The Ferret Sneezed
The Ferret Sneezed
By William Sargent
Chapter 18
The Case of the Declining Cases
February 23, 2021
I started to get excited in late February. Every morning I had been checking the daily graph of the number of Covid cases in the United States. The graphs were surprisingly robust. They had spiked markedly after every holiday and peaked at 250,000 cases on January 9th. but then declined dramatically. By February 23rd, the number of cases had dipped below 50,000 cases and it looked they might plunge to zero in less than a month.
During the following week the number of cases rose as patients called their doctors. That was the pattern that had appeared all year.
But this time instead of declining again the number of cases inexplicably rose. This confused everyone.
It was clear that human actions had played a part; the vaccine rollout was proceeding apace. People were used to social distancing and wearing masks and had probably increased their vigilance in anticipation of getting their shots. It also turned out that at least ten times as many people had had mild or asymptomatic cases than had been reported so we were that much closer to herd immunity.
To her great credit, Dr. Rochelle Wollensky, Biden’s new head of the CDC warned states not to relax their social distancing too soon.
But none of these human actions seemed to fully account for either the precipitous decline, or the troubling rise of cases after February 23rd.
The confounding, shape-shifting viruses were still in charge. Variants had cropped up all over the globe, some because of minor typos in their genetic code others because of wholesale recombinant shifts between neighboring viruses.
The results were decidedly mixed. Some variants were more deadly and able to overcome the available vaccines, however, a few had seemingly become more benign and more transmissible. The more virulent variations could already be driving the number of cases up but ultimately these variants would kill their hosts and die out themselves.
So, in the long run, the more transmissible and less virulent viruses could win out because they would overwhelm the more virulent forms and become more like their cousins that cause the common cold — troublesome but not deadly annual plagues. That is simply how natural selection and evolution works.
But scientists would need several more weeks of data before they knew for sure if the number of cases would rebound before the pandemic ran its natural course.
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Bill Sargent is a science writer and contributing columnist. His most recent book, Terror by Error? The Covid Chronicles, isavailable at Zenobia, Connelly’s, Betsy Frost design, the Little Store and through http://williamsargent.net, www.barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.
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