The Hill reports that the current head of the CDC notes:
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday warned of "impending doom" over rising coronavirus cases, telling the public that even though vaccines are being rolled out quickly, a fourth surge could happen if people don't start taking precautions. "I'm going to lose the script, and I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now I'm scared," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a White House briefing Monday. "We do not have the luxury of inaction," Walensky added.
Well we have been noting the phenomenon of increased cases. Namely as we vaccinate and as people recover from infection we are almost at 40% of the population which is no longer vulnerable. However 60% is and the incidence normalized by this change means we have a higher incidence in the vulnerable population than ever before! Why? That frankly is the question CDC should be providing the answer to. It appears regrettably that the current batch is no better than the last. Who are the vulnerable group?
We have done some limited demographics but the data is not adequate fro cross-tabbing temporally. The CDC should and must identify the at risk groups and the vector groups. We have abandoned contact tracing, which was fundamentally flawed from the outset. But we should be able to identify the infected.
Thus identifying the infected by demographic class one can then focus on remedying the expansion. This is hardly "doom", it is classic epidemiology. It is finding Typhoid Mary and isolating the problem. My concern is that for some reason the political sensitivity may be overwhelming.
Posts
