How Does the Pandemic Feel a Year Later?

In March of 2020, the covid-19 epidemic was getting started. The country was locked down and the president had declared a national emergency. We were all wondering what we were in for. I tried to predict the future in a post: How Will the Pandemic Feel? I made mistakes but I also got some stuff right.

Today, we are at a tipping point. Cases are rising again here and in some other parts of the country, but we have three effective vaccines against covid-19. I, my wife Rebecca, all her siblings, and many, if not all, of my Waschke cousins are vaccinated. In February 2021, if you were a healthcare worker or first responder or old enough or sick enough to be eligible, you had to scramble in Whatcom County to find a vaccination appointment. I drove a hundred miles to the University of Washington to get mine. Today, all but subteens are eligible, and they will be soon. Our household received three invitations to sign up for vaccination appointments before noon today. Much has changed.

Vaccines

The rapid development and deployment of vaccines for covid-19 is a scientific miracle. In the March 2020 post, I mentioned that viruses, the cause of the 1918 flu pandemic, would not be discovered until years after the 1918 pandemic was almost forgotten. Vaccines were poorly understood then, not nearly as well as now. Just a year ago, vaccines, when they could be discovered, typically took 3 years to develop, test, and deploy. A 60% effective vaccine was considered good.

Risking enormous investments and making dicey bets on success like setting up manufacturing lines before there was a vaccine to manufacture, covid-19 vaccines became available in a third of the elapsed period that was considered usual a year ago. Two of the three vaccines available in the U. S. are over 90% effective— over 90% of vaccinated people who are exposed will not be infected with covid-19. The flu vaccines that save lives every year are typically only 40% to 60% effective. More important, but less definitively documented, all three vaccines almost totally prevent hospitalization and death from covid-19. Folks still occasionally get sick, but they don’t go to the hospital and they don’t die. A year ago, I felt such an optimistic outcome was unreasonable. I am so glad I was wrong.

Resurgence

Everyone I meet now is feeling hopeful and safer, but life is not all well. The New York Times rates Whatcom County at a “very high risk” level today. A person in Whatcom County is more likely to test positive for covid-19 today than they were when I wrote my prediction post. On the other hand, the probability that I or someone close to me will be hospitalized or die has plummeted because we are all fully vaccinated, but less than a third of the county’s residents are fully vaccinated.

Variants

The danger today, which I did not anticipate at all, is in the variants. The covid-19 variants hitting us today are more dangerous than the disease that appeared in China in late 2019. They spread and kill more easily. We have more evidence of long term damage; covid-19 seems to be like polio, which left some victims crippled long after the disease was over. Today’s vaccines are still effective against the current more destructive variants, but eventually, as new variants appear, boosters or new vaccines will almost certainly be needed.

As long as covid-19 rages on, variants are a serious threat. Make no mistake, although the overall numbers for the U. S. are improving, and the vaccines are giving us more freedom, more people are getting sick with covid-19 now in Whatcom County than were all last summer. Infections are down from the winter peak, but getting sick is more likely now than last summer. And covid-19 is a worsening catastrophe in places like India and Brazil, which makes the emergence of dangerous variants from those areas likely. One clear lesson from 2020 is that closing borders in our mobile and connected age can slow the spread of variants, but eventually they will cross over to us.

Variants tend to appear where the disease is rampant. Variants are random occurrences. The more cases of covid-19, the more chances that a dangerous variant will appear. Where the disease is spreading rapidly, a dangerous variant also spreads more rapidly. As long as there are covid-19 hotspots, variants will show up also; some of these will increase the danger and need for boosters and new vaccines.

Predictions

Currently, the death rate for Whatcom County is about 45 per 100,000 population. That is considerably lower than the 600 per 100,000 in the U.S. during the 1918 flu pandemic. I attribute this to several reasons. In 1918 the U.S. was sending troops across the Atlantic to fight World War I. Army barracks and crowded troop ships were ideal conditions for spreading the virus. Our healthcare system has become much better at keeping sick people alive in general and a few specific treatments for covid-19 have been discovered. And, of course, there are the vaccines.

Last March, I predicted that by this time we would all have known one or two, but not many, people who died from covid-19. For me, it hasn’t been as bad as that. I know of two former co-workers from the east coast who died from covid-19, but they are people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade and who were, at most, just people I knew, not friends. If you allow degrees of separation, friends of friends, the number gets larger. My sister-in-law was in the infamous Skagit super-spreader choir. She lost two friends. There are others like that.

Social distancing, masks, and vaccines have all proven effective in fighting covid. We don’t have to be as careful about masks and social distancing now that vaccines are taking effect, but if more don’t get vaccinated, we run the risk of a variant that the vaccines won’t prevent. If that happens the only effective way to stop the deaths will be to return to lockdowns and continuous masking and social distancing. The countries of the world that combated covid-19 most effectively, like Taiwan and New Zealand, relied on masks and social distancing, not vaccines.

If you don’t want masks, social distancing, and lockdowns, urge everyone around you to get vaccinated. Now.