(Image Above) Californian citizens wear masks while walking in Del Mar, California
During this previous weekend after Thanksgiving, COVID 19 cases and hospitalizations surged. On Sunday the 29th of November, California saw over 8,000 people hospitalized with COVID 19, and during the week of Thanksgiving there were nearly 3,000 new cases across the state, which is a 109% increase compared to a month ago. The virus is disproportionally affecting African-American and Hispanic residents, as they have been found to be more likely to die from the virus(according to the LA Times).
The new surge in cases has led Governor Gavin Newsom and other county and state leaders to enact new restrictions in order to keep the public safe. The new restrictions are not only just a response to the new surge in cases, but also because medical professionals in California project that the cases could exceed statewide hospital capacity if nothing is done by mid December, which is only a couple weeks away.
Due to the amount of family gatherings that took place during Thanksgiving, and the closure of some hospital functions due to the holiday, it is predicted that the current case count for California is higher than it is currently. Los Angeles, along with many other California cities, went into lockdown today in response to the rise in cases. In Los Angeles, residents are prohibited from gathering with people besides those who live with them for any reason except for political protests and religious services.
With the new surge in cases, it is important that we follow CDC guidelines. This includes wearing a mask in public at all times, maintaining social distancing, not gathering in large groups, and making sure to wash your hands frequently. Its important that we follow these closely especially now, as there is a much higher chance of contracting COVID since there are more cases present.
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It is interesting to compare how the US has dealt with the coronavirus with how other countries have. It is rather frustrating to look around and see other countries like New Zealand and Australia become virtually covid-free as America regresses into quarantine yet again. Looking at the steps they have taken to lower the amount of daily cases (and keep them low), it is clear that they applied a much stricter quarantine protocol. As easy as it is to say that we should simply copy Australia, there are some key differences between a large country like the US and a small island like New Zealand or Australia, most significantly, hundreds of millions of people. Mobilizing such a large body of people to have a complete recovery will require time and patience on behalf of everyone.
I want to elaborate on Sophie Fayet's point on the US's approach in dealing with the virus. It's quite embarrassing that we're not seeing any improvement on containing the virus but rather a more rapid spread of it. Despite the effort in reducing the cases by social distancing and wearing a mask, many people seem to disregard that during the holidays. With all these new cases, I think it is vital that there are stricter restrictions on activities. We are in such a tightly packed community that one person carrying the virus is enough to spike the cases in the county. Another issue that I would like to address is people not wearing their masks or not seeing a need to as they consider themselves "young and healthy". Wearing a mask is not only to protect you but more importantly protecting those around you. It's extremely selfish to only think of oneself during this pandemic, jeopardizing other's well being. There isn't a rejection of wearing masks in other countries such as Japan and Singapore because it's a social norm to wear a mask when you're sick to protect others. This practice should also be in the U.S and even after the pandemic to ensure everyone's health.
It's strange to see that, even with how far we are into quarantine, people still have not learned how big of a threat COVID-19 is. It perplexes me as to why people don't believe coronavirus is real don't just be the bigger people and wear their masks. Realistically, even if they don't believe them to be effective, wearing a mask is going to get the US reopening quicker. If anti-maskers keep doing what they're doing they're just dooming this country to never reopen. However, if they just tough it out and wear their mask it would lead to a speedier reopening. Additionally, to build off Rachel's point on masks becoming a social norm, I, too, think that following the pandemic, many people will wear masks when sick in order to be courteous to others. I think that this pandemic has definitely opened up many peoples eyes to the importance of health and safety, and hopefully the masks carry through as something that should be implemented even following the pandemic. Lastly, while there are anti-maskers in places where masks are a norm, the amount of them is significantly lower than here in the US.
At this point, it is embarrassing to see how the U.S. is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our county has declared to be back in the purple tier because there have been approximately three-thousand new COVID cases in the past 30 days according to NBC News. Yes, masks are effective protection, but it is not the solution to end the pandemic. With the holidays going on, an increase in social activities can be a cause of the sudden rise in new cases. Families seem to forget about social distancing when it comes to holiday shopping. The importance of health and safety were overlooked and I wonder when the U.S. is going to fall back into country-wide quarantines at the beginning of 2021. Seeing other countries starting to open up again and going COVID-free really made me realize the importance of unity. Other countries, for example, China participated in a country-wide quarantine, and people were united in the fight to eliminate the spread of this virus. Looking at the U.S. I believe that the states are extremely divided in their opinions and approach. We see how terrible California is doing and there are other states where workers continue to work without proper COVID prevention. This whole situation is now frustrating, I wonder what would it take to further emphasize the danger of our situation.
It is not surprising to see that cases have begun to rise once again in California. It has been clear since the beginning that a second wave would hit, and now it has. California along with the rest of the United States has been in a vicious cycle. This cycle being us going on a strict lockdown, then people thinking the virus is gone resulting in careless actions, then cases going up, and the process repeats. Sadly, this cycle will continue to happen until an effective vaccine is distributed to a majority of the country. Until then more and more people will continue to be affected unless we as a country get our act together and take the pandemic more seriously than we have been doing so far.
I think that the response to Covid throughout the country has prompted me to not be shocked when I see news about Covid cases continuously going up. Every single time I see a holiday coming up in the calendar I worry about the gatherings that I know are going to occur across our country. This causes me to not be shocked when I see cases skyrocket after a big holiday. Unless the response of our country improves, we will constantly be seeing Covid cases reaching new numbers. I think that many people have grown fatigued of quarantine even though the threat is still serious. I hope that people realize that social distancing and following CDC guidelines is still very important. Even here, we have gone into the purple tier when we were in the midst of discussions about next semester.
