Hope alone won’t end the COVID- 19 pandemic that’s on track to kill a million people worldwide by the end of this summer and has upended the livelihoods of millions more. An effective vaccine should work. Dozens of promising candidates are the pipeline.
The world cannot wait for that. It doesn’t have to wait. Medical experts know enough now about the disease to slow it down, if not stop it in its tracks. It’s too bad not enough people especially in the United States are listening.
Avoid crowded spaces, especially indoors. Stay six feet away from anybody not in your household. If you have to go into a crowd or inside a building, wear a mask. The mask doesn’t necessarily protect you against the virus but it does greatly prevent you from spreading the disease to other people should you be infected. Think of it as a favor you’re doing for your fellow human beings.
As an added favor, wash your hands frequently or use hand-sanitizer.
Just those three measures physical distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing will slow the spread of the disease enough to enable a society to resume something close normal functioning. It has happened in Italy, which was hard hit in late March, when nearly 1,000 people died of COVID-19 in a single day.
The country enacted drastic lockdown measures, which people took seriously.
They wore masks, according to a recent CNN article, and they still do. Masks and social distancing are mandatory. They have enabled people to dine at restaurants and go on vacation, although some activities like nightclubs still aren’t open, and trains still only run at half capacity.
Much of Italian life is back to normal. Daily COVID-19 deaths are in single digits in Italy. It happened because the vast majority of Italians have heeded the advice of medical experts and are keeping their distance, wearing masks, and washing their hands.
For inexplicable reasons, which historians will no doubt ponder for centuries, too many people in the U.S. have a problem with this. More so than in places like Italy, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and even Canada all countries that have had much more success of late than the U.S. in managing the virus.
As this went to press, Italy still had a COVID-19 death rate per million population that was slightly higher than for the U.S. The difference is Italy had flattened its COVID curve whereas the number of active infections in the U.S. was still rising. That is unfortunate but was completely avoidable. It was exactly what the health experts predicted would happen were the states to relax lockdown measures too quickly.
Now everything is a complete mess. More forceful advice from government leaders at the outset probably would have helped. Who knows? U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams has come out and advised people to wear masks in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 and speed the reopening of the economy. Maybe that will help. People have to take the advice to heart, though.
That should have been the message from the get go instead of the mixed messages that sowed confusion such as that masks don’t work for regular people but need to be reserved for healthcare workers who need them.
The pressure to end the lockdown was great. As Steve Latin Kasper, director of market data and research with the National Truck Equipment Association, pointed out during a media webinar this summer the hit to the economy this spring was “historic.” A quarterly 33 percent drop in real U.S. gross domestic product hadn’t happened since the Great Depression. The work truck industry market alone is expected to shrink by $30 billion this year. (See the story on Page 1.)
The biggest risk to recovery is a second wave of COVID-19. By all accounts that is already underway, although some argue that the first wave never really abated.
In many ways, companies are learning to deal with the virus. That’s certainly true of essential services such as in the work truck industry.
But despite signs of the worst being over, about 17 million Americans remained unemployed in late July with few signs of that turning around quickly. And by December, the fear is that COVID-19 will have taken 300,000 American lives.
Widespread mask wearing would greatly reduce both those terrible numbers.
