What Controlling COVID Actually Means – The Atlantic
February 18, 2022
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols. In many parts of the country, restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters are operating at pre-pandemic capacity, not a face covering to be seen; even grade schools and universities have started to relax testing and isolation rules. These policy pivots mirror a turn in public resolve: Two years into the pandemic, many Americans are ready to declare the crisis chapter of COVID-19 over, and move on to the next.
We can debate ad nauseam whether these rollbacks are premature. Whats far clearer is this: Weve been at similar junctures beforeat the end of the very first surge, again in the pre-Delta downslope. Each time, the virus has come roaring back. It is not done with us. Which means that we cannot be done with it.
Whats up ahead is not COVIDs end, but the start of our control phase, in which we invest in measures to shrink the viruss burden to a more manageable size. This is the larger, longer game were having to think about, Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me.
Read: Endemicity is meaningless
To even think of controlling COVID for the long term means knocking up against some of the limits of our knowledge. Our future will depend both on the viruss continued evolution, impossible to predict right now, and on our response, which will hinge on the strength of our resources and our willingness to deploy them. Every disease that troubles us prompts some sort of reaction; for this one, the nation is still deciding how much to invest. Control, then, cant mean putting the virus behind usquite the opposite. It means keeping tabs on it, even when its not terribly abundant; it means building and maintaining an arsenal of weapons to fight it; it means having the resources and sociopolitical will to react rapidly when the threat returns. Monitor, then intervene, then monitor, then intervene.
Taking this challenge seriouslytrying to properly contain a deadly, fast-moving, shape-shifting virus that has spent the past two years walloping uscould require a revamp of the standard American approach to quelling disease, on a scale the nations never managed before. Well have to write a brand-new public-health playbook, and figure out a way to execute it.
Control is a simple word that, in the realm of infectious disease, doesnt come with a sharp definition. It is possible, in some cases, to roughly anchor the concept to epidemiological goalscutting cases of X disease by Y percentage by Z year, say; organizations such as the World Health Organization have set benchmarks like this for the control of measles, malaria, and tuberculosis. For COVID, too, we may eventually agree upon milestones to measure where youre at, Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, told me. But hard numbers are not necessary to define a control program, says David Heymann, an epidemiologist and global-health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. What unites diseases that are under control is human efforta sustained commitment to restrain a pathogen, and hack away at its harms.
Controlled diseases, then, might be better imagined as ones that do not impact a lot of social functions, and do not drastically exacerbate inequities, Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and global-health expert at Yale University, told me. Control manages a threat down into something that society can accept day after day after daypractically, less disease, less death, less suffering than might otherwise occur. It is how we talk about diseases were doing something about, says Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University.
Read: How public health took part in its own downfall
With COVID, one of the only things we can be sure about is that control will be difficult. The coronavirus spreads stealthily and speedily, and can hop among many animal species; it shape-shifts frequently, such that our immune systems have trouble keeping track. All of this will make it tougher to suppress. But with the tools we haveamong them vaccines, treatments, tests, masks, and air filtrationa less chaotic reality than the one were living now also remains within reach. Exactly what degree of control is possible will depend on the precise (and still-evolving) potency of those toolsthe durability of shot-induced protection, for instanceand how broadly and equitably we can distribute them. Controls timeline can also stretch extraordinarily long. After millennia of coexistence with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which kills some 1.5 million people a year, humanity is still trying to diminish its staggering global burden.
We also know that COVID control wont be static. At this point, we can expect disease to wax and wane. But bringing the virus to heel, and keeping it there, will require monitoring it even when it appears scarce. That starts with a commitment to surveillancetracking where and in whom the virus is circulating, how quickly its levels are rising, and whether a new version poses an additional threat. The granular details that surveillance offers can help policy makers plan a response. Early blips of a variant thats highly immune evasive, for instance, might demand a different response (consider updating the vaccines) than one thats primarily pummeling the unvaccinated, elderly, and immunocompromised (boost the vulnerable, and shield them to squelch further spread). The virus will dictate a lot of the terms, Omer said.
That doesnt mean counting every case. But it does mean improving our capacity for testing, and being more systematic about whom and what in the population were surveyingand not just in the midst of a surge. Flu can offer us a starter package, at least technologically: The globe is freckled with surveillance sites designed to track where flu viruses are percolating, and what mutations theyre accumulating; in the U.S., an intricate network of hospitals, laboratories, and state and local health departments regularly shuttle samples and symptom data from flu patients to the CDC for analysis. To build capacity for COVID, well need better ways to zero in on infections, Nuzzo, of Johns Hopkins, told meones that arent biased by whos seeking out tests or who has access to medical care. We need a representative sampling scheme to know what were looking at, as its happening, she said. The more sensitive these systems are, the faster theyll be able to signal that a viral comeback is nigh.
