When will society re-open?
by Alan Goodman
Every news show. Every anchor. Questioning every health expert or political pundit. And no one can give an answer. “When will society re-open?”
Which is surprising. Because the answer is obvious. And here it is, courtesy of TESTD, the most advanced system for healthcare management, including COVID testing and vaccine verification.
If everyone in the world got a second dose of vaccine today — or single dose of a one-vaccine serum — that date when we could re-open and go back to normal would be two weeks from today.
That’s it. That’s the answer.
Math holds the key
“When will we re-open” is a math equation. And right now, there are too many variables to be more precise.
How many people in the U.S. will refuse to get vaccinated? Right now, that number is so high that we are teetering on the brink of never achieving immunity. Without immunity, we will likely be in an endless cycle of virus outbreaks, shut downs, economic peril, and running risks of allowing vaccine-resistant strains of the virus to flourish. Does that sound like the kind of re-opening you want? Because that’s what we face with so many refusing to respect the advice of health experts.
Today, how many people — strangers to you — will you be near in confined, unventilated, crowded locations? That number is almost certainly too high. And while you may be vaccinated, and they may be vaccinated, there may be others you or they have encountered recently who have not been vaccinated, or were vaccinated and still came in contact with the virus. Remember, the vaccines are not 100% effective. Some will get sick. Some of the ones that get sick will be terribly sick. It’s unavoidable. It’s as real as math. If we continue to see cases rising at the same time vaccination numbers are peaking, we will know that the day when we will be fully open again will have to be pushed back.
Still a worldwide issue
When it comes to distributing vaccines, why do we say everyone in the world, and not just everyone in the U.S.? Because this virus is always on the move. The dominant strain of virus in the U.S. today is known as the UK variant, because that’s where its genome was first identified. We know that the initial outbreak flowed through Europe and the U.S. from China. We are a world of travelers, and we bring the virus everywhere we go. If we leave one corner of the globe unprotected, we are all vulnerable.
And why everyone in the world, and not just every vulnerable grown-up in the world? Because the numbers show that increasingly, younger people are developing the illness. While younger patients are less likely to get extremely ill, they are turning up more in hospitals needing significant care. That may be a result of older patients being less likely to get sick thanks to vaccinations, it might be because young people are going back to school, sports, and other behaviors that bring them into contact with others, and it might be because of changes to the virus. We don’t know. These are unknowns. Unknowns are inconsistent with re-opening at anything like the levels experienced before the virus.
And what about those variants? Variants are the biggest wildcard of all. We can do everything else right, but the longer the virus lingers and spreads, the more likely it is that one of the variants will develop into something that spreads rapidly, makes people very, very ill, and has high resistance to vaccines. Again — math. Knock this out as quickly as possible, or run the risk of it knocking us out by controlling future events.
Safe measures still the rule
Of course, in addition to everyone in the world getting the vaccine today, we would need everyone in the world to also wear masks, practice distancing, and observe good hygiene in the interim leading up to the “all-clear” horn we’ll sound two weeks from today. Because the variants could be spreading, mutating, and growing in virulence, learning how to evade the vaccines we’ve been so lucky to discover and deploy in record time.
So — you have your answer. We need everyone in the world vaccinated today, and we’re open in two weeks. Short of that vaccination schedule, the answers we’ll have for you are bound to be unsatisfying.
www.testd.com
