High COVID numbers, but also a reason for hope | Steve Brawner

The addition of 7,488 cases announced Wednesday means that 38,154 Arkansans – one out of 79 of us – had COVID that day, and that includes only those who were known.

Now policymakers must decide what and how much should be done about this omicron variant that’s spreading like wildfire but appears often to cause milder symptoms than previous variants.

Two developments on Wednesday were notable. Dr. Joe Thompson with the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) announced that the number of school districts in its “purple” zones had increased in one week from five to 39. That’s where 100 out of 10,000 residents are newly infected over a two-week period.

The five had been concentrated in the Jonesboro area, and they’re still purple. But now they’ve been joined by 34 others in various parts of the state. The worst of the 39 is the Nettleton School District, where 3.5% of residents have tested positive in the last two weeks, Thompson said.

The number of school districts in “red zones” with 50-99 new infections has increased from 23 to 99.

That means that the number of high-infection zones – measured by residents, not students – has quintupled in a week.

The rising case numbers put school districts in a difficult situation. The Little Rock and Pulaski County Special School Districts sent their students home for at least Thursday and Friday. They’ll take classes remotely, which the past two years have shown is usually not as good as being in the classroom.

Schools also will have to wrestle with mask requirements. According to a running tally kept by ACHI, only 47 public school districts and public charter schools still have full mask requirements, while another 26 have partial requirements. The rest, 188, have no requirements.

Those numbers can change quickly – too quickly for ACHI to keep up with. Some districts have policies tied to ACHI’s school zones, so they may automatically change their requirements now that they are classified as red or purple.

From the pandemic’s beginning, the generation least affected by COVID, young people, has been the one asked to sacrifice the most. This is the third school year that’s been disrupted, and the longer this goes on, the more long-term effects there will be on students’ academic performance, career prospects, and physical and mental health.

School districts are having to grapple with how to balance that reality with the need to reduce spread among their students and staff. It’s been a tough job.

The other development Wednesday was the acknowledgement by the Department of Health that it will no longer conduct contact tracing as of the end of Jan. 17. That’s where it calls someone newly infected with COVID and tries to find out where they’ve been and who they’ve hung around, so it then can contact those people.

Communications Director Meg Mirivel told me the department’s leaders decided within the last two weeks to end the program because federal funding is running out, because its vendors were unable to keep up with the caseload, and because response rates were too low. Too many people didn’t answer the phone or declined to answer questions.

Despite all the high numbers, there’s reason for hope in all this. In his highly informative podcast, Dr. Peter Attia said the best version of a virus – from the virus’s standpoint – occurs when it evolves to the point where it spreads easily without killing too many of its hosts. Maybe that’s omicron. One of his guests, Dr. Marty Makary, said omicron could be “nature’s vaccine” that will confer natural immunity on many people.

We’re not going to eradicate COVID. Instead, the doctors on the podcast indicated we’re headed to the point where a version such as omicron will circulate every season, like four other currently circulating coronaviruses including the common cold. A relatively small number of us would do badly and some of us would die. For most of us, it would be a seasonal disease, and many of us would have some immunity because we’ve had it and/or been vaccinated. Plus, now we have drugs that can treat it.

Maybe a realistic, best-case scenario is that omicron would be the COVID version we’d have to live with. OK. Can we live with that?

Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist and syndicated columnist. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com or follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.

This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: High COVID numbers, but also a reason for hope | Steve Brawner