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Realization that Covid will be 'a long war' sparks anger and denial - STAT - STAT

Realization that Covid will be 'a long war' sparks anger and denial - STAT - STAT

Realization that Covid will be 'a long war' sparks anger and denial - STAT - STAT
Aug 02, 2021 2 mins, 49 secs

In May, when the CDC said fully vaccinated people could ditch masks and social distancing, it seemed to signal a return to normalcy.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised everyone — even those who’ve gotten Covid-19 shots — to go back to indoor masking, a decision driven by new data showing the hyper-contagious Delta variant colonizes the nose and throat of some vaccinated people just as well as the unvaccinated, meaning they may just as easily spread this new version of the virus, while stilling being protected against the worst manifestations of the disease.

This time it’s not just the mostly Republican anti-masking refrain rearing its defiant head (though fights over school mask mandates have returned with a vengeance).

“It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, said on July 22, as her state, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, reeled from a 530% rise in Covid-19 hospitalizations in just three weeks.

Anger is what people in his profession refer to as a “secondary emotion.” It’s a feeling that arises in response to a more primal emotion, like fear and anxiety over having some aspect of your life threatened.

Covid response, among many, was at the beginning to not make it clear that this was going to be a long war,” said historian John Barry, who wrote the definitive account of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, “The Great Influenza.”.

For much of the first year of the pandemic, many top public health officials touted the idea that our way out of the pandemic was reaching herd immunity — a phenomenon by which a pathogen stops spreading because so many people are protected against it, either by a previous exposure or by vaccination.

In this way the pandemic pathogen would become an endemic one — circulating among us and causing smaller, seasonal surges of milder illness.

Epidemiological researchers like Emory University’s Jennie Lavine have turned to models to try to project when SARS-CoV-2 might transition from pandemic pathogen to endemic.

In a paper published in Science, Lavine and her co-authors predicted that this transition might take anywhere from a few years to a few decades, depending on how quickly the pathogen spreads and how widely vaccines are adopted.

That’s why this time around, epidemiologists like Lavine fear it will be even more difficult to get people to don masks, especially those who believed the pandemic was over for them the moment they received their shots

“There is a way in which the rhetoric around herd immunity has been a disservice, and I think we’re probably seeing it make this moment worse as people are starting to face in a tangible way in their communities that this isn’t going away,” said Lavine

That could change if new variants were to deal young kids much more severe cases of disease, or completely blindside the immune systems of people who’d been vaccinated or previously infected

“Thankfully, at this point, both of those things are holding,” said Lavine

“So the light at the end of the tunnel for me is that the long-term picture still doesn’t look so bad, it’s just that it’s not this kind of ‘get to this magical threshold of vaccine coverage and it’s all over.’ It’s a slower progression with a less clear-cut end,” she said

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