WASHINGTON—From the reactions I’ve heard, when the The US Department of State raised its travel advisory for Canada this week to “Level Four: No Travel”, some Canadians took it as an insult.
They’re good at judging, right? Have you looked in the mirror?
But it’s not like that, I don’t think so. The US currently has about 80 countries on its no-travel list, which is meant as advice rather than rule. The notice does not change any border rules. It does not ban travel or tighten restrictions. It’s just an acknowledgment that COVID-19 is very widespread in Canada right now, which, if I’m reading the work of my colleagues at Star correctly, is a pretty accurate assessment.
Meanwhile, Canada has the entire world covered with its global travel advisory to “avoid any non-essential travel outside of Canada.”
For Canadians who see the pandemic situation in the US as an indicator of what comes next, there are alternating doses of good and bad news.
The first bad news is that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are as bad as or worse than during last year’s peak. During the last two weeks, according to New York Times tracking dataThe US has averaged more than 780,000 new cases per day, more than 1.5 times more than two weeks ago. Hospitalizations nationwide increased 82 percent during the same period. Deaths have increased by more than half.
The head of the US Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Janet Woodcock, told Congress this week: “Most people will get COVID.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the famous director of the National Institutes of Health, said something similar: “Omicron will find almost everyone.”
It sure looks like this.
The good news is that in much of the Northeast, where Omicron first caused massive outbreaks in the US, infection rates may have peaked. Here in Washington, DC, confirmed cases are down 17 percent in the past two weeks, even as schools and restaurants have stayed open.
But the bad news here is that hospitalizations continue to skyrocket (which might be expected, since hospitalizations are a lagging indicator). it is somewhat reassuring that most area hospitals report Have ICU capacity. Test positivity rates remain sky-high at 25 percent. Dr. Bob Watcher, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that in San Francisco it’s fair to assume that one in 10 people have it, and many other experts have suggested that the actual rates of Omicron cases are much higher than confirmed reports indicate.
In other good news, there is plenty of evidence, in the US and abroad, that vaccines, and boosters in particular, offer strong protection against severe cases of COVID-19 that can lead to hospitalization or death.
But there’s some bad news with that: The northeastern cities where Omicron appears to have peaked are among the most highly vaccinated regions in the country. In other words, there could be reason to hope that the regions where Omicron is still spreading rapidly will be places where fewer people are vaccinated. And in rural areas of many states where vaccination rates are low, there tend to be fewer hospitals and less ICU capacity.
This wave of Omicron, in the US, could get even uglier.
Many US commentators (and, anecdotally, many Americans you meet) seem to be interpreting Fauci’s and Woodcock’s warnings about how Omicron is spreading as confirmation of a kind of COVID-19 fatalism: if we affects everyone, why bother taking precautions? ? This feeds into the “I’m over this, whether I’m over it or not” attitude I wrote about before the break.
However, the doctors’ point is that, given the prevalence and transmissibility of this variant, and perhaps others to come, who knows? — it’s important to get vaccinated and boosted to protect against serious infections, and to wear high-quality masks to slow the spread so hospitals can keep up. This seems pretty sensible.
One last piece of good news: Vaccination rates have been slowly and steadily increasing. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 63 percent of Americans have now been fully vaccinated (67 percent of those eligible), and more than half of those who are vaccinated have received a booster shot. And people are still getting their first dose: Over the last month, while about 16 million Americans received boosters, another 8.8 million received their first dose of the vaccine. Seventy-five percent of Americans have now received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Those vaccination rates are about 10 percent lower than Canada’s (on both the full-dose and single-dose fronts), but they represent progress.
Still, if the State Department were to issue travel advisories to Americans about locations in the US, the entire country would likely be stamped with the DO NOT TRAVEL designation. It wouldn’t be an insult. It’s just good advice, based on the circumstances.
Reference-www.thestar.com