Serious About our Public Health
By Albert B. Kelly
No matter how we look at things, it has been a long couple of years since the start of the pandemic. Somehow 2019 seems like a lifetime ago but it’s only been some 22 months. Try as I might, I find that it is hard to remember what it felt like living in a world that didn’t know about Covid. Yet, even as I say that, I find that I’m also surprised at how easily we’ve sort of moved on from anything resembling a public health mindset.
Part of me says “good for us”, why let Covid change us any more than it already has, let’s just continue to get on with the business at hand. The flip side of that begs the question, can it really be that easy? Can we really afford to ignore it or forget about it? I guess everyone will answer that question in their own way, but for me it starts with numbers.
Recently, a colleague reminded me about the website “ncov2019.live” which is a website that was created in January of 2020 by an 18 year old high school senior named Avi Schiffman from the State of Washington. This young man, along with a friend, created the website to keep anyone who is interested updated as to “how the world is handling the coronavirus pandemic”.
This website gathers or “scrubs” information from local government and health department websites from around the world, COV19, the Centers for Disease Control, and World Health Organization and whatever code he has written pulls it all together on an almost continuous basis to update his “dashboard” and it is impressive. It’s also easy to use.
According to “ncov2019.live”, here in the United States, as of this writing, there have been some 83,553,386 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Out of that number, 80,919,386 people have recovered and 1,024,454 of our fellow Americans have died from the disease.
For some additional overload on the numbers, out of a population of 334,575,277 people in the United States, approximately 257,995,280 people have received at least one dose of a vaccine which translates into 77% of our population.
A little closer to home according to “ncov2019.live”, here in New Jersey out of a population of 8,882,190 people, there have been 2,285,641 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Out of that number, 2,149,272 of our fellow New Jersians have recovered and sadly, we’ve lost 33,487 of our neighbors. For what it’s worth, 8,034,624 residents of the Garden State have received at least one dose of a vaccine.
As mind-numbing as past numbers are, it is the future that has my attention. As I write this, news reports tell of 2 new strains of Covid that they say are more transmissible than what was dubbed “stealth omicron”. Scientists say that these strains have the ability to possibly evade antibodies from vaccination and prior infections and these strains are now just starting to circulate in the U.S.
If there is good news, it’s that these new strains, (B.A.4 and B.A.5), which originated in South Africa like the original Omicron, don’t seem to cause severe infection and if true, it means we might well avoid any kind of “wave” as occurred in the past.
But what happens when fall and winter come? I hope I’m wrong, but we could be a just a couple of mutations away from going back to some extremely hard days. My point is that I don’t think we can afford to forget what we went through over the past 22 months. I’m not sure we should put our masks away for good, especially when we head into the latter part of the year.
But mostly, I don’t think we should put away the new public health awareness that many of us bumped into as a result of this pandemic. For a long time, we didn’t have to give much thought to the whole arena of public health. I think those days are gone.
These days it’s certainly Covid, but it’s also flu, hepatitis, food safety, HIV, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, alcohol-related harms, opioid addiction, depression, and obesity to name a few. For many of those already contending with one or more of these conditions, Covid when it arrived, was simply not survivable.
That’s part of why we need to be more serious about our public health, why we can’t afford to politicize public health and draw battle lines, because we don’t know what’s coming next.