Rob Horowitz: COVID-19 Resurges

Rob Horowitz: COVID-19 Resurges

After a temporary leveling off in the United States, Covid-19 is now resurging with a vengeance, fueled mainly by states in the South and West that moved prematurely to open up, even though they weren’t even close to meeting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)  benchmarks.  A new record for most cases was set this past Sunday with nearly 45,000 recorded, according to CDC.  Last week’s total cases were the most for any week since the beginning of the pandemic, reports The New York Times.

Contrary to the misleading comments of President Trump and some of his allies, stepped up testing only accounts for some of the rise in cases. The percentage of people that test positive is going up. If the virus wasn’t spreading, it would be going down as we test greater numbers of people. Additionally, in states such as Texas and Arizona, hospitalizations are rapidly increasing and in certain areas are close to exceeding capacity. 

Recognizing this hard reality, the governors of Texas and Florida have finally pulled back from their too rapid re-opening. Governor of Texas Greg Abbott, to his credit, took responsibility for making a mistake in allowing bars to open back up too quickly: “If I could go back and redo anything, it probably would have been to slow down the opening of bars, now seeing in the aftermath of how quickly the coronavirus spread in the bar setting.”

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As we have now exceeded 125,000 deaths from coronavirus nationally, it should be evident to all that President Trump’s ill-advised efforts to wish it away and downplay its impact--- which continues to this very day-- have not only hamstrung the federal response, preventing the consistent public health messaging required to get people to socially distance and wear masks over a sustained period of time: it has resulted in his strategy of opening up early in order to jump-start the economy backfiring as the predictable resurgence of the virus dampens economic growth.

Perhaps, most importantly, the overall federal response still is falling far short of what is needed to curb the pandemic. As Dr. Anthony Fauci straightforwardly conceded last week, “Something’s not working.”  Among the problems he pointed to, are the failures of contact tracing.   We have less than 30,000 contact tracers working around the nation, according to CDC, when the lowest estimates of need are more than 3x that. The Donald Trump Administration simply did not use the time bought by having the nation in virtual lock-down to sufficiently ramp up testing to the levels needed to catch asymptomatic spread and never put in place the robust contact tracing program  done successfully by other nations and recommended by experts such as Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University

Even with sufficient numbers of tracers, contact tracing is tricky. States that are doing well at it, such as Massachusetts, are only reaching 60% of the people exposed to the virus. There is an added difficulty in getting people to comply with a quarantine/isolation protocol.  New strategies that employ trusted local residents as contact tracers must be employed and phone calls by themselves are still likely to be insufficient.  More resources and more energy are needed to increase its efficacy--and that requires a far more robust federal response to supplement and support what have been uneven state efforts.

The resurgence of COVID-19 should be a wake-up call to President Trump and all those who continue to downplay it. It stands in the away of re-booting our economy.  The many nations that have done a better job than us on curbing the virus have experienced much less economic damage. Most importantly, we have a little more than 4% of the world’s population and more than 25% of Covid-19 deaths.

Even at this late date, a stronger federal response can make a big difference. But even in the unlikely event that finally occurs, it will be up to each of us to continue to socially distance, wear masks and endure the other inconveniences that will make it possible to more fully re-open our economy and return to our pubic lives.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.