Earlier this month, the Texas government, Greg Abbott, along with Covid-19 declared “mission accomplished” – and announced that Texas would fully reopen “EVERYTHING” and lift its mask mandate. The decision was quickly criticized by experts and public officials, and President Joe Biden described the move as “Neanderthal thinking”.
At the same time, the coronavirus outbreak in America is really improving. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are lower, and vaccination rates are higher. It is perhaps not so unreasonable to ask: When will it be over? When can we become normal again – and when should states reopen to help make that happen?
Experts have told me that there is still a lot of guesswork to be done, and we may not know when we are really back to normal before we get there. “I think it’s going to be clear in retrospect,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me. “We will suddenly realize that we are laughing, indoors, with people we do not know and whose vaccine status is unknown, and we will think, ‘Wow, that would have been unthinkable then. … ”
But there are measures to judge whether a state should reopen – which we have mostly heard about since the beginning of the pandemic: cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccination rates.
The aim is to bring these measures to safer levels and to ensure that favorable trends continue. So the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths should drop – preferably to lower levels than before the autumn / winter boom – and, just as importantly, continue to fall from there. Meanwhile, vaccination rates must increase steadily.
One criterion that is not worth pursuing at the moment: herd immunity. In theory, this is a meaningful goal – the point at which so many people have a natural or vaccine-induced immunity, that the spread of the virus slows down and eventually stops. The problem is that we do not know what the right threshold for herd immunity is; there are too many unknowns about the virus, its variants, and how immunity can definitely say.
As Anthony Fauci, the biggest federal expert on infectious diseases, said at a press conference this week: ‘We should not get so caught up in this elusive number of herd immunity. We just have to worry that as many people as possible can be vaccinated as quickly as possible, because herd immunity is still an elusive number. ‘
The process of reopening must be done slowly. By reopening piece by piece, each state can see if any of its movements lead to too much spread of the virus. If things go wrong, a state can withdraw. If things go well, it can continue to lift restrictions.
All of this must also be followed locally, as different cities or provinces may experience different experiences as a state as a whole.
By all these standards, many of the US are moving too fast. The country’s coronavirus, hospitalization and mortality rates are too high – still higher than before the autumn / winter boom – and the vaccination rate is too low, with a meager 12 percent of the country being fully vaccinated. Texas, despite its urgency to reopen, is no better off if it’s Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths or vaccines.
This could lead to new increases before the vaccine campaign is really done. This is of particular concern because of other potential threats facing the country with Covid-19, in particular the possible emergence of new variants that may change to evade immunity, making our efforts so far fruitless. Experts say the best way to prevent this from happening is to contain the virus, and deny the replications it needs to mutate.
The US is almost at the finish line: as Biden said, every adult in the country could be vaccinated by June. But until then, it is up to us and our public officials to make sure that as many of us as possible reach the finish line.
Read my explanation at Vox for more information on how states can return to normal.