Periods of relative calm, too, offer opportunities for institutions to prepare for the next difficult stretch. Medical infrastructure will need some suturing. Should COVID become a winter disease, it will slam us when many other pathogens do. We need to make sure our health-care systems are able to meet demand, Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Theres no single or easy solution for this, but we could start with building more flexibility into the systems we use to treat the sick. Staffing shortages could be patched with a supplemental workforce, while hospitals offer retention packages; mental-health resources could ease burnout in overtaxed personnel. Trained teams of community health workers could help bridge gaps in communication, and deliver care to where its often been lacking, says Camara Jones, an epidemiologist and a health-equity researcher at UC San Francisco. At the same time, the federal government could funnel funds into developing and maintaining stocks of high-quality masks, tests, and over-the-counter antiviral pills, with a particular focus on ferrying tools to high-risk settingslong-term-care facilities, prisons, and the likeso that they could be speedily distributed right when surges start, Anne Sosin, a rural-health expert at Dartmouth College, told me.
Read: Hospitals cant accept this as normal
Proper ventilation in public spaces, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, could also be key to COVID control. Done well, systematically decontaminating our air can exemplify public-health intervention at its bestone so constant, invisible, and ubiquitous that people can be protected without even knowing it, the difference between everyone boils their own water versus we have clean water everywhere, Whitney Robinson, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. But society-wide overhauls of infrastructure tend to be slow going. Schools, for instance, have been billed as an especially important target for these upgrades, but the pandemic funds that might drive such changes have plenty of other pressing uses too. And specific indoor-air-quality standards could push lawmakers to update building codes, but these, too, have been sluggish to arrive.
Our countrys immunity will need shoring up as well. In the United States, too many people remain unvaccinated, among them 19 million kids under 5, who are still ineligible for their shots. Demand for boosters has been tepid, and people who are older or immunocompromised dont always respond to their first dose. The situation abroad is even more dire; many nations still struggle to access the supply to deliver first doses, much less seconds or thirds. And the more susceptible hosts it finds, the more SARS-CoV-2 will split itself into new and dangerous forms. For Jones, the biggest near-term goal is to, as expeditiously as possible, vaccinate the world, she told me. Even after the foundations of protection are established, they will need updates, whether because our defenses against infection are dropping, because a surprise variant has arrived on the scene, or both. Going forward, vaccine mandates may have a heightened role to play, as certain businesses, schools, or entire jurisdictions try to buoy uptake, says Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at Yale. The policy is controversial, but the United States already has centuries of precedent to guide it, and thanks to flu shots, has long harbored the infrastructure to roll vaccines out en masse, and at a regular clip. If that capacity is partnered with policies that help close equity gaps, population immunity could soar. Ensuring that everyones up to date on their shots, Schwartz told me, is how we generate a lasting baseline of protection.
Not all COVID interventions can simply come on and stay on. Some tools operate at the individual level, and these are the control-phase wild cards. Their success depends not only on capacity and planning but on public acceptance. Protections wont work if no one is willing to adopt them.
If control is a moving target, then theres little question that response must shift in lockstep with the threat. Several experts told me we could reasonably expect a future in which we abide by a tiered system of response, with the stringency of public-health measures titrated to how much virus is around. The idea is that you can have gradations of every policy, rather than just taking everything on or off, Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician and global-health expert at Stanford University, told me. Such a system might be roughly analogous to how we categorize and respond to hurricanes. Most of the time, life can proceed as usual, our tools on standby, our surveillance systems whirring. But as soon as danger begins to brew, protections may start to kick back into place.
The mechanics of bringing such a system online hinge on three big questions. The first is about thresholdsdetermining what viral conditions merit what protective responses, and when those measures get rolled out or pulled back. Options abound: new cases per 100,000 people? Test positivity? Hospital capacity? A sharp upswing in viral particles, picked up by wastewater monitoring? First we have to choose one metric, or a combination, then set careful benchmarks to distinguish fine from less fine from way less fine from actually, thats quite bad. But each option has its flaws. Case counts depend on people showing up for limited available tests and arent representative of the larger population; hospitals fill too late to nip a blooming surge in the bud and dont capture less severe cases; wastewater analysis is fast and reliable, but too coarse to show whos getting infected and how bad their symptoms are. No one has pulled out a magic formula for switching measures on and off, Omer said. And different parts of the country will probably come to different conclusions.
