Public health experts encouraged Americans to continue to distance themselves socially and wear masks at a potentially critical tipping point in the pandemic – one in which highly effective vaccines could provide relief, but the fervor to reopen public life could unintentionally spread new variants. of Covid-19.
The notices come in the same week that Texas and Mississippi opened the door to normal social life in their states.
Coronavirus cases have declined in much of the United States since mid-January, a point when the peak of the third wave saw more than 4,000 Covid-19 deaths per day. However, the cases remain “extremely high” according to data observers, and may stagnate at a point equivalent to the peak of summer 2020.
“Everyone is focused on the big drops in the number of cases, pretending that the plateau is not really substantive and oblivious to the impact of B117,” a highly transmissible variant first identified in the UK, said Dr. Peter Hotez, vaccine researcher and dean for the national school of tropical medicine at the College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
The potential threshold, new highly transmissible variants and the decision to reopen when the vaccines reached relatively few people “have all the ingredients of a fourth wave and give me a lot of pause for concern,” said Hotez.
On Wednesday, after a terrible winter ice storm, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, lifted all restrictions on the pandemic and opened the state “100%”. The Republican governor of Mississippi soon followed suit and removed the masks’ mandates in all activities except schools and large arenas.
Only 16.3% of the US population has been vaccinated against Covid-19, or about 54 million people, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In Texas, vaccines reached only 13.6% of the population.
The movements sparked immediate protests. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner called the lifting of the pandemic restrictions “a failure of state leadership across the system”, while Joe Biden called the decision “neanderthal thinking”.
However, the intense pressure to reopen companies has also prompted many Democratic-led cities and states to tiptoe towards reopening. Massachusetts has lifted capacity limits in restaurants, although social distance remains in place, and has allowed live music to resume.
New York City is expected to reopen cinemas this Friday with restrictions. As New York is a leading Hollywood market, the move is likely to put pressure on Los Angeles to do the same. And San Francisco reopened aquariums, health clubs, indoor restaurants and museums this week.
The changes came even when the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned that the very rapid reopening could threaten “the ground conquered with so much effort”.
Hotez said people should know: “The message is: vaccines have arrived, hang on.” That message was echoed by the CDC, which in the draft guidelines this week said that fully vaccinated Americans could gather in small groups without masks, while continuing to wear masks and social distance in public.
At the same time, a series of reports from the CDC this week highlighted the continuing dangers of Covid-19. A CDC report tracked the travel of one of the first patients diagnosed with B117 variants in the United States – and the variant’s ability to spread, even with restrictions in place.
The patient in question traveled to the United Kingdom on vacation, met a sick relative at a family reunion on Christmas Eve and developed mild Covid-like symptoms just before boarding a transatlantic flight back to Dallas, Texas. A few days before the flight, the patient’s test was negative for Covid-19, but he used a low specificity antigen test.
As soon as the patient arrived in Dallas, they drove eight hours through the state; stopped five times to buy food, gas and groceries; they came home with worse symptoms and eventually tested positive for Covid-19 variant B117.
In another report issued by the CDC this week, the agency found that the Covid-19 rate among children in Mississippi was probably 10 times worse than the number of reported cases and had infected perhaps one in six children last September.
A third report highlighted the association between restaurant dining, mask orders and Covid-19 broadcasting. The agency found that the masks’ mandates reduced transmission and mortality rates, while any restaurant on site tended to increase transmission and mortality rates.
To completely prevent the spread of Covid-19, a different concept called “herd immunity”, scientists believe that the United States would need to vaccinate the vast majority of adults. Even if vaccine manufacturers are able to produce enough doses to reach all American adults by the end of May, as Biden promised, the vaccine’s hesitation, poor distribution and logistical barriers can still cripple the immunization campaign.