{"id":9817,"date":"2022-03-23T04:02:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T04:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=9817"},"modified":"2022-03-23T04:02:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T04:02:57","slug":"we-have-to-accept-some-risk-of-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=9817","title":{"rendered":"We have to accept some risk of Covid-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We\u2019ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus \u2014 make it less deadly \u2014 not eliminate it entirely.<\/p>\n

This is not a surrender to the virus. For a long time, we\u2019ve lived with the seasonal flu, a family of viruses that kills up to tens of thousands of Americans each year. While we can and should take steps to mitigate the risks of the flu (including getting vaccinated for it every year), we\u2019ve never been willing to shut down society or close in-person schooling to fully eradicate it. Americans have accepted some level of risk to continue living normally.<\/p>\n

The same will likely be true with Covid-19. The highly transmissible delta variant appears to have cemented this possibility, showing the coronavirus will continue to spread even in states and countries with higher vaccination rates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

If you go back to the earlier days of the pandemic, the original hope with vaccines was more modest. Previously, the Food and Drug Administration set the standard for an acceptable Covid-19 vaccine at 50 percent efficacy. The expectation was that the vaccine wouldn\u2019t stop all cases of Covid-19, but would at least reduce the severity of the disease. As Baylor College\u2019s Peter Hotez put it at the time, \u201cEven if it\u2019s not the best vaccine, it still could prevent me from going to the hospital or worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click Here: <\/a><\/p>\n

Yet somewhere along the way \u2014 perhaps with the news the vaccines were far more effective than expected \u2014 that message has been lost. And now anything short of perfection is perceived as a failure.<\/p>\n

Consider the recent study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The initial headlines about the study focused on the fact that three-fourths of cases tracked in the study were among vaccinated people, showing the virus spread in a very vaccinated community. The implication, propped up by the CDC\u2019s new guidance that vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in public, was that the delta variant can spread at a high level among even the people who got their shots. <\/p>\n

But if you dig into the details of the outbreak, they revealed some very good news for vaccinated people. Among the more than 1,000 cases so far linked to Provincetown, there have only been seven reported hospitalizations (some unvaccinated) and no deaths. <\/p>\n

If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced roughly 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.<\/p>\n

The Provincetown outbreak, then, showed that the vaccines had worked to defang the coronavirus \u2014 to make it more like the flu.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should cheer,\u201d Amesh Adalja at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me. \u201cThe Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines\u2019 failure but of their smashing success.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short: Pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths, not just cases.<\/p>\n

There are concerns about \u201clong Covid\u201d \u2014 lingering effects in those infected, like overwhelming fatigue. Still, experts say serious long-term symptoms after a Covid-19 infection seem to be fairly rare (though this issue is still being studied). And, at any rate, these kinds of long-term symptoms aren\u2019t unique to the coronavirus; they happen, for one, with seasonal flu.<\/p>\n

While we still have to get more people vaccinated, at a certain point we\u2019ll have to acknowledge we\u2019ve done what we can. It might not be ideal, but we can learn to live with a vaccine-weakened version of Covid-19 \u2014 hopefully not too unlike how we\u2019ve long dealt with the flu.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We\u2019ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus \u2014 make it less deadly \u2014 not eliminate it entirely. This is not a surrender…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}