By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 10, 2021
When people drive by a car crash, they tend to take a look. The phenomenon is called rubber-necking — motorists turning their heads to inspect something on the side of the road. This usually causes traffic to slow, and sometimes leads to additional wrecks.
But if people saw car crashes every mile or so they drove over a period of, say, a year and half, their interest would wane. The same would be especially true if these people had received injections of incredible potency that protect them from all car crashes, or at least most crashes more serious than a fender-bender. Such folks would show a lot less interest in gazing at the automotive carnage and in fact largely begin to ignore crashes that they encountered.
That’s the situation in which millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of other people around the globe now find themselves. Those who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 may worry, as I do, about the chance that variants like delta can penetrate the immunity conferred by these new miracles of modern science, the novel coronavirus vaccines. But otherwise, unless they know many unvaccinated people, it’s rather natural for fully vaccinated individuals to tune out the pandemic and begin to resume experiencing life the way they used to before Covid-19 put the world on pause.
I’ve been guilty of this myself at times. I barely blinked the other day when I saw a headline stating that more than 4 million people worldwide had died of the disease. I’m used to seeing car crashes, and besides, barring radical new strains, I’m never likely to suffer anything much more serious than a scuffed bumper!
While the delta strain appears to have minimal impact on those who have been fully vaccinated, it’s a completely different story for others. From a pandemic standpoint, the unvaccinated are the medical have-nots; that is, they lack protection from the disease that’s ravaged the world since the start of 2020.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced Friday that the delta variant now constitutes at least half of all new Covid-19 cases — up from slightly more than 3 percent in the two-week period ending May 22. Maryland announced this week that all those in the state who died from Covid-19 in June had not been vaccinated. The same day, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweeted that more than 99 percent of his state’s new Covid diagnoses, hospitalizations and deaths from late January through late June consisted of people who were not fully immunized.
Globally, vaccinations have progressed at a fairly steady pace since January or February. More than 3.3 billion injections have been administered, or 44 doses per 100 people. But this has barely dented the disease’s worldwide progress. CNN noted that it took the world 88 days to move from two million Covid-19 deaths, back in January, to 3 million such deaths. The death toll swelled to 4 million in just another 89 days.
Regarding the glass as half full, we would say that many more would have died if not for vaccines. Regarding the glass as half empty, we would say that the vaccination campaign is barely making a difference. The truth is probably somewhere in between: Many more people would have died without immunization, but delta is so virulent and there are still so many unvaccinated people that Covid-19 appears to be progressing unhindered.
There’s evidence for that in-between assessment in our experience here in the United States, which is the largest nation in which at least 48 percent of residents are completely immunized. June’s average daily new diagnoses and average daily deaths were the lowest of any month since March 2020. (Through Friday, daily deaths in July had dropped to 193.1, a decline of nearly 43 percent from June. Daily new cases this month, however, are 18,352.7, a rise of more than 52 percent.)
Immunizing the world was always going to be a complex and difficult task. But the crying shame of the matter is that even in wealthy nations like the United States, which secured numerous immunization doses early on, millions of people have passed up the opportunity to get vaccinated.
Missouri, where only 46 percent of residents have received at least one shot and only 40 percent are fully immunized, is one such place. Delta has driven the rolling-week tally of new daily Covid-19 cases over 1,200, the highest level in more than five months. On July 1, hours after the Biden administration announced the creation of surge response teams to deal with outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, the state requested help from the program.
Even so, David Pennington, the fire chief for Springfield, Mo., the state’s third-largest city, tweeted on Thursday that the disease was overwhelming health-care capacity in his area:
I suppose this is where my comparison between car crashes and contagious disease begins to break down. Remember the people blithely driving by the crashes, thinking that it could never happen to them? Well, a significant percentage of them are unvaccinated. These people don’t realize that by passing up the opportunity to immunize, they’re putting their lives on the line, and also the lives of people whom they could infect.
Not every one of those blithe unvaccinated motorists will pay the price for not getting their shots. But Covid-19, which has proven so adept at spreading, is virtually guaranteed to exact a toll from someone in their community.
As Springfield’s fire chief stated, this is a mass-casualty event happening in slow motion all around us. To stop it, we need to accept responsibility for stopping the plague. We can do that taking advantage of scientific advances that, when distributed to enough people, will save thousands if not millions of lives.
Americans, please get vaccinated. The life you save may be your parent’s, or your kid’s, or your neighborhood shop owner’s — or your own.
Author’s note: This post originally appeared under the title “Covid diary: Part 43.” To conform with earlier entries in this series, I later changed the name to “Covid-19 diary: Part 43.” MEM
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