Kansas Has Reached A Time For Celebration, Caution And A Lesson

By Gianfranco Pezzino, Kansas Reflector

March 17, 2021

The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Gianfranco Pezzino is a public health physician and former Shawnee County health officer who currently directs the Kansas Health Institute’s Center for Sharing Public Health Services.

Finally, some good news: vaccination against the coronavirus is gaining traction and the number of cases in Shawnee County and the rest of the state is going down. The number of immunizations administered has accelerated so much that the state has just announced we will move into phase 3 and 4 of the immunization plan, with hundreds of thousands of citizens becoming eligible for the vaccine.

The rate of vaccination in Shawnee County is almost 222 per 1,000 population, way ahead of the other metropolitan areas in the state, thanks to the incessant effort of our public health department (a real, often under-recognized hero in the pandemic), as well as hospitals, pharmacies and other providers. At the same time, the number of cases has plummeted to levels not seen since June. Hospitalizations have also decreased substantially.

In the past year, I have often been the messenger of grim news. Now I want to invite everyone to pause and reflect for a moment and celebrate these numbers.

A year ago, we were just starting our journey into a dark time full of disease, death, social and economic distress, and uncertainty. Now we can look forward to a summer in which we may be able to cautiously resume many activities that we could not enjoy last year, from traveling to hugging our loved ones.

While we can speculate about factors that are causing these favorable trends, in reality we don’t know for sure what is driving the changes, the same way that in the past we were not sure why infection rates would suddenly increase. For example, the number of cases in Shawnee County remained relatively stable throughout the summer (between 100 and 200 a week), but suddenly skyrocketed in October (when it increased by more than four times in four weeks). It has recently dropped about as fast.

In both instances, there were no clear, apparent reasons for those changes. This uncertainty alone should be sufficient to suggest some caution in our approach to relaxing those containment measures that allowed us to reach this point.

But there is more: something called “history.”

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, the virus mutated several times, becoming more transmissible and lethal at every mutation. While the virus that is causing the current pandemic is different from the influenza virus, it has also produced “variants,” some of which are more transmissible and cause more serious disease.

Variants emerge from mutations that occur randomly when the virus replicates, and the more the virus can replicate, the more the chances for those mutations to occur. That is why some of the variants have emerged in countries like South Africa and Brazil that have a high rate of infection and transmission. These variants (still relatively rare in our state) are in large part responsible for another surge of cases that is occurring in Europe, where countries like Italy and Germany had to quickly reimpose restrictions like those adopted at the peak of the pandemic one year ago.

Historically, trends observed in Europe have appeared two to four weeks later in the U.S.A. The good news is the vaccines used in the United States so far seem to be able to contain the spread of the current variants, although there is no guarantee that new variants will not emerge that can escape the vaccine if we give the virus sufficient opportunities to replicate and mutate.

Policymakers these days are making decisions that will affect these opportunities.

The Shawnee County Board of Commissioners last week indicated its intention to soon lift all required precautions and turn them into simple recommendations. This is a risky proposition. It will undoubtedly result in more disease and deaths, but perhaps more importantly it will increase the chances of the virus to mutate and produce the variant that nobody wants to see — one for which the vaccine’s effectiveness is reduced.

It is time for policymakers and all of us to show restraint and prudence. We can expand many activities currently restricted without lifting all the required precautions. Lifting all restrictions on the size of public gatherings or removing mask orders is just going to send the dangerous message that everything is fine and we don’t need to worry anymore.

Let’s resist the temptation to mistake our wishes for reality. We are in a much better position than before, but still in the middle of a pandemic. And without a reasonable, common-sense, measured approach, we risk negating much of the progress made in recent weeks.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.