Mask mandates around most of the country have dropped, hospitalizations are down, and case counts continue to drop including in Minnesota. With most health experts now predicting the COVID pandemic has at minimum slowed down, life is starting to return to more normal circumstances for many Minnesotans.
One of the most familiar voices in the Minnesota health community the last two years has been the Commissioner of the Department of Health, Jan Malcolm who spoke to WCCO Wednesday.
Malcolm agrees that the news has been very good the last month, and the numbers have been sustained which is a change from other peaks and valleys since the start of the pandemic.
“We’ve been seeing pretty steady and pretty dramatic declines in the rate of new cases that we have for a month now,” Malcolm tells WCCO’s Susie Jones. “That's good. So we've seen really sustained progress. Sometimes in the past we've seen dips that last for a few days or a week and then head back up, so this is the first time in a while that we've seen this kind of sustained decline. So we're feeling very good about that the progress is genuine.”
The good news comes with an asterisk of course. Malcolm says data is showing a downward trend but the numbers were coming from a high place to being with.
“It's all relative though,” Malcolm explains. “We're still at case levels of 500, 600, 700, 1,000 cases a day that we would've thought horrifying earlier on. But it is relative. Happily, with the Omicron variant, on average, the illnesses were less severe, both because of the variant itself, but also due to the immunity in the community from vaccination or even from prior infections.”
The Omicron variant is mostly to blame for the higher caseloads the last several months. Malcolm says that variant has been much easier for hospitals to deal with because it comes with less severe symptoms compared to earlier variants like Delta.
“Even with high case counts, we didn't see quite as high a hospitalization rate as we had in the past,” Malcolm says. “Still, with that many cases, we saw a lot of hospitalizations and so we're much better shape than we were, but we're still fairly high. There still is a lot of virus out there.”
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The Department of Health is still tracking hospitalizations, not just for COVID but how much space hospitals in the state have overall. Malcolm says that they are still dealing with significant issues and workers are clearly burned out.
“Our hospitals, even though they have fewer COVID patients now, are still very, very full of other critically needed care that gets put off when the hospitals are overflowing with COVID,” warns the commissioner. “So I think we just all have to keep in mind that our healthcare workers have been working flat out for two years and the situation still very tight. Everything we can all do to help protect healthcare capacity by taking good precautions ourselves is still a very important thing.”
Another topic that has been of interest to the public is whether or not we can achieve what is referred to as ‘herd immunity’. Herd immunity, or community immunity, is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go. While not every single individual may be immune, the group as a whole has protection.
Malcolm says this is very unlikely with COVID due to a number of factors.
“I don't know that the concept of her immunity really applies all that well to SARS COVID-2 because of the number of variants that we have seen and will continue to see,” Malcolm predicts. “Just because of the sheer global spread of this thing, there's still hundreds of thousands of cases a day around the world and plenty of opportunity for the virus to continue to mutate. And what we've seen with both Delta and Omicron is that they're different enough from the original strain of the virus that prior protection doesn't last, at least not permanently. It appears that this is not the sort of thing where you have COVID once and you don't ever have to worry about it again. That that is not the case with this virus.”
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Is COVID here to stay? The CDC says it is very likely this will become a seasonal virus much like influenza is and Malcolm agrees with that assessment.
“I think most folks would agree with, you know, the best case scenario that this virus isn't going away, it will become like how influenza and other respiratory viruses are around,” says Malcom. “So it will be with us.
But the optimistic hope is that those future waves of COVID will be small and manageable and we do have vaccines and we do have treatments. So much progress has been made that puts us in a better position to be able to manage those future surges.”
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