Another challenge has to do with the complex immunological landscape, he said. It’s not just a matter of how many boosters people have that determines their level of protection, but when they’ve gotten them. Add to that the fact that the most vulnerable people are more likely to get vaccinated.
There’s another deceptive factor that can make it look like everyone is in pretty good shape, said Andrew Noymer, a demographer and associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. The infection fatality rate, a number many were obsessed with finding early in the pandemic, is probably now close to that of flu. But the disease is killing a lot more people than flu because so many people are getting Covid. It’s common for people to get Covid several times a year, whereas people tend to get flu — at most — several times a decade.
Even those public health experts who are furious with Biden for his remarks have had to concede they were wrong in claiming that we’d “crush” the pandemic if only enough people followed the rules, stayed locked down, or masked up for 100 days. “When this first arrived, we thought this would be a nightmare for six months and it would go away because we’d all have immunity,” said Noymer. “That hasn’t panned out.”
What Americans need is not to keep hearing the word “pandemic” but to get some clarity about what we should be doing. What do we owe our fellow citizens? What should we demand from our government? We don’t all share the same values, but we should at least have the chance to argue over the same data.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.