We must not end the restrictions until we reach 10,000 cases a day – or considerably less

We must not end the restrictions until we reach 10,000 cases a day – or considerably less

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It must be emphasized that he is talking (I think) about the benchmark for completely ending pandemic restrictions. He is willing to scale back restrictions on higher levels of community dissemination, as long as we don’t completely get rid of them.

And even Texas did not do that. The mask’s mandate has been withdrawn and companies are open at full capacity, but local authorities are empowered to issue new regulations based on the number of recent hospitalizations in their communities. We should not treat restrictions like a light switch, where we go from strict capacity limits to nothing, Fauci warns Jake Tapper in the clip below. But Texas did not do that either. They had 75% of the capacity of many businesses before Greg Abbott’s new request to authorize a full reopening. It was a gradual adjustment.

Yet. Consider how difficult it will be to reach a reference of 10,000 cases per day – or “considerably less”, ideally, in Fauci’s words. The last time we had only 10,000 confirmed cases in a single day in the United States was on March 22, 2020, 348 days ago. With the exception of a few days in May and June, it has also been almost an entire year since we saw less than * 20,000 * cases per day. And remember, these case counts were being recorded at a time when America’s testing capacity was still weak, much less extensive than it is now. In fact, we were generating well over 10,000 infections a day last March; the low case count was due to the fact that we were still in a primitive stage of detecting them.

Which means it’s possible that we haven’t seen a day with less than 10,000 infections for an entire year, possibly since February 2020. Question then: Realistically, the case count will drop to less than 10,000 a day, even after everyone has who want a vaccine to have it? Somewhere around 15% of Americans insist that they will not receive the injection under any circumstances. There are 45 million people. Even taking into account the fact that many will be immunized the old-fashioned way and some are children who are unlikely to be very contagious, we are still talking about a pool of millions that will remain vulnerable to the virus. Couldn’t they generate 10,000 infections a day with each other? Especially during a more contagious winter?

A benchmark of 10,000 a day seems like a terribly high bar for a return to full normality, then. Even if we soften that 15% resistance and convince almost everyone to get vaccinated, it will take many months before the entire population has access to the vaccine. And assuming we can finish them all by September, we will probably have to turn around and get reinforcements again, as the virus threatens to resurface in colder climates.

In other words, pandemic restrictions basically forever. Not strict restrictions, perhaps, but still. Masks recommended next winter, restaurants with 75% or 50% capacity?

Perhaps Americans are getting used to the idea:

The irony is that the same survey shows the number of people who think the pandemic is improving slightly or a lot, at 60%, the highest ever. Americans are becoming more optimistic! And … also more resigned that their lives will remain troubled next year.

What Fauci and his colleagues on the Biden team are really concerned about are the new variants. It is not certain that we will end a fourth wave of the virus driven by more contagious strains, but it is certainly possible:

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said on Thursday that the most transmissible variant B.1.1.7 was appearing between 20% and 30% of the viruses obtained in surveillance checks in states like Florida, California and Georgia. Those numbers – just 1% -2% four weeks ago – are likely to double in 10 days, he said.

When this variant appeared at 50% on surveillance checks in parts of Europe and the Middle East, “we saw a big increase in (general) cases” – and the same can happen in the United States, he said.

“Everything that governors are doing now to relax all the public health recommendations we have made will only be a great invitation for the virus to spread faster and further,” said Osterholm to CNN’s “New Day”.

Watch the first few minutes here, while Fauci presents his possibly impossible benchmark. For what it’s worth, Biden doesn’t seem to be hurt by the extreme caution advised by his advisers. According to new AP research, Sleepy Joe has 70% approval to deal with the pandemic, including 44% among Republicans. This is probably a reaction mainly to the increasing rate of vaccinations, but Biden’s sustained emphasis on masks and not reopening anytime soon is no problem for him now. We will see how things will look in two months if and when tens of millions more people have been immunized and the White House is still asking governors not to open their doors too soon.

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