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Faced with a third wave of COVID-19 as we enter the holiday season, it would be fair for Californians to ask existential questions.
Why does this virus seem to target us again? Why did we have trouble controlling it? Where are we wrong?
The simple answer is: we actually know how to fight the virus. We are just tired of doing it.
This third wave of coronavirus is particularly troubling because ‘we’ve never gone back’ to a low number of base cases, said Dr Sara Cody, Santa Clara County health official and key architect of the regional sustaining first order. at home in the country. .
Worse yet, this flare-up occurs during the traditional cold and flu season, which is exacerbated because people tend to stay indoors, where germs are easier to spread.
“We’re also facing this surge on the eve of what has always been the biggest travel day of the year – and it’s Thanksgiving eve,” Cody said.
In addition, California will not be able to count on help from other parts of the country. “Everyone is having a flare at the same time,” Cody said.
Many unknowns remain. In general, deaths from COVID-19 have declined since the spring, as infections strike a younger, healthier population and hospitals improve in treatments. Some workplaces and institutions such as retirement homes have improved their protective measures. But there are still concerns about filling hospitals in the coming weeks if California can’t start flattening the curve again.
And there is also a psychological dimension to the third wave which is particularly devastating. Many were now hoping for a respite from the isolation, uncertainty and economic damage caused by the coronavirus, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, to do Christmas shopping in person and feel like times better. The news of successful vaccines is a boost. But many are entering the holiday season as anxious as ever.
Even in San Francisco, which has seen a relatively low number of deaths from COVID-19, “we are seeing an explosion of new cases across the city,” warned Dr Grant Colfax, director of public health.
“This rate of increase is higher than ever,” Colfax said, and warned that it is possible that the city could run out of hospital beds and intensive care unit capacity.
“The choices we … make over the next two weeks will determine the rest of this holiday season,” Colfax said, urging people to cancel travel plans and stay home for Thanksgiving. “We have the option of choosing whether we push back the third wave, or whether we are victims of this wave, as we are unfortunately seeing in other parts of the country.”
California was once a shining example of how a state can step up to prevent this pandemic from becoming a disaster in its own right. With authorities acting relatively early to impose a stay-at-home order, hospitals in the Golden State have never become as overwhelmed as those in New York City, which has suffered a heartbreaking death toll double that of California.
Home keeping orders, however, devastated the economy, prompting people to reopen their doors to save their businesses from ruin.
Attitudes also changed as the pandemic continued. California shows how a collective shrug, a lack of discipline and a desire to “get back to normal quickly” can also lead to another death season.
Relaxation of restaurant and bar rules and an explosion of social activity in the last weeks of spring and the first weeks of summer culminated in the deadliest season of the pandemic in California, sabotaging efforts to reopen schools in time for the fall.
Now there are fears that California may be heading down the same path again, with the allure of Thanksgiving, Christmas and other winter holidays irresistible to some.
Mass fatigue and even resentment over the coronavirus is driving some people to host defiantly maskless dinners and plan holiday season.
The allure of social gatherings is strong: Governor Gavin Newsom recently apologized for attending a birthday dinner for a friend at an exclusive Napa Valley restaurant.
And health officials are urging people not to think they can use the tests to give themselves a free pass to throw parties without the need for face masks or social distancing. It would amount to making the same mistake the Trump administration made when its testing strategy failed to protect President Trump from infection and allowed a wide spread incident at a Rose Garden ceremony announcing its candidate for the Supreme Court.
Unless canceled or significantly reduced, traditional social gatherings held amid the world’s worst pandemic in a century will lead to a season of heartbreak, overwhelmed hospitals and busy morgues as the weeks approach Christmas.
Health officials are following this pattern across California, and it is for this reason that they are terrified of what could befall the state if nothing is done to deviate from that trajectory.
Statewide, the current acceleration of cases is the fastest on record, with cases in the first week of November soaring 51%, California’s fastest increase to date, which had previously been a 39% jump from the last week of spring, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday.
It is “simply unprecedented in the history of the California pandemic,” Newsom said.
In late spring, scientists now believe that the swift reopening of businesses that began in May and the singing stories of how California survived the pandemic better than the East Coast seemed to be telegraphing people who after two months following a strict stay-order home, it was OK to relax.
But birthday parties and celebrations quickly became very popular events.
There was the story of a truck driver who, after months of diligent isolation, finally went to a barbecue. More than 10 people who attended the party ended up being infected and the truck driver, Tommy Macias, 51, died on the second day of summer.
Then there was the story, later in the summer, of a couple who traveled from California to Maine to get married in the small town of Millinocket. There were only 55 attendees at the wedding reception, but over the next few weeks 176 people would be infected, including a relative of someone who attended the wedding – who also worked at a nursing home. long duration. More than half of the residents at the facility were infected and six of them eventually died from COVID-19.
In Los Angeles County, Barbara Ferrer, the director of public health, meticulously followed the key moments leading up to the surge in coronavirus infections.
Looking back, it is now clear that the second increase in LA County cases began to be detected on May 28, three days after Memorial Day, leading to a spike in daily coronavirus cases that would not peak until July 14. .
But the surge in hospitalizations would not begin until June 18 and peak on July 20. The rise in deaths began on June 30 and finally peaked on July 27, and it would take until early October before deaths hit a low point.
A similar timeline with the current LA County outbreak would possibly translate into an increase in deaths starting in early December and worsening Christmas and New Year’s Day through early January.
It’s a similar timeline predicted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Measurement and Evaluation. Scientists at the institute predict that daily deaths will begin to increase in early December in California.
Daily deaths from COVID-19 have already been increasing across the country for about a month, and the institute predicts the pace will worsen until mid-January.
The increase in travel recently may be a reason officials noticed a sudden spike in coronavirus cases in the early days of November, Cody said, with residents of Silicon Valley heading to more infected areas, s ‘unknowingly infecting and bringing the virus home. .
In addition, “we are seeing both speeding up transmission both within households and in private settings, then to work sites, and back and forth,” Cody said. “We must redouble our efforts on all fronts.”
Part of this is increasing public education and emphasizing that people can be highly contagious with the virus without ever feeling bad – resulting in silent chains of viral transmission that result in an incident of very wide spread, a Cody said.
In fact, the idea that we might be faced with multiple waves of the pandemic had been expected shortly after the start of the pandemic.
In a computer model developed by researchers at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and released in March, scientists suspected that a one-time social distancing effort in the spring would never be enough.
They predict a situation where we would need long periods of social distancing, perhaps with occasional slack periods, to keep the hospital system from being overwhelmed at some point. And they suggested a plausible scenario that social distancing measures could only be relaxed from early to mid-2021, with the outbreak ending in mid-2022.
Experts now say it is likely that the widespread availability of promising coronavirus vaccines to most of the public will not occur until mid-2021.
Times editors Karen Kaplan and Stephanie Lai contributed to this report.
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