A LULL, NOT A BYE-BYE — So now what? As Nightly told you last week, we’re probably heading into a pandemic lull. Not today, but soonish. Fewer cases, fewer hospitalizations, fewer deaths. All good. But a lull doesn’t mean an end. And if we want to use the lull wisely to prepare for the next wave — or a future pandemic — we need public health to do a better job communicating to avoid a repeat of the whiplash, anger and distrust that’s worsened division and prolonged the mess we’ve been in. We, the public, also need to do a better job of listening to nuance but admittedly, based on what we’ve seen over the last two years, that’s a tall order. Everyone really wants the pandemic to be over (and for those of you who have decided it already is, let me remind you that Covid was the second leading cause of death in the U.S. in January. Deaths are still running around 2,500 a day). But this virus doesn’t care what we want. So we have to change how we talk about the future, Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, suggested in an interview with Nightly. Right now “living with the virus” is often short-hand for ignoring it. What it should mean, instead, is respecting its cadences and knowing when to dial up and dial down our protective responses. When we can do most of what’s really important to us — and when we need to slow it down. Maybe not another “hot vax summer” but a pretty enjoyable spring. Jha in a recent tweet thread likened virus precautions like masks to rain boots and umbrellas. You don’t need to use all of them when it’s drizzling, but you are way better off having them when it pours. And sometimes it’s going to pour. But public health hasn’t always done a good job of conveying that uncertainty, so some people feel betrayed or manipulated or lied to when the advice changes. That’s when the demonization of “lying” scientists gets ugly. And counterproductive. Jha and other experts also worry that there’s a growing belief out there — a hardening but inaccurate conventional wisdom — that viruses always evolve to get less dangerous. “That’s wrong,” he told Nightly. “They can be more deadly,” he told Nightly. Omicron may have been milder than its predecessors, but it’s possible that son (or daughter or third cousin) of Omicron could be a whole lot worse. Or not. We just don’t know. There’s also too much faith in our acquired immunity, he said. Yes, we have built up a lot through vaccination, natural infection or both. But that immunity, while probably pretty strong right now, is impermanent. It won’t go away entirely — our immune systems are smarter than that. But based on what researchers are seeing to date, it’s likely to wane. “People who think natural infection is their ticket to ride for the rest of this pandemic are looking forward to multiple rounds of infection,” Jha said. More variants — and more surges — are almost certain, Johns Hopkins virologist Andrew Pekosz and his colleague Crystal Watson, an expert on public health risk assessment, told a Bloomberg School of Public Health media briefing this week. But we also have more tools to cope with that: vaccines, first and foremost, but also new medicines, better understanding how to treat people who get sick, and more abundant testing and supplies. So public health officials say the lull is a time to keep preparing: stockpiling tests and drugs and vaccines and supplies. And if we end up not needing them, terrific. As Jha pointed out, we spend a huge amount of time and money stockpiling defense equipment and running strategic planning exercises year after year. If there’s no attack, nobody gets mad or makes death threats against the Pentagon’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci. Having adequate, reliable supplies of those pandemic-fighting tools — which we didn’t have in 2020 — without panicked scrambling will help us manage future outbreaks, said Mandy Cohen, who stepped down a few weeks ago as North Carolina’s top health official. Public health officials should acknowledge, even lean into, the uncertainty. “Talking in absolutes has gotten folks in trouble,” said Cohen, who did something like 150 public briefings during her tenure, with graphs and data that shed light on both the known and the unknown. Not to make hope the strategy. But to have a strategy that enables us to hope. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author on Twitter at @JoanneKenen.
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