During April of 2020, the in-hospital mortality rate from Covid-19 was at 19.7%. By November, it had declined to 9.3%. That is a remarkable testament to the triumph of clinical medicine in the face of a previously unknown disease. The drop in mortality was due to many factors, including the use of non-pharmacological approaches such as patient proning, the use of pharmacological therapies in hospitals such as remdesivir and steroids, and perhaps also due to lower viral loads seen in hospitalized patients because of more universal embrace of mask wearing. Regardless of the explanation, it is clear that our handling of Covid-19 got better quickly, changing dramatically the risk of what should be the ultimate outcome of concern: death.
But this dramatic improvement in mortality did not do very much to change our broader public narrative of Covid-19. Our impression—legitimate as it was—of a new deadly disease that was to be avoided at all costs was fixed quickly in March of 2020, and it did not budge much when the risk of the disease’s feared outcome changed substantially. We were seeing the same dynamic a year later as the widespread introduction of vaccines provided protection for those most vulnerable—the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions—lowering mortality rates and leaving cases to be driven by younger people who have had much less risk of contracting severe Covid-19. Despite this dramatic change in disease profile due to widening vaccination, the public conversation about the state of the pandemic remained driven, largely, by fluctuating case numbers, and state-by-state decisions were informed primarily by case load, even if these cases were milder and posed less risk.
Read the full post on The Turning Point.