The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
38 breakthroughs in a week — yet we return to masks
We’re back into an abnormal existence not to protect the vaccinated among us, but to ensure the health of that 20 percent of eligible people who won’t protect themselves.
In the six days between July 28 and last Tuesday, a COVID resurgence led to calls for the governor to slap on new restrictions. Events were canceled. Connecticut recorded 2,352 new cases, up from just 299 in a six-day period a month earlier.
And the number of those new positive tests among people fully vaccinated? A grand total of 38 according to data the state released Thursday.
That means if you were one of the 2.2 million vaccinated Connecticut residents, your chance of testing positive in that stretch was one in 57,000. No inoculation card? You were 90 times more likely than your vaccinated friends to come down with a documented case of COVID-19.
As we return to wearing masks in supermarkets, as we fret over long-anticipated gatherings now suddenly postponed, it’s hard not to feel the anger rising up your forehead. We’re back into an abnormal existence not to protect the vaccinated among us, but to ensure the health of that 20 percent of eligible people who won’t protect themselves.
Oh, sure, children under 12 can’t have the salve, and a few people with medical conditions can’t, either. We’re protecting them too by wearing a mask — which really isn’t much of a burden. But the numbers of those cases don’t justify dramatic action.
Besides, science tells us that if just half of Connecticut’s 575,000 unvaccinated residents and their fellow holdouts around the nation would roll up their sleeves, we wouldn’t have to worry about children, the old and the sick.
Love, respect and anger
And so the reality sets in: An overwhelming majority of citizens doing the right thing must sacrifice for the benefit of a largely uneducated crowd of folks who choose to snub civilized society.
That’s OK with state Sen. Saud Anwar, the South Windsor Democrat who must heal these holdouts in his day job as a lung doctor.
“That’s where the community comes in,” Anwar told me on July 28, the first day of that six-day stretch. “The way I live with this situation is that education is a process. So I know that many of the people I’ve interacted with, I’ve been able to educate them and work with them to get them to be vaccinated.”
I was heartened to hear he’s had some success. I’ve heard that from other docs, including Dr. Tichianaa Armah, head of mental health at Community Health Center Inc., herself a former skeptic who became a vaccinator to persuade fellow African Americans it’s okay.
Anwar continued, “There is a mistrust but there is also a lack of enough knowledge and there is misinformation that’s out there. So when you overcome some of those with the people who are willing and looking at the ground realities, they’re changing.”
I was no banner-waving cheerleader for the vaccine myself, especially as it came at us after just six months of testing and all that. But I took it when my turn came, three months into the shots. And by now we’ve seen hundreds of millions of people consume the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, with scant few problems and better than advertised protection.
The scandal is that decades passed without the FDA approving other vaccines and therapies using the technology that teaches cells how to defend themselves.
Back to the holdouts. Yes, we’re letting a few crank cases set the rules. Does a little part of me want the free market of Darwinism to work its magic, let nature take its course as these people blather about personal freedom? The thought is there, I can’t deny it.
“Somebody asked me the question,” Anwar recalled, “‘How are you going to treat a person who is critically ill, who actually is unvaccinated?’ I said, ‘Just like my family. Just like my family.’ The reason is that they have made a choice to make a decision, and if God forbid they get sick, I will treat them with the choice that I have, to give them everything and anything that I have to protect them.”
Great. The argument for civilized behavior wins.
“If everybody starts to think that we are just responsible to ourselves and anybody else that’s doing wrong, it’s not our problem, we don’t build a society like that,” Anwar continued. And for the sake of our society we just need to show love, respect, understanding and help them get to the point. There are some people we’ll never be able to change, and it’s okay for them to not change, it’s their right.”
Love? Respect? And we have to respect their individual rights? Okay, but we can ans should still turn up the pressure — no movies or concerts for you, no table at a Danny Meyer restaurant, definitely no seat on your favorite airline. And under Gov. Ned Lamont’s new order, no more nursing home job.
How bad is it?
We still don’t know how much of the blame for this delta variant spike lands at the feet of the unvaccinated-by-choice set. Of course we know from the Provincetown outbreak that vaccinated folks spread coronavirus. And of course there are many more breakthrough infections than we see in the test results.
But clearly, the worst states are the ones with low vaccination rates, like Florida and Missouri.
Patterns aren’t easy to see at this stage. For example, the number of people in hospitals in Connecticut, 174 as of Friday, stands at 14 percent of the wintertime peak — not far from the level Great Britain reached before it started to decline.
We even had a couple of days of declines this week, raising hopes that the spike was over.
“We’ll be on a much lower track,” said Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer and a thane of the coronavirus apparatus, “but I think we have a little bit further upwards to go before we start to plateau.”
Sure enough, hospitals added a net 19 more patients Friday. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants us to focus on the number of cases, and by that measure we’re a hot spot — but Connecticut conducts more than five times as many tests as the average state.
“There are so many different variables and it’s impossible to know how they compare with each other, Geballe said.
This much we know: Free cultures that encourage dissent don’t do well in a public health crisis. If you’re confused about how to treat the holdouts in your life, join the club.