Department of Health acting Secretary David Scrase’s comments about the current COVID-19 surge are too little, too late (“Scrase says new wave of COVID cases looms,” June 9).
Anyone paying attention knows case numbers have been climbing for weeks. With home testing and mild or asymptomatic cases unreported, the official numbers are almost certainly an undercount. Yet no guidance has emerged from the state or federal governments on how to handle this uptick — presumably because they fear the public is “tired” of the pandemic.
This is irresponsible. Scrase states that the goal now is to prevent serious illness, not infection, relying almost exclusively on vaccines and antiviral medication. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has echoed this. Yet given the rate of breakthrough infections even among those fully vaccinated and boosted, we know vaccines aren’t enough. The article cites CDC’s own statistics indicating that roughly 20 percent of patients who contract COVID-19 also contract long COVID — a constellation of debilitating symptoms with no definite cure. According to an Associated Press story (“Study: Vaccine won’t prevent ‘long Covid,’ “ May 26, a recent scientific study demonstrated that a third of veterans who contracted COVID-19 developed long COVID. Even mild infections in healthy people can result in long-term disability.
I know someone with long COVID. She struggles to breathe, can barely work, is always exhausted and suffers from chronic pain. The solution to this public health crisis isn’t simply providing a third of COVID-19 patients with disability payments and praying for a medical miracle. The solution is preventing infections in the first place.
We know how to do this. Health officials previously emphasized a layered approach to tackling this wily and persistent virus: Vaccines, yes, but testing, masking and social distancing as well. After the isolation of recent years, we’re all anxious to socialize and see loved ones; and we know this is also important for our mental and physical health. But to do so safely, we need vastly more widespread, easy, free, accurate testing, so that as people go about normal lives — attending weddings, traveling for work, visiting friends — they can quickly know beforehand whether they are infected and then stay home if they are.
Public health officials and community leaders set the tone, and for the past year the overarching message has been, “Go back to normal.” The result, repeatedly, has been a few months with lower case counts followed by another surge with new variants. Unless we change our COVID-19 strategy, this cycle will continue indefinitely; this virus isn’t going away.
Instead, officials and community leaders need to strongly encourage everyone to test frequently to slow the spread of infection and to wear masks indoors whenever possible. Not just medical personnel, but restaurant staff should be required to wear masks at all times. (Would you really want to eat a meal that a server or cook coughed on?) Scientific studies have demonstrated the strong efficacy of KN95 and N95 masks for reducing the spread of COVID-19 between two people when both parties wear one. (Their efficacy is still impressive but declines when only one person wears a mask.) This layered approach protects everyone, including immune-compromised people who are most at risk of infection or serious illness. The federal and state governments need to provide the funding and resources to make widespread testing and masking possible.
In short, given the prevalence of long COVID, the vaccine-only approach is not preventing serious illness. To anyone who complains that masks or testing are inconvenient — consider others who are even more vulnerable than you. And consider how inconvenient your own long COVID would be.
Amy Mathews Amos is an environmental and science writer who lives in Santa Fe. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, High Country News and Scientific American.
