My first article on this topic leaves us questioning “If herd immunity is out of reach, does that mean we’re doomed?”
Our Wall Street Journal (WSJ) medical authors (Larry Brilliant, W. Ian Lipkin, Lisa Danzig, and Karen Pak Oppenheimer) all answer this question with a resounding “Not at all.” They instead recommend that our government begin at once to supplement its recent vaccine rollout with a rapid-response system, similar to the one used to eradicate small pox in the 1970s.
This “surveillance and containment” strategy relied on aggressive contact tracing in its ability to:
1. Discover every case of the virus
2. Trace the cases backward to infection sources
3. Trace parallel chains of disease transmission, and finally
4. Trace contacts forward to find those who would become infection risks
Our Covid-19 viral strains travel today at such high speed for contagion possibilities that “speed to detect” has become now a necessity in finding the first cases within days when a small number of cases exist before major outbreaks. Contact tracing can become a gigantic problem if the virus is left to spread for weeks at a time anywhere in the world.
Next, the scientific team will need to know what viral variant is involved. After searching for detection of immunity created by both infection and vaccination, our experts inform us “We will need to match new variants of Covid-19 with the vaccines most effective against them.” The effective rate of the particular vaccine remains critical here, as well as the length of time (provided by the contagion) from exposure to disease. A longer period for exposure to take place allows the contact traced individual, and even the contacts of the contacts, to be vaccinated in time. It becomes crucial to build exposure notification and tracing systems that find contacts most at risk of getting the disease, while immediately isolating these individuals.
The WSJ medical officers recommend the allocation of about 10% to 20% of our successful vaccines along with “the most urgent policy priority” of developing “a digital rapid-detection system by integrating information from all the sources now available.” They insist “Forerunners of such systems already exist at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and at World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Global Outbreak And Response Network, but none, to our knowledge, integrate exposure notification systems, viral sequencing and just-in-time vaccination.”
Our newspaper’s authors conclude by finalizing their beliefs “But more needs to be done. The states should work together to establish a national outbreak alert and response network, connecting data scientists, public health experts and technologists, and each state needs to establish a core group of first responders to complement the CDC’s state epidemiologists – trained local specialists ready to deploy to current and future outbreaks.”
In this way, we can accelerate our pandemic recovery journey to “normal-ish.”
