelines: people who care about coronavirus exposure but remain asymptomatic should not be tested.
“We do more tests, not less,” says Janet Baseman, associate dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Your colleague, Vice-Dean Jared Baeten, agrees. This replacement makes no sense . . . Follow-up and reaction probably require testing other exposed people, so if they have an infection, they can spread it. We want more tests, not less: endpoint ».
Indeed, as the country’s politicians fight and are divided, the leaders of the fitness sector remain remarkably consistent with what they want to do. In a dozen interviews with non-governmental experts; Recent presentations by Fauci; in a new report from Johns Hopkins University; in social media posts of former government officials, from Obama’s CDC director to former U. S. Food and Drug Administration chief Donald Trump, the message varies little, if any.
The first steps are the most crucial, but the most difficult: wear a mask and stay away.
“We are pointing to a scenario in which, with adequate est estating and social masking, we will be able to restart critical parts of the economy without seeing any increase,” says Hilary Godwin, dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health. “What we have learned is that certain types of activities would possibly not be imaginable during this prolonged era, not only before we receive a vaccine, but until we have [generalized] immunity.
Large meetings, especially inside, are among the activities you will have to wait for. When there’s alcohol, screaming or making a song, “these are recipes for mass circulation events,” Godwin says. (This is what “coronavirus in the air” means and how to yourself. )
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety recently launched a 10-point plan to restart the US viral response. But it’s not the first time His first stated detail masks an essential civic responsibility, which deserves to be demanded if necessary. reduce the threat of transmission. But “not everyone is convinced of the usefulness and importance of [the mask],” says Caitlin Rivers, assistant professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and leader of the report.
Reason is not a mystery. ” The average user doesn’t go on, eat, sleep or breathe,” says Konyndyk. Instead of following all the trivialities of the latest science, it “resorts to the signals of others it trusts. “is a total segment of the right-wing ecosystem that echoes the skepticism about masks.
While three-quarters of Americans say they wear masks, physical care experts have struggled to succeed over their opponents. “I lived on September 11th and invaded Iraq, tying the yellow ribbon around the tree and collecting for our country. “says Colleen Kraft, deputy medical director of Emory Hospital in Atlanta. “I’ve never been prepared for the public to resist fitness interventions. “
Much of the skepticism begins at the top, with a voice whose strength is difficult to exaggerate. After President Trump spent months ridiculing the covers and continually refusing to wear a mask, many Conservative officials did the same. some Trump supporters moved in the face of tragedy. ” I have no motivation to spread concern about this virus,” Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves tweeted in July as he begged the electorate to hide. “It makes us lose money, makes my homework more complicated and puts me in a terrible situation. It’s never popular to ask others to sacrifice the board. There is only one explanation why I owe percentage of these graphic warnings: look at a great death. “
Health experts knew that converting Trump’s position could lead to radical change. In July, even after many companies began waiting for consumers to wear masks, Southern supermarket chain Winn Dixie announced that he would not, but a few hours after Trump tweeted a picture of himself. wearing a black mask and called “patriotic,” Winn Dixie changed course, pronouncing his own demand (a spokesman told The Washington Post that the company only listens to consumers, not Trump).
Trump’s persistent refusal to wear a mask has since pointed out to many that he reluctantly did so. On August 12, shortly after a call with Trump, a sheriff in central Florida County barred his agents from dressing in masks and ordered the public to remove them from the department’s workplace buildings.
Progress is slowly progressing. While 34 states now have hidden mandates, two of the 3 states with the new one consistent with summer captain instances – Florida and Georgia – do not yet have it.
Masks and social estating are because they act as critical discharge valves, relieving hospitals and control centers.
At the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals faced problems from sources, facing shortages of everything from beds and enthusiasts to paper coats and carriers. Since then, some have redesigned their practices, using, for example, cleanable dresses and reusable masks. Non-public protective devices remain high, hospitals are now more prepared to cope with waves of force.
Test sites, however, are another matter. Standard COVID-19 tests can require up to 30 components, from tubes and plugs to reagents and laboratory instruments. Nasal swabs, for example, came here largely from a single supplier in Italy at a time when the country was plagued by epidemics. The White House has encouraged laboratories to launch faster alternatives, but the lack of a national strategy still leaves states competing for supplies.
