The Pandemic’s Next Phase - The New York Times - Interview with Zeynep Tufekci
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/briefing/the-pandemics-next-phase.html
The pandemic outlook
The U.S. is in a peculiar moment in the pandemic.
The nation is still averaging over 100,000 cases a day as the latest virus wave appears to be making its way westward. Yet many Americans seem to be meeting this latest wave with a shrug. Could this be the new normal?
To help us reflect on where we are and where we’re going, I connected with Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist who has written extensively on Covid for The Times’s Opinion section.
As a society, where are we in the pandemic?
I think the official messaging and our policy remain muddled and confusing, and that’s causing a lot of polarization. There are many questions that remain unanswered and a lack of clarity about the future steps. For example, it’s June 2022 and we still don’t have clarity on updating our vaccines for fall or for vaccines for the youngest. We don’t have the kind of research, clarity and steps needed to address long Covid, either.
In response, some people are very anxious, some people are wondering how much to worry and some people have basically tuned out. And I’m not sure I could blame any group because at this moment, navigating the pandemic is kind of like a build-your-own-adventure game.
What do you think the next phase of the pandemic will look like?
There are many possible paths. The worst-case scenario would be that we get a variant that causes significant amounts of severe disease even among the vaccinated or those with prior infections. If this happens, and we haven’t prepared to quickly update our vaccines and administer them widely and globally, it could be a pretty grim scenario.
It’s also possible that we just kind of sputter along: There isn’t a new variant that represents a huge jump, at least in terms of causing acute illness. But in combination with waning vaccine effectiveness, especially among the elderly whose immune systems are weaker, it settles into something like the disease burden of influenza. That’s also terrible. Influenza itself causes an incredible amount of suffering every year, and it would further strain our already strained health care system.
The ideal scenario for vaccines is we update the vaccines, we vaccinate children and we vaccinate globally. But we shouldn’t stop there. We could also do many other things that would benefit everyone. For example, immunocompromised people are especially susceptible to generating variants because they can have very long-term infections. There are now therapeutics that should be used globally and equitably. And a large number of people with H.I.V. remain undertreated around the world, and thus immunocompromised. Extending treatment to them is both morally right and beneficial.
What else is the government not doing that it should?
There’s now a much better understanding of airborne transmission of respiratory diseases. If we got our act together, we could do for indoor air sanitation something similar to what we did to water after discovering waterborne diseases, in terms of regulating it to make it safer with better air cleaning filters, ventilation and other methods. We would see benefits against all the other respiratory viruses that are airborne too. It would be costly at first, but we would recoup that cost because illness is very costly — in terms of the human suffering but also financially.
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How do you feel about the moment we are in?
We’re not in a good place, even though we could be. I am very despondent about the dysfunctional global and national response, and lack of clear next steps. We are not able to do things that are within the reach of countries like ours with the amount of science and wealth we have, let alone globally.
When you have a virus or some problem and you don’t have an effective response, that is tragic. But it’s a different kind of tragic when we have so many things we could be doing but we just can’t get our act together. It feels like we’re living a bad chapter in a history book that ends with “aaand that’s why they screwed it up even though they didn’t have to.”