A couple hundred years ago, in 1806, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson wrote an effusive letter to Dr. Edward Jenner, who had just created the smallpox vaccine. "Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility," Jefferson wrote in praise of the English physician. "Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated."
Jenner had indeed pioneered something great. But it took another 171 years for smallpox to be eliminated globally, which only happened in 1977.
Today, we're once again benefitting from tremendous science: the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are playing a critical role in getting us back to normality. But as historian Kyle Harper writes in a new piece for TIME, just as with smallpox, the coronavirus shots' ability to end the outbreak is being hamstrung by a society that has not fully embraced them.
"The example of smallpox elimination is one of many that reminds us the control of infectious disease requires both technical and social adaptations," Harper writes. "Technical solutions on their own are never enough."
While U.S. President Joe Biden's COVID-19 strategy gets an A on the technical front, the White House has not adequately grasped how societies respond to pandemics and what behavior changes are necessary worldwide to end them, argues Harper, author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Biden's plan calls for "evidence-based public health communications," but that's not sufficient, Harper says.
"A fully-fledged plan should establish an R&D agenda that draws from the social sciences and humanities; it should put in place the framework, resources and incentives to drive forward our knowledge of the determinants of successful public health initiatives," he writes. Among the issues that need to be addressed: declining public trust in the government and other institutions; the role social media plays in influencing how we feel about science; and the structural inequalities the pandemic has widened. "In short, we need a bold, coherent agenda to advance our understanding of the human side of the equation," Harper writes.
More than 479.3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this afternoon, of which nearly 397.7 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 56% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
More than 235.8 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 2 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4.8 million people have died. On Oct. 5, there were 399,075 new cases and 7,138 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 4.5 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 43.9 million coronavirus cases as of 2 a.m. E.T. today. More than 705,100 people have died. On Oct. 5, there were 95,756 new cases and 1,916 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Oct. 6, 2 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Rapid at-home tests will soon become much more accessible in the U.S., thanks to two recent developments. First, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday authorized a new mass-produced testing kit from Acon Laboratories. The company's antigen tests, which require a nasal swab, are relatively inexpensive at about $10, and produce results in 15 minutes. Acon plans to produce more than 100 million tests per month for now, and pledges to increase that to 200 million per month by February. Meanwhile, the White House is expected to announce today that it will spend $1 billion to boost the supply of at-home tests, which will quadruple the number available to consumers by early December.
In other rapid-testing news, Ellume, an Australian company that makes at-home tests used in the U.S. and elsewhere, has recalled nearly 200,000 kits due to concerns about false positives. That equates to about 5.6% of the 3.5 million kits the company has shipped to the U.S. Ellume chief executive Dr. Sean Parsons told the New York Times that the issue involves the quality of one of the materials used to make the test kit, though he declined to specify which one. The company's app will be updated to alert users if they attempt to use a potentially faulty test.
China is the last major country to continue pursuing a COVID Zero strategy, Bloomberg reports. Other places that were once on a mission to become or remain virus-free, like Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, have abandoned that goal, which some experts say is almost impossible to achieve. By clinging to the strategy, China is committing to such disruptive measures as abrupt lockdowns, border closures and social and economic limitations.
Vaccination prevented about 265,000 cases, 107,000 hospitalizations and 39,000 deaths among Medicare recipients between January and May. That's according to a new analysis published yesterday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, underscoring the life-saving importance of inoculation. Reductions in death from the virus were found for all racial and ethnic groups, though the largest benefit appeared to be for American Indians and Alaska Natives.
A Colorado hospital system will not perform organ transplants on unvaccinated patients, with few exceptions. UCHealth's policy made national headlines yesterday when Republican Rep. Tim Geitner shared on social media that a woman he knows was denied a kidney transplant because she's not vaccinated. According to the Washington Post, the woman was told that said she had 30 days to get her first shot, or she would be "inactivated" on the waiting list. Transplant patients are commonly asked to meet a variety of requirements, such as avoiding alcohol or stopping smoking.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
If you were forwarded this and want to sign up to receive it daily, click here.
Today's newsletter was written by Angela Haupt and edited by Alex Fitzpatrick.
沒有留言:
張貼留言