Mask commands have fallen. Some free trial sites are closed. Wherever parts of the United States continued to try to quell the pandemic collectively, they have largely shifted their focus away from counseling throughout the community. Now, even as the number of cases starts to rise again and more infections go unreported, the burden has fallen on individual Americans to decide how much they and their neighbors are at risk of coronavirus – and what, if nothing else, to do. for this. For many people, the threats posed by COVID have been dramatically mitigated during the two years of the pandemic. Vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization or death. Powerful new antiviral pills can help prevent the deterioration of vulnerable people. But not all Americans can count on the same protection. Millions of people with weakened immune systems do not get the full benefits of vaccines. Two-thirds of Americans, and more than a third of those 65 and older, have not received the critical security of an auxiliary shot, with the most worrying rates among blacks and Hispanics. And patients who are poorer or live farther away from doctors and pharmacies face sharp barriers to taking antiviral pills. These vulnerabilities have made it difficult to calculate the risks of a strenuous exercise. A recent suggestion by federal health officials that most Americans could stop wearing masks because of hospitalization numbers was confusing in some areas as to whether the chance of infection had changed, scientists said. “We’re doing a really awesome job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, a public health researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. “I think that’s why people throw their hands in the air and say, ‘Screw it on.’ “They are desperate for some kind of guidance.” To fill this gap, scientists are rethinking how to discuss the dangers of COVID. Some have studied when people could be exposed indoors, if the goal was not only to prevent overcrowding in hospitals, but also to protect people with immunosuppression. Others are working on tools to compare the risks of infection with the risks of a wide range of activities, finding, for example, that the average unvaccinated person 65 and older is about as likely to die from a micron infection as someone from heroin use for 18 months. But how people perceive risk is subjective. No one person has the same sense of the possibility of death from a year and a half of heroin use (about 3%, by one estimate). And beyond that, many scientists have said they are also concerned about this latest phase of the pandemic, which puts people at a disadvantage in making choices to keep themselves and others safe, especially while the tools to combat COVID remained beyond some Americans. “As much as we would not like to believe it,” said Anne Sosin, who is studying health equality at Dartmouth College. vaccination.” Coronavirus remains quite young and its long-term effects are quite unpredictable that measuring the threat posed by an infection is a thorny problem. (Source: The New York Times) Collective measurements While COVID is by far the only threat to America’s health, it remains one of the most important. In March, even when deaths from the first micron wave plummeted, the virus was still the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only heart disease and cancer. More Americans have died overall than they would normally die, a sign of the large number of viruses. As of the end of February, 7% more Americans were dying than expected in previous years – in contrast to Western European countries such as Britain, where overall deaths were recently lower than expected. The amount of virus circulating in the population is one of the most important measures for people trying to measure their risks, scientists said. That remains true, even though case numbers now count for real infections by a wide margin because so many Americans get tested at home or do not get tested at all, they said. Even with many lost cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now places most of the northeastern region at “high” levels of virus transmission. In parts of the region, the number of cases, although much lower than during the winter, is approaching the maximum growth rates of the autumn delta variant. Much of the rest of the country has what the CDC describes as “moderate” transmission levels. Covid Risk Assessment (Source: The New York Times) COVID vs. driving Even two years after the pandemic, the coronavirus remains young enough and its long-term effects quite unpredictable, so measuring the threat posed by an infection is a thorny problem, scientists said. An unknown number of people who become infected will develop COVID for a long time, leaving them severely debilitated. The risks of transmitting COVID also extend to others, potentially in poor health, who may consequently be exposed. However, with much greater immunity in the population than ever before, some public health researchers have sought to make risk calculations more accessible by comparing the virus to everyday risks. The comparisons are particularly strange in the United States: The country does not conduct the random sampling studies needed to estimate infection levels, which makes it difficult to know what percentage of infected people die. Cameron Byerley, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Georgia, has developed an online tool called COVID-Taser, which allows people to adjust their age, vaccine status and health background to predict the risk of the virus. . Her team used estimates from earlier in the pandemic of the rate of infections that led to poor results. Her research has shown that people find it difficult to interpret percentages, Byerley said. She recalled that her 69-year-old mother-in-law was not sure if she should have worried about the pandemic earlier, as a news program reported that people her age had a 10% risk of dying from infection. Byerley suggested to her mother-in-law to imagine if, one in 10 times she used the toilet on a given day, she would die. “Oh, 10% is terrible,” she remembers her mother-in-law saying. Byerley estimates, for example, that an average 40-year-old who was vaccinated six months ago had about the same chances of being hospitalized after an infection as someone who died in a car accident during 170 road trips across the country. . (Newer vaccines provide better protection than older ones, complicating these predictions.) For immunocompromised individuals, the risks are higher. An unvaccinated 61-year-old with an organ transplant, Byerley estimates, is three times more likely to die from an infection than to die within five years of being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer. And this transplant recipient is twice as likely to die. dies from COVID than one dies while climbing Mount Everest. With the most vulnerable in mind, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, began last month determining how low cases would have to fall for people to stop the mask indoors without putting it on. at risk are people with extremely weakened immune systems. Imagine a hypothetical person who had no benefit from vaccines, wore a good mask, took difficult preventative medications, attended occasional gatherings and shopped but did not work in person. He set a goal of keeping vulnerable people at less than 1% in a four-month period. To meet that limit, he said, the country would have to keep indoor coverage until transmission fell below 50 weekly cases per 100,000 people – a stricter limit than what the CDC currently uses, but a limit it said nevertheless offered a point of reference to aim at. “If you just say, ‘We’re going to take off the masks when things get better’ – that’s true I hope – but it’s not really useful because people do not know what ‘better’ means,” Faust said. This article was originally published in the New York Times.
