COVID workers need support but anti-vaxxers not so much

Maine Writer- Gratitude echoed during this daunting pandemic and any other time, when the goal of our community is to support one another during particularly challenging times. (Be sure to scroll and read the comment posted on this Central Maine Editorial Board opinion. I pasted it at the end of the article.) 

Gratitude and grace needed during the holidays (and any other time too!): The advice of the Maine CDC director strikes the right chord in a bewildering, frustrating time.

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Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, took a few moments at the start of his Wednesday briefing to make some observations about celebrating the holidays during a pandemic.

Before sharing what he knew about the fast-spreading omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the status of the state’s hospital capacity and efforts to vaccinate more people, Shah spoke about how our attitudes toward this disease could fit with the spirit of the season – a time of gratitude and grace.

Central Maine Editorial Board: We couldn’t agree more. Both qualities are in short supply this year, and the need is great.

Our gratitude, Shah said, is deserved by so many people, starting with health care workers, who have been fighting on the front lines of a crisis that keeps changing.

Nirav Shah Director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention

“They do this in a variety of settings,” Shah said. “Health care workers at hospitals, nursing homes, EMS stations, home care workers, hospice workers, every sector of the health care system has played a role in our response to COVID-19.”

Shah continued: “The work they do matters, perhaps more than ever before. And they do it over this holiday season because the disease doesn’t take a break.”

These workers deserve our thanks. “And if you know one – and you must – give them a high-five and thank them for what they have done throughout the pandemic.”

To the list of the deserving, Shah added public health workers – from community outreach workers to lab technicians – as well as volunteers who staff vaccination clinics and other community efforts, and members of the Maine National Guard who have been serving a role since the beginning of the pandemic, which has only expanded.

At the same time that he called attention to the people around us who should be thanked, he reminded us about those who need our generosity – the people in our lives, our friends, families, coworkers and neighbors who may be evaluating the risk of the pandemic in ways we don’t understand.

“These days it seems, when it comes to COVID, each of us feels like we are on an island,” Shah said. “Everyone who is taking COVID more seriously than you is an over-reactionary worrywart. And everyone who is taking COVID less seriously than you, it’s easy to cast them as someone who doesn’t get it, someone who is denying science.”

But, neither of those extremes is right.

“What is true is that everyone approaches COVID differently through their own lens, a lens that reflects and refracts their own health status, their family’s health, whether they’ve been vaccinated as well as a host of other factors,” Shah said. “No two people, right now, will think of COVID and their own risk in the same way. And that means that no two people will take the exact same set of steps, especially as we go into the holiday season.”

This can be frustrating and confusing and has already caused conflict within families, workplaces and communities. 

Yet, Dr. Shah’s prescription is to meet these differences with generosity instead of anger.

“Recognize that they are coming at this world, a messy, bewildering world, with a different set of thoughts and values than you may be,” he said. “It can be frustrating, but it’s also a time where grace will get us much further than will irritation.”

This is not exactly the kind of advice we expect to get from a doctor, but it struck the right tone at a time when so much of the news we have been hearing is bad.

After nearly two years of uncertainty and disappointment, we have learned not to see this pandemic as a transitory phenomenon that will be over sometime soon.

But, rather than settle into despair, we can offer our grace to the people in our lives who need it, and our thanks to those who have been giving so much to protect us from a disease that consistently and stubbornly surprises.

Among those to whom we offer our thanks are the people at the Maine CDC, whose work has never been more demanding or important, and their director, Dr. Nirav Shah.

Comment published on the editorial page:  

From Maine Stoic:  I admire Dr. Nirav Shah very much, make no mistake. I have followed his guidance since the beginning of the pandemic. Nevertheless, I have reached the point where I have to disagree with the notion of being gracious and accepting of those who refuse to be vaccinated. What if twenty percent of the Maine population decided from time to time to put on a blindfold and walk down a busy street firing a deadly weapon in random directions, leaving a trail of injury and death behind them? What would Dr.Shah, or most other rational people think of that scenario? 

How would Dr.Shah have the greater majority of us respond to these people? The unvaccinated are doing very much the same thing. The time is long past where we, individually and collectively, must respond to the vaccine refusers in some stronger and more effective manner.

From P. Turlo: “These days it seems, when it comes to COVID, each of us feels like we are on an island.” The island analogy is misleading. There are certainly shades of gray. Yes, we should take into account the fact that many "may be evaluating the risk of the pandemic in ways we don’t understand." But there's another group who will simply deny science and who will put others at risk for 'political' reasons. Those 'reasons' involve a deep, unfounded distrust of 'science.' Dr. Shah has been extremely helpful and comforting for months on end. His attempt to promote 'grace' is commendable, but in some cases it will fall on deaf ears. When it comes to the deniers, "grace," in many cases, won't get us further. I agree with the thanks we should give to all the healthcare workers and the long list of support staff who tend to those with COVID. 

They have many, many long days ahead. God keep them safe.

Obviously no herd immunity in COVID infected Netherlands

Wait! I thought the Netherlands COVID public health pundits predicted "herd immunity"?

Dickens Festival The Netherlands- cancelled!

"...here we are again, with no Christmas spirit in our empty (Netherlands) restaurants and a maximum of four guests a day..."

