Science and Sanity in the Valley of COVID

 As we reach the end of 2021, and approach two years of COVID, I find myself wanting to look back and assess a bit, because there are two opposite trends that I see.

On the one hand, there are the basic facts of the pandemic: the virus is worse than the common respiratory viruses to which we are accustomed, and two years in we continue to see above-average death rates among adults as a result.

Among those who are 65 or older, we're seeing about 8,000 more deaths than usual per week, which amounts to 20% above the normal rate.  (This data comes from the CDC Flu View dashboard which you can access here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html )

Among adults under 65, there have been an average of 5,000 more deaths per week than is normal over the last twelve weeks.  This is 40% above the normal death rate: younger adults are less likely to die in general. 

The group which is clearly not dying much from COVID is kids. The average deaths per week for people under 18 is slightly lower than usual.

The other thing worth noting about COVID is that despite the much discussed breakthrough infections, the vaccines really do work quite well in preventing serious disease (as well as someone well preventing spread in general.)

Looking at the CDC data on COVID hospitalizations by age group for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, even for those over 65 people who have been vaccinated are less likely to end up in the hospital with COVID than unvaccinated 18-49 year olds. 

For all other age groups, vaccinated people are about as likely to end up in the hospital with COVID as are kids, which is to say: very unlikely.

So on these basic facts, the COVID hawks (which is often but not exclusively the left and the 'elite') basically have the story right. COVID is a virus which is causing real ill effects on the American population, and the vaccines really do help a great deal.

And yet, this same group of COVID hawks and elites, increasingly showing themselves as incapable of dealing with the pandemic as a human phenomenon with any sense of perspective. We're treated to a steady trickle of despairing pieces about how people have "given up" on ever living normal lives again. The federal government is requiring kids aged 2 and up in Head Start sponsored pre-school programs to mask all the time, despite the fact that such young children are virtually unthreated by the virus and masks aren't terribly effective anyway. Many areas require people to ritually wear masks while entering restaurants, before taking them off to eat -- something which perhaps does much to visually telegraph concern but does nothing to actually protect people. The private college down the road from us laid off a large number of faculty this year to cut costs, but is still spending significant amounts of money on having people spray disinfectant on all surfaces multiple times per day -- a most shown to be ineffective eighteen months ago.

And aside from these petty gestures of unseriousness, many of our managerial elites seem unable to even figure out what are reasonable measures by which to judge success or failure, emergency vs normality, etc. Two years in to the pandemic, many COVID hawks still seem to be working with the implicit assumption that with sufficient diligence  we will somehow be back to a world in which COVID simply does not exist. Even as with high levels of vaccination and the apparently less severe (but more easily spread) Omicron variant, the metric of case counts becomes less important, politicians and health officials still routinely act as if trying to enact restrictions to get to zero cases is reasonable approach.

By comparison, those (often on the right) who shrug off the usefulness of COVID vaccines and sometimes indulge in a shifting set of excuses to ignore the seriousness of the virus, often have a more healthy basic attitude towards life and the death: There are dangers in the world. Death could come at any time. We must do what we can but also live our lives and accept that we do not know the day or the hour when our lives will come to an end.

On the one hand, I'm deeply saddened (and more than a fit frustrated) that some of those who have faced their own deaths or those of their friends or family have done so needlessly. The COVID vaccines really are quite safe and are good at preventing the virus from being more severe. And yet, this group has a better understanding of the basic issues of life and death. 

We cannot reduce risk to zero. At this point, it's become clear that we also are not going to reach zero COVID. Though deaths and severe illness will be lower if everyone was vaccinated, it is also the case that this may mean that deaths will be higher in the next decade than in the last. Our status quo ante was, all things considered, pretty good from a health point of view. Certainly, we desire to see medical science to continue to defeat infectious and genetic diseases. We want to see new treatments that allow people to live longer and healthier. But there is no guarantee that we were entitled to the death rate of 2019. 

As COVID becomes endemic, the increased death rates of the last couple years can be expected to moderate. Most people will have some degree of immunity due to vaccine or having had the virus. And the virus's desire to have live hosts will select towards less deadly variants. But we may find ourselves living in a slightly shorter-lived world than we were before, and to do so in constant anxiety and strife will not change that fact, must make it more unpleasant. 

On the grander things, those who realize that we must live our lives with the understanding that death is at the same time unexpected and inevitable have the right of it.