Daily Admin Update
Day 48
Happy Saturday!
I hope that this update finds you well. I am doing it a little later in the day as my daughter Clara and I went for a 6 mile hike. It felt great to be out in nature and with my little one.
I drove by the school yesterday, so exciting. They have the windows covered as they are going to begin stuccoing soon and in my opinion that is when it really begins looking like a "real" school. I will be stopping in quickly next week and will take a few shots, it all seems to be evolving quickly.
I love and appreciate all of you in your many roles. As always I am here for you to support emotionally, financially, with food and love, please do not hesitate to reach out. SDCCS will stand strong together, we are here together to support any family.
With gratitude, warmth and love,
Sarah
There is scientific evidence for with most of us know intuitively, that time in nature is restorative, helps us recover from the stresses of daily life and improves our capacity to pay attention.
Three potential futures for Covid-19: recurring small outbreaks, a monster wave, or a persistent crisis
As epidemiologists attempt to scope out what Covid-19 has in store for the U.S. this summer and beyond, they see several potential futures, differing by how often and how severely the no-longer-new coronavirus continues to wallop humankind. But while these scenarios diverge on key details — how much transmission will decrease over the summer, for instance, and how many people have already been infected (and possibly acquired immunity) — they almost unanimously foresee a world that, even when the current outbreak temporarily abates, looks and feels nothing like the world of just three months ago.
It is a world where, even in Western countries, wearing a face mask is no more unusual than carrying a cellphone. A world where even at small social gatherings a friend’s occasional cough feels threatening, where workplaces have the feel of hot zones, and where taking public transit is not as much environmentally correct as personally dangerous.
“October 2020,” said emerging diseases expert Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, “won’t look nothing like October 2019.”
And neither will October 2021, according to an analysis released on Thursday by epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues. They envision three possible futures, depicted as seascapes, their waves of different heights and widths approaching the unseen and unsuspecting beachcombers on a placid shore.
In one future, a monster wave hit in early 2020 (the current outbreak of millions of cases and a projected hundreds of thousands of deaths globally by August 1), but is followed by alternating mini-waves of much smaller outbreaks every few months with only a few (but never zero) cases in between.
In the second scenario, the current monster wave is followed later this year by one twice as fierce and even longer-lasting, as the outbreak rebounds after a summer when a significant drop in the number of cases and deaths led officials and individuals to let down their guard, relax physical distancing more than was safe, and fail to heed (or even detect) the early warning signs that a new outbreak was gathering force. After this doubly disastrous second wave, the sea is almost calm, marred only by an occasional wave of cases that number barely one-fifth of what the fall and spring of 2020 saw.
In the third possible future, the current wave creates a new normal, with Covid-19 outbreaks of nearly equal size and, in most cases, duration through the end of 2022. At that point, the best-case scenario is that an effective vaccine has arrived; if not, then the world experiences Covid-19 until at least half of the population has been infected, with or without becoming ill.
What all three scenarios agree on is this: There is virtually no chance Covid-19 will end when the world bids good riddance to a calamitous 2020. The reason is the same as why the disease has taken such a toll its first time through: No one had immunity to the new coronavirus.
“This pandemic is not going to settle down until there is sufficient population immunity,” slightly above 50%, epidemiologist Gabriel Leung of the University of Hong Kong told a New York Academy of Sciences briefing.
Since the world “is far from that level of immunity,” said Osterholm (he estimates that no more than 5% of the world population is immune to the new coronavirus as a result of surviving their infection), “this virus is going to keep finding people. It’s going to keep spreading through the population.” And that, he said, “means we’re in for a long haul.”
The uncertainty over what the long haul will look like — a staggering third scenario or a much less brutal first — reflects the host of unknowns surrounding an outbreak unparalleled in modern history. Scientists are still racing to understand everything from the basic biology of the virus (how much do warm temperatures and high humidity reduce transmission? how many people were infected, and if they have immunity, how long does it last?) to the impact of mitigation strategies (does closing K-12 schools help enough to justify the cost to children’s education?). The answers will affect which future comes to pass.
Perhaps the greatest unknown involves human and social values. To put it bluntly, how many deaths can a particular country, city, or community tolerate? “Reducing infections to zero is not possible, and would come at too high a cost,” Leung said.
Different countries will decide what “too high” means; Sweden, for instance, has imposed only modest physical distancing steps, such as banning large gatherings, but its schools, restaurants, stores, and workplaces have remained open. It has fewer cases per 1 million people than Spain, Italy, the U.S., France, the U.K., and other countries that adopted stricter measures.
When STAT last asked experts what might happen if the new coronavirus were not contained, three months ago, Wuhan, China — the origin of the pandemic — had been on lockdown only a week. The world had just passed 10,000 cases. The U.S. had one (a man returning to Washington state after visiting family in Wuhan). Its first documented case of community transmission was still three weeks away. Yet there was a consensus that the outbreak would not be contained.
Instead, the experts told us, while the new coronavirus might settle down and simply cause colds like the other four human coronaviruses already in circulation, it was more likely to return year after year like seasonal flu, causing illnesses much more serious than sniffles.
Now, more than 1 million U.S. cases and 64,000 deaths later, here are three possible futures that leading epidemiologists think the Northern Hemisphere could see. In each, the small wave in early 2020 represents China’s Covid-19 outbreak, which peaked in late January and February but was mostly gone by March (the dip). The next, much larger crest represents the pandemic outside of China, especially in Europe and the U.S. Each scenario runs through 2022, when there’s a reasonable chance a vaccine will have arrived and there will have been enough of it produced to inoculate hundreds of millions of people.
-By SHARON BEGLEY