EDITORIAL: The finish line is paved with COVID vaccines

Gov. Steve Sisolak on Thursday announced a handful of measures intended to knock down the surging delta variant, and none of them involved going backward on business restrictions or lockdowns. Good. The tortuous path to normalcy depends on ramping up vaccination numbers, not on a return to government edicts of dubious efficacy.

Optimism tempered by realism remains a vital human tool — in terms of both mental and physical health — when dealing with challenging times. In that spirit, we offer a handful of anecdotes which offer much-needed hope regarding this latest coronavirus assault.

■ The United Kingdom and India appear to have emerged from a crippling attack by the delta variant in less than two months. Over the two weeks ending Monday, confirmed case counts dropped nearly 60 percent in the United Kingdom. A similar plunge took place in India, where cases fell almost 90 percent during June and July. The virus is also claiming fewer lives. Statistician Nate Silver calculated last week that the infection fatality rate in Britain — which includes confirmed cases plus an estimate of asymptomatic ones — at around 0.1 percent, similar to the seasonal flu.

■ Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb theorized in mid-July that the United States could be further along in the delta surge than suspected. Data from Johns Hopkins and the CDC indicate that transmissibility in some areas of the country has plateaued or is falling. That’s not true across the board — Nevada and other states have not hit this point — but it could indicate that a sudden downturn is possible in the United States, just as happened in Britain and India.

■ While confirmed cases now exceed the highs of last summer, they remain two-thirds lower than the peak in January. U.S. deaths are also much rarer today than at the same point in 2020. As July closed 12 months ago, the nation’s seven-day rolling average for fatalities was 1,205. A year later — despite more confirmed cases — that number was 360, a 70 percent drop. The vaccines are saving lives.

■ On the vaccine front, ABC News reported last week that “every state has reported an increase in its average number of first doses administered, with the national rate of Americans receiving their first dose up by more than 73 percent. Similarly, in the last week alone, vaccination rates have increased by nearly 20 percent in young Americans, ages 12-17, and by more than 25 percent in adults.”

■ It appears few politicians — Gov. Sisolak included — have a taste for reverting to the draconian measures that characterized the nation’s initial response to COVID. And with good reason. Numerous academic studies have found that businesses closures and lockdowns did little to stop the virus. An April analysis out of the University of Chicago, for instance, found that “shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior and small but adverse effects on the economy.”

David Leonhardt of The New York Times recently offered a unique perspective on our virus conundrum, emphasizing the need for humility rather than certainty. “Over the course of this pandemic,” he wrote. “I have found one of my early assumptions especially hard to shake … namely, that a virus always keeps spreading, eventually infecting almost the entire population, unless human beings take actions to stop it. And this idea does have crucial aspects of truth. Social distancing and especially vaccination can save lives. But much of the ebb and flow of a pandemic cannot be explained by changes in human behavior. That was true with influenza a century ago, and it is true with COVID now.”

Patterns during the pandemic, Mr. Leonhardt points out, show “that the mental model many of us have — in which only human intervention can have a major effect on caseloads — is wrong.” Michael Osterholm, who runs an infectious disease research center at the University of Minnesota, told the Times that “these surges have little to do with what humans do. Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.”

The policy implications are clear. Vaccinations are the best tool for dragging us across the finish line. No other strategy comes close. Get the shots.