I don’t like wearing a mask. Neither do a lot of other people who nevertheless wear one when out in public. Getting to live a few more decades by taking some basic though inconvenient precautions is preferable to dying from a coronavirus infection today.
However, even if we think that we do listen to the science, it’s still possible to misunderstand certain statistical trends. Former gubernatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, M.D. (D-Michigan), gives an explanation of the current trends in a new article in The Incision, his newsletter for news pertaining to health care and public policy.
The Incision is a publication for subscribers, but you can read the beginning of some articles without a subscription. Like this one about mask mandates that he published yesterday:
In New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and many more states, governors have recently announced the end of mask mandates, vaccine requirements for indoor dining, and other safety precautions. While there’s a lot of hope that this may, in fact, be the end of the pandemic, full reversals may be premature. Because, remember: We already did this before.
Yes, we have done this before. The pandemic was supposed to end last year, but then delta and omicron burst on the scene. Maybe we could say that the coronavirus classic pandemic ended and now we’re on to another pandemic.
Whatever we call it, people are tired of it. They want to get back to normal. And Democrats in high positions, like the aforementioned governors, want to oblige. But we must not drop our guard, even though the temptation is there.
I want to explain a peculiar paradox of this moment. Even though COVID deaths are falling precipitously, COVID mortality keeps rising. It’s led to a horrifying split screen that has triggered a particular genre of responses to those who haven’t thought deeply about the dynamics of this disease ... deaths are a lagging indicator. [emphasis mine] That’s because people don’t get infected with omicron and then immediately drop dead. It takes two to five days for the first symptoms to even manifest — let alone to cause death. People who are now dying of COVID are extremely unlikely to have been infected recently. Rather, they likely were infected with COVID two to four weeks ago, at the height of the surge. Dropping COVID precautions now will have zero impact on the death rate that day. While it sounds rash to drop precautions as deaths increase, the two are functionally unrelated. Indeed, the death rate will fall, and that’s because the case rate has been falling now for weeks.
So it’s not enough to look at a graph of coronavirus deaths, or even a moving average. We also have to consider things like hospital capacity and availability of medical equipment and supplies.
But even if all the numbers seem to be going in the right direction, that doesn’t mean we can ditch the masks. The Greek alphabet has plenty more letters...