Why the US is experiencing a coronavirus plateau
09 June, 2020
When epidemiologists talked about "flattening the curve," they probably didn't mean it this way: the united states hit its peak coronavirus caseload in April, but after that the graph has been on a seemingly unending plateau.
That's unlike other hard-hit countries that have successfully pushed down their numbers of new cases, including Spain and Italy, which will have bell-shaped curves.
Experts say the prolonged nature of the united states epidemic is the result of the cumulative impact of regional outbreaks, as the virus that started out mostly on the coasts and in major cities moves inward.
Layered in addition are the ramifications of lifting lockdowns in places that are experiencing rising cases, in addition to a lapse in compliance with social distancing guidelines as a result of economic hardship, and occasionally a belief that the threat is overstated.
"The US is a huge country both in geography and population, and the virus is at very different stages in various parts of the country," Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told AFP.
The US saw a lot more than 35,000 new cases for several days in April. While that figure has declined, it has still been exceeding 20,000 regularly in recent days.
By contrast, Italy was regularly hitting a lot more than 5,000 cases per day in March but is currently experiencing figures in the low hundreds.
"We didn't act quickly and robustly enough to avoid the virus spreading initially, and data indicate that it travelled from initial hotspots along major transport routes into other urban and rural areas," added Frieden, now CEO of the non-profit Resolve to save lots of Lives.
To wit: the East Coast states of NY, New Jersey and Massachusetts accounted for about 50 percent of all cases until in regards to a month roughly ago -- but now the geographic footprint of the US epidemic has shifted to the Midwest and southeast, including Florida.
Still insufficient testing
Another key problem, said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, is that america continues to be not doing enough testing, contact tracing and isolation.
After coming late to the testing party -- for reasons which range from technical issues to regulatory hurdles -- the united states has conducted more COVID-19 tests than any other country.
It even has among the highest per capita rates per country of 62 per 1,000 people, in line with the website ourworldindata.org -- better than Germany (52 per 1,000) and South Korea (20 per 1,000).
But according to Nuzzo, these numbers are misleading, because "the volume of testing that a country should do ought to be scaled to the size of its epidemic.
"The United States gets the largest epidemic in the world so obviously we must do far more testing than any other country."
For Johns Hopkins, the more important metric may be the positivity rate -- that's, out of most tests conducted, just how many returned positive for COVID-19.
By June 7, america had an average daily positivity rate of 14 percent, well above the World Health Organization guideline of 5 percent over two weeks before social distancing guidelines ought to be relaxed.
By contrast, Germany, which includes tested far fewer people in relation to its population, has a positivity rate of 5 percent.
Social behavior
Even if testing were scaled up, undertaking tests in of itself does hardly any good without another steps -- learning who was exposed and asking them to isolateHere also, way too many US states are lagging woefully behind.
Texas, which is experiencing a surge in cases after relaxing its lockdown, is a case in point. The state targeted hiring a modest 4,000 tracers by June, but according to local reports is still greater than a thousand shy of even that goal.
Opt-in iphone app based efforts are also slow to log off the ground.
Then there may be the fact that some persons are growing sick and tired of lockdowns, while others don't possess the economic luxury to be able to stay home for prolonged periods.
The federal government sent some 160 million Americans an individual stimulus check as high as $1,200 back April but it isn't clear whether more will be forthcoming.
Still others, particularly in so-called red states under Republican leadership, have chafed under restrictions and mask-wearing guidelines that they see as an affront to their personal freedom.
"The US is kind of on the extreme of the average person liberty side," Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, told AFP.
Part of the has related to mixed messaging from Republican leaders, including President Donald Trump, said Nuzzo.
"We've had at the best political level an assertion that this is a situation which has been overblown, and that maybe certain protective behaviors are not necessary," she said.
More recently, tens of thousands of people in the united states took to the streets to protest the killing on an unarmed black man by police, risking coronavirus infection to demonstrate against the general public health risk of racialized state violence.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
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