The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 180 (680)

Two years ago today, the first case of the novel coronavirus was found in France. In the 732 days since, 1.7 million people have died in Europe. That's 99 people dying every hour of every day. I have a hard time picturing that; I really have to stop and think about it.

The director for WHO's European region says that the pandemic is entering a "new phase" and that the rapid spread of Omicron offers "plausible hope for stabilization and normalization." At the same time, the head of WHO offers, "There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end. But it's dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame. On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge."

I have read or seen various assessments of POTUS's first year. One that centered on the coronavirus cited three key areas:

The White House bet that the pandemic would follow a straight line instead of the sharp turns it did take. The White House did not anticipate the nature and severity of variants even after warnings from abroad. There was a very tight, perhaps too tight, focus on vaccinations.

There was no sustained focus on testing. The supply of at-home tests should have increased when the Delta variant appeared. 

POTUS worked hard to try to avoid a Republican revolt over masks, mandates, and the like. Using force more than persuasion might have been a better strategy.

The distribution of 400 million N95 masks has begun; masks will be available at a number of local pharmacies and community health centers. It is "the largest deployment of personal protective equipment in US history," with masks coming from the Strategic National Stockpile. Reading this, I wondered just what other deployments there have been of PPE. And just what is this "Strategic National Stockpile"? Answering that second question was easy. In terms of the first, well, read the Wikipedia article cited above.

Japan has had 146 pandemic deaths per million people compared with 2,590 deaths per million people in the US. What might we learn from Japan? Their goal all along has been to find ways to live with covid. Because Japanese law prohibits lockdowns, those were off the table at the outset. Instead, they adopted the strategy of telling people to avoid "the three C's." Those would be closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings. "Three C's" was the 2020 buzzword of the year in Japan. The Three C's are "attainable without being alarmist" and can outlast changing circumstances. Japanese officials still stress avoiding the Three C's whenever there is a surge.

Avoiding the Three C's seems like such a simple strategy and more specific than the whole social distancing strategy we've put forward here. Still, I don't think the strategy of avoiding the Three C's would fly here; it might be too simple. Did you see the crowds at the weekend's NFL playoff games? Or human interest photos in the newspaper or general interest magazine? Are we there yet? No.