Echo report published in The New York Times by Senay Boztas*:

AMSTERDAM — Since 5 a.m. on Sunday, bars, restaurants, museums, schools, clothing stores, gift shops and anything resembling fun have been closed across the Netherlands. We’ve become the first European country to go back to lockdown life amid Omicron (until at least early January): It was “unavoidable,” said Prime Minister Mark Rutte. So here we are, looking over the borders enviously at holiday sales and seasonal celebrations in Belgian Antwerp. Once more, it doesn’t look a lot like Christmas.

The Netherlands’ lockdown stands as a warning to the United States, other European countries and COVID hot spots across the globe. 

But, the warning, though, isn’t just about Omicron — other countries have more coronavirus cases and worse vaccination rates than the Netherlands does, and they are not locking down (at least yet).

Netherlands Public Health

The warning is about policy failures — the failure to start a booster campaign sooner, to spin up free testing capacity quickly when needed, to persuade more groups of the benefits of vaccines and to ensure there are enough beds in intensive care. Now our hospitals are already full of patients who are infected with the Delta variant, and we probably won’t have enough beds for all of the people who need care if the Omicron wave hits vaccinated people hard too.

Think of the Dutch lockdown as a Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a Dickensian warning — in a country where the annual Dickens festival has been canceled — about the need for every country to be on its toes in the pandemic era.

So far this holiday season, Europe is trying to allow at least some festive cheer. While Austria enforced a sharp three-week lockdown and severe limits on the unvaccinated, many countries are still trying to avoid shutdowns. 

For example, in Germany, the vaccinated will be able to have up to 10 guests at New Year’s parties; Boris Johnson is determined not to have new British restrictions yet; Belgium is closing certain indoor venues; and France has largely closed restaurants to the unvaccinated — but these countries are not at crisis point.

In the Netherlands, we are, because of the lack of strong and consistent crisis management. Part of the reason is that the government resigned in January and the country took 271 days to form a new one after the March elections. But our troubles also stem from ever-more-unhelpful ideas about freedom — a word with great resonance and many meanings here as well as in the United States and across the West.

The current Dutch lockdown was triggered foremost by a record-breaking average of 22,000 new infections a day at the end of November (in a country of 17.6 million), with severe cases largely among people who have chosen not to get vaccinated, and a rapid spread among school-age children.

Hospitals gave dire warnings of “code black,” meaning they are running out of beds. Some patients were transferred to Germany. And on top of all this, Omicron — currently up to 15 percent of infections — is expected to cause another spike.

But haven’t we learned enough in the last two years to avoid stop-start lockdown as a gut-reaction pandemic response?

The recent history in the Netherlands helps show why the answer is frustratingly muddled. 

Although the country has seen frequent and sometimes violent protests against coronavirus prevention measures, vaccination compliance is high and 85.9 percent of people are fully jabbed.

However, the country has been criticized for going back to “normal” too quickly. In July, for instance, the government had to backpedal on an overenthusiastic loosening of restrictions, including on nightclubs, where high attendance led to “superspreader” events.

Then, in September, two days before the British National Health Service started its booster campaign, Dutch leaders canceled the country’s “one-and-a-half-meter-distanced-society” and told people it was OK to hug again. At the time, health minister Hugo de Jonge said confidently that “vaccine effectivity is high” so the country wasn’t starting a booster campaign.

Entry to events and spaces was based on a QR code for people who had been vaccinated, recovered from COVID, or could show a recent negative test. But the “test for entry” setup has been mired in problems.

The lesson from the Netherlands is that even an admirable level of vaccination is not enough: We need to think about long-term strategy, regular boosters and unlimited, free access to testing if countries want to avoid swinging between extremes.

Another trigger for this total lockdown is the Dutch adherence to freedom. Unlike in Austria, banning the unvaccinated from spaces and places is a hot potato for all political parties. Dutch personal freedoms are strongly protected in the constitution — but surely this ban would be better than lockdown, where we all pay the price?

Prime Minister Rutte has said repeatedly that he has “no intention” of imposing vaccination by law, at one point arguing that the Netherlands is a “slightly anarchistic country that doesn’t need a preachy government.” 

Yet, some people have had enough: Just 52 percent of Dutch people support a hard lockdown, while trust in government coronavirus policy is at record lows.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small businesses now risk financial ruin, M.P.s say. “There’s a silent majority in the Netherlands, that together with business owners, the Royal Dutch Football Association, music venues, the culture sector are asking for alternatives,” Jan Paternotte, a center-left member of parliament, said on Tuesday.

Perhaps, as Mr. Rutte says, Dutch lockdown is a sign of things to come elsewhere with Omicron — we just got here first. Or perhaps Omicron will prove less virulent and burn out the worse strains to save us all.

But  (if we aren’t already infected or in quarantine).

It being the Netherlands, though, there’s often a workaround. One in seven people claim to have had a sneaky manicure, hair trim or massage. And just as COVID crosses borders, hundreds have gone shopping in Antwerp.

*Ms. Boztas is a British journalist who has lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade and has written and worked for media including The Guardian, The Sunday Times of London and the BBC.

Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community (the herd) becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. As a result, the whole community becomes protected — not just those who are immune.