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 they had 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 me.
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.
Evidently, 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 cells.
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 was simply how natural selection and evolution work.
It turned out that scientists were equally baffled by this pesky disease. Back when the pandemic first emerged, they predicted it would become endemic and never go away.
But their initial dismay had turned to pleasure when they discovered that the virus remained stable throughout most of 2020. It seemed not to be mutating toward greater virulence or transmissibility.
They became positively ecstatic in November, when both Pfizer and Moderna’s clinical trials showed that their vaccines were 95% effective. They envisioned they might be able to control Covid-19 through vaccinations like measles, or that it might mutate to become like another seasonal flu, deadly but controllable if you kept ahead of it with the right vaccines.
Just before Christmas Pfizer’s chief virologist enthused the vaccines were a breakthrough for humanity. But by January he had changed his tune. He acknowledged that the rapidly mutating viruses heralded a new chapter where scientists would have to remain vigilant for newer more virulent mutations.
By late February the reigning paradigm had shifted again. Chris Murray who produced closely watched projections about the trajectory of the disease was shocked when saw data that showed that a South African variant of Covid could not only dampen the effects of the existing vaccines but could also avoid the immunity of previously infected patients.
He told a Reuter’s reporter that that he couldn’t sleep wondering when the pandemic would ever end. The following morning he started to revise his projection model so it would incorporate the new variant’s ability to evade natural immunity. It was a deeply depressing paradigm shift.
But ultimately 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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