Even if we manage to reach a consensus on cues, theres not a lot of obvious intuition about the second big question: which precautions should take priority. With COVID, the manuals still being written, but it could go something like this: Say theres a surge next winter. An initial upswing in cases might prompt your company holiday party to, once again, require employees to test to attend; your local grocery store to, once again, ask that you mask. Local leaders might set up mask- and test-distribution centers throughout the community so residents can grab and go. These early pivots put the focus on the tools that are, in theory, lower-effort investments that dont impede much mingling and help keep most businesses afloat. The leading edge of a wave is also an essential time to buttress blanket protections: If older or immunocompromised individuals have skipped boosters, they might be nudged to catch up; if hospitals are running low on personnel, reinforcements might be rallied and deployed. We dont waste the lead time were given, Omer said. Should all go well at this stage, the outbreak could quickly be quashed.
Read: The millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo
But if cases continue to climb, if ICUs begin to fill, if a new variant starts to sidestep the protection that vaccines or previous infections left behind, those are signals to go stricter. New vaccine mandates or booster requirements could kick in. Government or business owners could put in place capacity limits in restaurants and entertainment venues, flip to work-from-home policies, or amend travel protocols, to ensure that the outbreak doesnt spiral out of control. As a last resort, policy makers could consider shutting entire swaths of society downclosing schools and other essential institutions, Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and epidemiologist, and a senior fellow at Kaiser Health News, told me. Things would have to really get bad for that, she said: basically, if we get to the point where hospitals are not able to function.
The trick is balancing public well-being with palatability. Which raises the third, and thorniest, issue: Who gets to make these decisions, and who bears the cost if plans go awry? Thats what it ultimately comes down to: how much of what were doing is mandatory versus motivated by personal risk-based decisions, Nuzzo told me. Certainly, if deaths are skyrocketing, if health-care systems are near the point of collapse, governments will need to step in. Where experts start to diverge, though, is on questions of whos in charge at every other stagewhether governments or individual members of the public should conduct the brunt of risk assessment and management.
Mandates are the business of leadership. Their strength is that they reach more people, Julia Raifman, a health-policy expert at Boston University, told me. And they reach them more equitably. A coordinated response, helmed by leaders with money and a platform, can present a unified front against an incoming threat, and offer people clear-cut guidelines to follow. Denmark, which recently announced that it was lifting nearly all of its COVID restrictions, has embarked on a rather extreme version of this tactic, its government repeatedly removing and reimposing restrictions as circumstances shift. At its best, such a strategy can be especially well aligned with an infectious threat: Collective danger merits collective response.
Read: How Denmark decided COVID isnt a critical threat to society
But totally extracting personal choices from the equation of disease prevention is impossible. Adherence to mandates and long-term investments in protective behaviors are tied to the levels of trust we have in one another and in the people who lead us, Tom Bollyky, the director of the global-health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. He and his colleagues have found that in outbreaks past and present, trust in government seems to buoy vaccination rates and the adoption of infection-prevention behaviorssuch as hand-washing and physical distancingthus curbing contagion. In the U.S., with its streak of individualism and eroded confidence in the government, the chances of following the Danish model appear essentially shot. Plus, policies that are constantly switching from on to off run the risk of losing public interest each time they flicker. In the United States, decisions about mandates have also been left up to states, even to local jurisdictions, seeding a patchwork of policies. Many Americans have had to wearily navigate the chaos of living in a masks required neighborhood and working in a masks not required one.
For these reasons and more, several other experts are wary of a mandate-forward approach. Nuzzos among them. We have to be sparing with what were asking people to do, Nuzzo said, both to keep people invested and to preserve their stamina for the next infectious crisis. Schwartz, of Yale, feels similarly. Most mandates are a lever to be pulled in case of emergency and, generally speaking, are far too great a sledgehammer to wield at other times.
When it comes to daily-use interventions, such as masks, Watson, of Johns Hopkins, thinks that Americans might feel better if theyre told its okay to strike out on their own; such an idea could even be actively empowering, if people feel that theyre able to make informed choices in times of crisis. Heymann, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says a version of this is now in place in England. The government shifted risk assessment and risk management to the individual, he told me. Masks, tests, and vaccines are widely available to residents; people are advised to cover their faces in certain crowded settings, but theres no outright legal requirement under most circumstances. Should Americans follow suit, Watson imagines they might benefit from a tool to help guide personal, day-to-day choicessomething like a weather forecast for infectious disease, which might take the form of a computer- or smartphone-accessible feed of data on local viral conditions. The precursors for a system like that are already taking root at the CDC, and with information in hand, she thinks that people will take their own actions to protect themselves. In the same way that weather apps issue winter-storm advisories, or flag high local pollen counts, governments could flag that a ton of virus is in the vicinity, and recommend precautions.
