COVID-19 pandemic: Where is the U.S. national strategic and collective containment plan?
Please consider the following:
A- Surge in Asia
China
14 March 2022
“China orders 51 million into lockdown as COVID surges”
https://abcnews.go.com/International/china-orders-51-million-lockdown-covid-surges/story?id=83431247
In particular:
Shenzhen (13 March 2022)
“China locks down business center of Shenzhen amid Covid surge”
Hong Kong (11 March 2022)
“Hong Kong grapples with massive COVID-19 surge”
Shanghai (10 March 2022)
“Shanghai suspends classes as cases surge in China: Virus update”
South Korea
12 March 2022
“Covid explosion in South Korea”
South Korea reported a new record daily high of 383,665 cases, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said.?The Omicron-fueled surge in infections has recently led to more Covid-19 deaths, and also rise in severe and critical virus cases.
B- Surge in Europe (12 March 2022)
Please see below:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-cases-rising-uk-what-to-expect-us-rcna19891
领英推荐
C- In the U.S.
9 March 2022
- “The CDC’s new guidelines on Covid risk and masking send confounding signals”
- Having effective vaccines and therapeutics is not enough because the strategies that were chosen to deploy them are highly problematic relying heavily on individuals’ decisions.
Furthermore, the RNA-based vaccines are bad for a pandemic situation: too expensive, bad scalability, short shelf life, inadequate for children, not protective enough (breakthrough infections), not blocking the transmission of the virus in some people, having unknown long-term side-effects, not covering all variants, providing a protection of less than 6 months: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/02/11/covid-boosters-omicron-protection/.
- To contain the pandemic, the coverage of the booster eligible population is dismal. For example in the Bronx, New York: 27% and in Staten Island and Brooklyn: 32% on 12 March 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-covid-booster-shot.html
- To protect the most vulnerable only 66.8% of the U.S. population age 65+ had been boosted on 13 March 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254250/share-of-older-us-adults-fully-or-partially-vaccinated-against-covid/
This leaves more than 17 million people at an avoidable high risk of death.
Regarding preventive drugs, relying on individuals to be responsible and take them is irresponsible. Their collective and targeted utilization should be attached to a national mandatory* testing, tracing, and isolating campaign, which is the cornerstone of containment. Moreover, their efficacy against new strains is unknown and the resistance of the virus to them is inevitable, as it happened and is still happening with HIV. The latter is minimized by a very well framed usage at the domestic level. ?
14 March 2022
“Cases are on the rise again”
The national number of deaths per population ratio shows the dismal pandemic management and the absence of radical change does not bode well for the future, including new pandemics (please see previous posts).
Conclusions
Where is the U.S. national strategic and collective containment plan?
The COVID-19 pandemic ship is sinking but the CDC orchestra (among others) keeps on playing**
Drastic change is needed in global health.
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*Tomorrow, I will post a text on democracy and pandemics.
**Analogy with this event during the Titanic shipwreck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur9JHXirUBs
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