The Trouble With Vax-Pax-Unmask
Despite massive global data gaps, it is generally accepted that more than 6.3 million of 7.7 billion people have died as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic — that’s more than 0.08% of humanity lost to a single global event.
When SARS-CoV-2 hit the world in 2019, saying we were ill-prepared for it would be an understatement. Today, we have vaccines, medications, and non-pharmaceutical interventions like masks to help us through the COVID-19 pandemic. But case numbers and deaths continue to rise, because of inequitable access to interventions, ignoring science, and shortsighted and confusing policies.
Current policies in the US are often broadcast with confounding accompanying maps. For example, most media outlets display the CDC map for county levels of COVID-19 showing more than 80% of the counties at a “low level”, indicating fewer than 10 new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 population in the last 7 days. However, if we looked at community transmission — a measure of percentage of positive RT-PCR results for COVID-19 in the last 7 days, only 9.28% of counties are in the “low level”.