Still, Watson and Schwartz admit that a system like this has no precedentit would be a large-scale reimagining of how we think about prevention, Schwartz said. Americans have never had to be so keenly aware of how much of a respiratory virus is bopping around. And not everyone will be eager or able to opt in. Many will simply lack the time or resources to check such a forecast, much less act on the intel, especially if access to masks, air filtration, and tests remains a premium in this country, Deshira Wallace, a health-equity researcher at UNC Chapel Hill, told me. And while the weather provides its own feedbackprecipitation is visible and audible; temperature can be feltviruses elude our senses, so their perils are harder to gauge. Theyre much more insidious. One persons ignoring a rainy forecast risks only that they get wet, but an individuals negligence in responding to infectious disease can sicken both them and someone else.
This is the problem with wrangling viruses: They do not obey the boundaries of bodies, or of cities or states. When they spill between people and communities, they ratchet up everyones risk. In the face of collective risk, the better bet will be at least to choose some policy, with the understanding that well have to tweak and finagle it, rather than select door No. 3total inaction, an opportunity for the virus to run roughshod over us because we simply let it.
Disease control, when its done right, is as much a social undertaking as it is a scientific one. Weak social infrastructures can derail containment and push goals out of reach. But just as neglect can augment burdens, investment can diminish them. Public health travels at the speed of trust, Dartmouths Sosin told me.
Even when state or federal governments falter, trust can still be forged. Springfield, Missouri, vanished its masking requirements in May 2021, and I dont think well ever go back, Cora Scott, the citys director of public information and civic engagement, told me. But she said she and her team feel that theyre still making inroads on mitigation by recruiting local messengers. For months, theyve been pouring resources into getting the citys still-low vaccination rates upan initiative thats included sending public-health personnel door-to-door.
Leveraging the strength of communities will be an essential strategy in the months and years to come. For a long time now, American confidence in government has been troublingly low. But people still place immense trust in their own health-care providers, for instancethe individuals who feel close to home. And the tactic has played a role in halting outbreaks before. Bollyky points out that partnerships between local and national leaders, bulwarked by community liaisons, helped turn the tide during the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Key to all of this is paying attention to the specific needs of individual communities, Andrea Milne, a medical historian at Case Western Reserve University, told me, and tailoring policies to suit them. What works to stamp out misinformation in Guinea wont necessarily be what gets shots into arms in Springfield. Locals will understand those differences best, and know how to navigate through them.
Read: The seven habits of COVID-resilient nations
HIV, too, offers an example of a virus that can be well managed via a community-centered approach, El-Sadr, of Columbia, said. In the past four decades, infections have become more bearable through the development of powerful and readily available antivirals and tests that can be taken at home, through routine surveillance for infections, and through public investment, education, and partnerships with the communities most severely affected by disease. Milne points to the San Francisco Model of AIDS care, which has centered a multisystem, holistic approach in beating the citys epidemic back. Even in its early days, the program focused not just on clinical care but on getting food to people, and making sure people could afford bus rides to the doctor, she said. Community members were doing the educating. People were treated not just as patients, but as agents in this health-care work. In the years since the models debut, new HIV diagnoses in San Francisco have plummeted.
SARS-CoV-2 is an entirely different pathogen, but our current response to it risks rehashing some of the failures of the early HIV response, shifting the burden of suffering to the vulnerable. The task of taming this new threat, El-Sadr told me, can and should bear hallmarks to the successful strategies weve leaned on before. Theres even opportunity to riff and expand on the templates that past pandemics have offered: to introduce paid sick leave and food assistance; to speed the development of safer housing options; to meet the needs of people who are chronically ill, immunocompromised, and disabled; to address the inequities that have concentrated suffering in marginalized populations, both domestically and abroad. Pandemics are an opportunity to respond in the present but also prepare for the future. And if SARS-CoV-2 sparks its own revolution, that wont be the first time a virus has catalyzed lasting change. When theres no trust, its often because people feel they havent been listened to, El-Sadr said. In the HIV world, we always say, Nothing about us without usno decisions should be made about the fate of a particular group of people without their involvement. I think thats at the core of it. Its true that some of the best public-health interventions are ones we dont notice. But others succeed precisely because they enlist peoples attention and use it.
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What Controlling COVID Actually Means - The Atlantic
