This was paradigmatic good news and bad news month. The bad news is the infection rate is soaring (yes, it may partially be because testing is way more common). Worse, hospitalizations and deaths are rising although not as fast. As is typical, everybody is blaming the "second wave" on the behavior of people they don't like. These second waves cross national and cultural boundaries. If you think a certain behavior changed from the summer when things were getting better, and changed across many places in the world simultaneously, I suppose it's plausible. I continue to believe that we are overstating the effect of our behavior on the infection rate and that we like it mostly because it let's us demonize The Other. In any event, there is nothing close to comprehensive data, nevermind proof, of anything at this point. The CDC now seems to think that most transmissions come from asymptomatic carriers. How can you fight that? Test everyone, every day, all the time? Shut down everything? Even if you could survive the economic disaster, no one would stand for it. A solution that is not politically palatable is not a solution.
The good news is vaccines are coming and coming for real if we can believe our eyes. Big Pharma (both Pfizer and Modena), the political punching bag, seems to have come through. And not in a small way. For context, we have never successfully created a vaccine against a coronavirus before. Since the common cold is a coronavirus, I would speculate that there have probably been close to a century's worth of attempts. We have also never created an MRNA vaccine before -- an entirely new method of triggering the immune system versus the old way of infecting cells with an inert version of the virus as an immune system trigger. Lost in all the sound and fury is how remarkable this is. It's moonshot level stuff. Do not underestimate what an incredible scientific achievement has just occurred. Not only that, there are also traditional vaccines coming on line (the famous Oxford vaccine and others). In less than a year an intractable problem was solved using a new technology, just because it had to be solved. The next time someone asks why they don't have a flying car, point to this.
Of course, there are blemishes in our silver lining. Specifically, it seems these vaccines are getting slowed by FDA bureaucracy who can't manage to push paperwork as fast as scientists can solve problems. I have no idea if cold analysis done after this is all over will indicate that we did the best we could. But I feel confident that our regulators are going to come out of this looking pretty bad. The nth degree of safety our agencies enforce may yield benefits to our lives in normal circumstances, but it's clear our judgement fails when assessing risk to ease regulations in times of crisis. (It appears the Pfizer vaccine is already approved in the U.K.)