The closures accumulated time, but with reopening, the instances exploded again, putting a new tension in the verification facilities. “When there’s this kind of increase, [states and labs] want more products,” says source chain expert Nicolette Louissaint, executive director of Healthcare Ready.
When labs slow down, the effects are delayed and delayed like a snowball even in states with low case counts. Suddenly, “it’s to get out of work late,” says Eric Blank, program director at the Public Health Laboratories Association.
While mask guarantees and estating can decrease cases, this decreases the need to verify materials and speeds up results. This in turn lets us know what other inflamed people have exposed. “There’s not enough contact search in anyone’s craziest dreams given what they’re facing now,” Blank says.
And an agile control reaction can be to mitigate epidemics. Ask Erik Johnson and Geoffrey Gottlieb.
A weekend last June, Johnson, the 21-year-old president of the University of Washington Interfraternity Council, received a call while driving, many fraternity citizens felt sick. At the same time, Gottlieb, an infectious disease doctor who oversees outbreaks on campus, learned from staff at a verification facility that cars filled with students had come for COVID-19 checks.
In bedrooms or homes of organizations with unusual bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, COVID-19 can be devastating, but the region had fitness organizations in place, given that Washington state was the region where the U. S. pandemic began. check site gave the impression of being near the Greek Row campus, and more than a thousand academics were reviewed in 4 days. The effects returned in just 12 hours. Students carrying the virus were remote in fraternity houses. Testing and tracking continued for weeks. By August, 154 academics, many of whom had rented areas in fraternity houses during the summer, had tested positive, but the number of new cases had begun to decline. .
“I wouldn’t say it’s over, but we reversed it significantly,” Gottlieb says.
The incident shocked many students. When asked what he would say to the country’s youth, Johnson hesitated, “Don’t be a vector of transmission. “
No matter how difficult the fitness recommendation is, other people may decide to forget about it. Last week, across Johnson State, fraternity parties at rival Washington State University contributed to a further increase in cases among young adults. Masking and social estating will require a national resolution, but Harvard University epidemiologist Michael Mina believes that even the most skeptical among us would be more willing to accept an undeniable home checkup as a way to detect the virus, especially if he can also simply tell them if they were positive in just 15 minutes.
“Wearing a mask for other people is expensive,” he says, “but when you sit at home in your underwear and brush your teeth, other people give up your problems. “
Many corporations are already conducting such checks, however, FDA regulations prevent you from entering your medicine cabinet. According to FDA emergency authorization guidelines, popular diagnostic controls, involving a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, aim to be 95% accurate when identifying SARS-CoV-2 and will need to be performed in a laboratory. Home verification, so far, cannot be approved through those channels and also sacrifices some precision to be more practical. But for Mina and others, a home verification can be simply a thousand times less delicate than traditional PCR and remains a great credit for COVID-19.
These rapid COVID-19 tests may be intended to house pregnancy tests, as an early warning.
Such controls can help return to general life, even in coronavirus hot spots. Imagine being able to seamlessly check if you have COVID-19 every morning or every day. If this is done regularly, many other people would test positive before they even get infected, which would help disrupt network transmission. This can be useful when up to 40% of coronavirus carriers never show symptoms and, unlike PCR controls, those house strips can simply be manufactured and distributed at low cost. , worth between $1 and $5 each.
Mina says the FDA is close to approving those tests, but adds: “I think we are gaining ground. “
For such a concept to work, the government or a personal enterprise would probably have to help pay the bill, because mass production would charge billions of dollars, but it might not be profitable in terms of profit. Some fitness experts propose to use the Defense Production Act. , which obliges – and compensates – corporations to manufacture parts in the event of a crisis (the law was already initiated in 2020, for the emergency production of the mask and N95 fans). After FDA approval, Mina says production can begin without delay and that it would only take about six weeks to succeed at sufficient levels.
Many fitness experts applaud the concept. Jared Baeten, vice-dean of public fitness at the University of Washington, is a fan of masking and avoiding crowds, but “if we could put quick and easy, common tests in place, it would completely replace the game. “
With or without such innovation, Baeten says, we can do better, we just want to wish. The fact that infections have increased, decreased, reappeared and then decreased is an indication that other people are in a position to replace their behavior, he says. For now, we want to “continue to rub shoulders with each other. “