We have to accept some risk of Covid-19

We have to accept some risk of Covid-19

German Lopez, Vox.com <newsletter@vox.com> Unsubscribe

 

Hello, Weeds fans!

 

First, some exciting news: Jerusalem Demsas and I are now cohosts of The Weeds podcast, joining Matt Yglesias and Dara Lind. Stay tuned to hear more of us on the show! (Speaking of, rate or review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts — it really helps us with reaching new listeners.)

 

As for this week’s newsletter, I want to break down the reasons all of us will likely have to learn to accept some risk of Covid-19 indefinitely. I also look at the most recent UN report on climate change — and its very, very grim findings.

 

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, email me at german@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @germanrlopez. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends and family, tell them to sign up at vox.com/weeds-newsletter.

EXPLAINED IN 600 WORDS

Accepting some Covid-19 risk

If you go back to the earlier days of the pandemic, this was the original hope with vaccines. Previously, the Food and Drug Administration set the standard for an acceptable Covid-19 vaccine at 50 percent efficacy. The expectation was that the vaccine wouldn’t stop all cases of Covid-19, but would at least reduce the severity of the disease. As Baylor College’s Peter Hotez put it at the time, “Even if it’s not the best vaccine, it still could prevent me from going to the hospital or worse.”

 

Yet somewhere along the way — perhaps with the news the vaccines were far more effective than expected — that message has been lost. And now anything short of perfection is perceived as a failure.

 

Consider the recent study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The initial headlines about the study focused on the fact that three-fourths of cases tracked in the study were among vaccinated people, showing the virus spread in a very vaccinated community. The implication, propped up by the CDC’s new guidance that vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in public, was that the delta variant can spread at a high level among even the people who got their shots.

 

But if you dig into the details of the outbreak, they revealed some very good news for vaccinated people. Among the more than 1,000 cases so far linked to Provincetown, there have only been seven reported hospitalizations (some unvaccinated) and no deaths. 

 

If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced roughly 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.

The Provincetown outbreak, then, showed that the vaccines had worked to defang the coronavirus — to make it more like the flu.

 

“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”

 

In short: Pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths, not just cases.

 

There are concerns about “long Covid” — lingering effects in those infected, like overwhelming fatigue. Still, experts say serious long-term symptoms after a Covid-19 infection seem to be fairly rare (though this issue is still being studied). And, at any rate, these kinds of long-term symptoms aren’t unique to the coronavirus; they happen, for one, with seasonal flu.

 

While we still have to get more people vaccinated, at a certain point we’ll have to acknowledge we’ve done what we can. It might not be ideal, but we can learn to live with a vaccine-weakened version of Covid-19 — hopefully not too unlike how we’ve long dealt with the flu.

 

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PAPER OF THE WEEK

Global warming is here and getting worse

A new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a grim picture — affirming that humanity has contributed to global warming, the situation is already bad, and things stand to get much worse in the decades to come without proper action.

 

The report concludes that the world is now likely to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming relative to pre-industrial days. That alone means more severe floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events.

 

A chart measuring changes in global surface temperature throughout the centuries.

As bad as that is, things may get even worse. In the coming decades, humanity could continue to warm the planet — by up to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. At that point, the world would look very different: Melting glaciers would spawn cascading effects, ecosystems would collapse, and once-a-decade or even once-every-50-years events would happen almost annually.

 

The researchers also warn that we still don’t know when some of the thresholds for worse outcomes could be reached. There remains a lot of uncertainty surrounding specific temperature tipping points for catastrophic events — which means they could come sooner than we hope, and we may not even know we’ve reached them until it’s too late.

 

The panel will release future reports, offering further details about what can be done to prevent the worst from coming. But the message of the current report is very clear: With some of the awful effects of climate change already baked in, we’re getting an early hint of what’s to come — and humanity needs to act before it gets much worse.

 

For more on the report, read Umair Irfan and Rebecca Leber’s explainer at Vox.