Where Reopening Is Working
We journalists don’t always pay enough attention to good news. So I want to highlight some this morning: Across much of the United States and Europe, the coronavirus has been spreading less rapidly than many people feared.
Yes, the caseload is
growing in some places, and they’re rightly getting a lot of attention. But the full story is more complex. Over the past six weeks — as communities have started to reopen, Americans have flocked to beaches and lakes and European schools have reopened — the number of new cases has continued falling in many places.
Across the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., they’re down more than 50 percent, and often much more, since May 1. Nationwide, weekly deaths have fallen for six weeks in a row. And Europe “seems to have turned a corner,” Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University says.
How could this be?
I put that question to public health experts, and they gave two main answers. One, the virus spreads
much less easily outdoors than indoors. “Summer — being outside, warmer weather, humidity — seems to help, and we may have underestimated how much it’s helped,” Ashish Jha, the incoming dean of Brown University School of Public Health, told me.
Two, many people are taking more precautions than they were in February and March. They’re wearing masks, remaining six feet apart and being careful about what they touch. “Even absent top-down health interventions” — like lockdowns — “people want to keep themselves safe,” Rivers said.
The combination appears to have eliminated most “superspreader events,” like parties, concerts and restaurant meals, where multiple people get sick. Such events may account for 80 percent of all transmissions, research suggests. (Read
this Times Op-Ed for more.)
I recognize that this is a somewhat dangerous message. Transmission rates in the U.S. are higher than they need to be, and they have begun rising again in parts of the South and West.
In Arizona, where the governor has played down the virus and hospitals are filling up, the situation looks especially bad. But many other places are showing what a responsible and effective reopening looks like.
One crucial caveat is that the virus will outlast the summer — everywhere. During the 1918-19 flu, transmission rates fell in the warmer months, only to soar again in the fall. “People thought it was over,” as Apoorva Mandavilli, a science reporter at The Times, said, “and stopped taking precautions.”
Where the news is worse: A few big countries where cases are still rising — India, Mexico, Russia, Iran and Pakistan — are nevertheless
ending their lockdowns, citing economic reasons.