Like the majority, I find this whole situation very frustrating and am not surprised by the spike we are seeing in the U.S. People have not been taking the pandemic very seriously, some not even believing it is very dangerous or even that it is real. However, our government officials have been very hypocritical. Elected officials have been telling people they should stay home and not see anyone outside the people they live with for Thanksgiving, but go ahead and have a gathering with several families. It doesn't make the people that they are setting guidelines and restrictions for, want to listen to them. They should be setting a better example for the people they are representing and listen to their own advice, or I do not see this situation getting much better until, hopefully, a vaccine is distributed.
On a local level, the increase in restrictions due to the rise in cases has already led to panic from many people. Similar to how people bought out household items during the spring lockdowns, items such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer seem to once again be leaving store shelves at a fast rate. Cases are bound to drastically increase as many individuals ignore the risks of COVID and meet during holidays with others. However, given the amount of time that it takes for symptoms of the novel coronavirus to become apparent, cases are not generally noted until about two weeks after some sort of major interactive event. Many people cite the vaccines being worked on as an immediate solution to the issue, but the reality is that the amount of time that it will take to manufacture enough vaccines for distribution on a large scale means that the public will not have much access to it until late spring or early summer, as first responders and at risk groups will likely receive the vaccination first time around.
I think the combination of vaccines on the horizon and just general cabin fever, both from social isolation and cold weather, is leading to people feeling invincible. Perhaps when one doesn’t have any connection to the virus, as in they don’t know people who have contracted or been hospitalized by COVID-19, the numbers may seem illusive and irrelevant. That’s simply lack of empathy, though. In addition, government officials and organizations have been flip flopping between “you may have some people over for Thanksgiving” (Gov. Gavin Newsom) to “traveling to see anyone for Thanksgiving is not advised” (CDC) (not direct quotes). The Thanksgiving full incubation period still has a few days, and I’m quite fearful of what the next week will hold. Health care workers are facing depression, anxiety and PTSD. The hospitals are facing 100,000 beds filled nationwide. I hope the nation’s stamina holds as to not collapse our health care system.
A lot of people are starting to crumble. It's clear that everyone is mentally exhausted from being stuck at home with nowhere to go every single day. But, it's imperative to continue to stay strong and not sacrifice the health of others for our own entertainment and change of pace. Even Gavin Newsom was outed for attending a dinner party with more than 10 people, or 3 families, showing that he's not even following his own rules that he put in place. I hope that Biden can efficiently target the issues of COVID-19 so that we can all move on from this season of life, even if it means abiding by extremely strict rules that other countries have set in place (like New Zealand, or South Korea).
Responding to Sofie, I think it's sort of expected that homogenous countries have a smoother time with mask-wearing and eventually having a low number of cases. But, New Zealand did in fact have a quick and effective lockdown right when they had a rise in cases. Hopefully, moderna's vaccine is extremely effective and allows the country to return to it's original state. To be realistic, although it's best that everyone continue to stay inside and follow safety rules, the pandemic has lasted 10 months. Some people ignored the safety regulations and are continuing to do some and some may be getting sick of the regulations because they find it pointless as the pandemic isn't getting better.
I believe we're in the midst of this holiday season where there's a month or less between major holidays, first Halloween, and there was a spike two weeks after that, recently Thanksgiving, we're in the spike from that now, and Christmas is coming up along with New Year's not even a week later. So as if partial isolation wasn't hard enough for people, there is now the temptation of all of these holidays. As if that weren't enough, there's also a deep mistrust in lockdown by a large amount of people in this country thanks to the president. So due to all those factors, I don't think the spikes we're seeing now are going to ease up until late January or February. Which is terrible, but that's the reality of the situation until there's a vaccine (which won't be easy to distribute sadly).
Even back in the spring when no one was quite sure how long this pandemic was going to last, scientists were already predicting the winter to be dangerous and result in the second peak of Covid cases and deaths. In addition to the weather being colder and leaving people more susceptible to picking up colds and diseases, we just had/are having four fairly big and social holidays almost back to back. Starting in October with Halloween, then going to Thanksgiving in November (Black Friday also certainly not helping), and now rapidly approaching Christmas and then New Year's. I think it was definitely smart to place more restrictions on us, although I think it would have stopped the increase faster and been more helpful if these stricter restrictions had been in place starting before Halloween.
That being said, these restrictions and lockdown and Covid are mentally exhausting. It's hard to have to sit inside without outside contact and without an end in sight. The holidays are only going to make breaking these guidelines and restrictions more tempting, and I also think that the sad truth of the matter is that the longer people are in lockdown, the more comfortable they become with slowly breaking/finding ways around the rules. I sincerely hope that people can find a way to mass-distribute the vaccines and I hope that we can overcome this by next summer.
Over the past few weeks now, it feels like every week is a new opportunity for covid cases to hit record highs somewhere in the US. Even though Thanksgiving was one of the largest spikes yet, its honestly surprising how little everyone thinks of it. It's scary how desensitized the entirety of the pandemic has made people, including me. With new statistics being released every week about how a couple more thousand people have contracted a deadly virus I'm surprised how little a lot of people seem to care. I'm mainly talking about individual acts, not large scale things that have been done to help the nation. I'm talking about the amount of people that go out willingly, even though they know they are at risk of either giving others COVID or contracting COVID. It seems so foreign to me that so many people would go outside to hang out with their friends even if it means they give them the virus. However, with that being said I do get that life under lockdown has been difficult for everyone and some people need to get out. But, I still don't think that going outside should prioritize the health of those that you care about.
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