STAT reports:

The U.S. is now confronting what public health experts have been warning about but many in the public had not absorbed: the coronavirus pandemic will be with us for many months, and lapses in vigilance will lead to more sickness and death.

The country as a whole is tacking on about 20,000 new Covid-19 cases to its 2.1 million infection tally each day, a clip that’s been steady for weeks, according to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker. But cases are surging in about half of states, some of which dodged major outbreaks in the spring as the Northeast and other pockets like New Orleans became inundated. The local outbreaks are leading to increasing hospitalizations in Arizona, Texas, Alabama, and the Carolinas — raising concerns about capacity when the original rallying cry of “flatten the curve” was meant to prevent overwhelming health care systems.

Experts had envisioned localized ups and downs as the U.S. epidemic dragged on. But the new bursts of cases have not galvanized a commitment to rein in the spread and steer those rises into downturns. Instead, there is fading attention in Washington, and many Americans seem inured by the steady stream of 800 daily Covid-19 deaths and desperate to return to work and daily life.

“I’m worried that people have kind of accepted where we are as a new normal,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Much of this was forecast. As states started easing back shelter-in-place restrictions last month, public health experts warned cases would increase. That’s simply the nature of the coronavirus: more people encountering more people provides more chances for the virus to pass from one to another. Plus, unlike in some countries, the U.S. lockdowns were eased at a time when there was still lots of virus circulating, so it was primed to resurge.

“We should expect to see that the virus will go wherever there are susceptible people,” said Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease expert at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.

But if initial lockdowns were meant to cut off as much transmission as possible and reduce it to manageable levels, they were also supposed to buy health authorities time to design strategies for the long haul, to come up with plans to keep a brake on spread so people could emerge back into life without an explosion of cases. Hospitals were meant to gear up for future spikes of seriously and critically ill patients. Health agencies had to build testing and contact tracing networks, which could keep spread at a simmer and prevent dangerous flare-ups. Authorities had to communicate to the public that some measures — including masks, distancing, and avoiding crowds — had to be maintained for the duration.

Now, we’re seeing the fruits of those efforts — and the lack thereof. [Continue reading…]