THE ISSUE
Lancaster County’s first reported case of COVID-19 was recorded March 18, 2020. Four years ago, nonessential businesses and schools were closed in a state-mandated pandemic shutdown. And in the months and years that followed, there would be more than 2,200 COVID-19 deaths in Lancaster County.
It’s painful even to remember what life was like beginning in March 2020, when nursing homes were closed to visitors, families were preparing to celebrate Easter and Passover apart, children were struggling to learn remotely and many small business owners were trying to figure out how to pay their bills.
We were introduced to a whole new vocabulary then, one that included terms such as “social distancing,” “flattening the curve,” “personal protective equipment” and “contact tracing.”
Health care employees and other essential workers risked their lives and mental health so that other people would survive. Many front-line health care workers still are wrestling with the trauma of the pandemic’s worst months.
As a nation, we were caught flat-footed by the pandemic when it began. And we made things worse by turning what should have been a unifying crisis into yet another culture war, and picked sides: health versus the economy, science versus politics, Republicans versus Democrats.
But it’s important to remember that not everything was terrible.
Houses of worship held services online to nourish spirits. Some county residents placed items — such as teddy bears — in their windows or on their porches to create distanced scavenger hunts for neighborhood children taking walks with their parents. Other county residents sewed masks when they were needed. Nonprofits stepped up to fill whatever gaps emerged.
Indeed, there were so many inspiring examples of kindness, compassion and perseverance that we eventually introduced a weekly editorial, “Good Things” — still published every Friday — to highlight them. And we’re confident that Lancaster County residents will keep giving us good things to write about.
Nevertheless, the pandemic exacted such a heartrending toll that many of us would rather forget 2020. So many families lost loved ones. Because of the necessary shutdowns, schoolchildren experienced educational challenges that persist even now and adolescent mental health was seriously compromised.
Four years later, we have effective vaccines to protect us against COVID-19 hospitalization and death, and the antiviral drug Paxlovid can prevent severe illness. (Paxlovid is available for free to those on Medicare or Medicaid, and those who are uninsured; call 877-219-7225.)
It’s difficult to measure COVID-19’s continuing presence because data is only collected for hospitalizations and deaths. As LNP | LancasterOnline’s Lucy Albright reported in January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Pennsylvania Department of Health no longer track COVID-19 cases. This seems shortsighted.
Earlier this month, to the consternation of some public health experts, the CDC dramatically reduced the COVID-19 isolation period. It now recommends that people with COVID-19 “stay home and away from others until at least 24 hours after both their symptoms are getting better overall, and they have not had a fever (and are not using fever-reducing medication).” It adds that people should take precautions, such as masking and distancing, over the next five days to decrease the chances of passing on the virus to others.
The CDC made the change because of the availability of vaccines and Paxlovid, and because, its website notes, 98% of the U.S. population “now has some protective immunity against COVID-19 from vaccination, prior infection, or both” and as a result, “far fewer people are getting seriously ill.”
NPR quoted a critic of the new CDC isolation guidance, Dr. Kim Rhoads, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who pointed out in an email that “well-designed studies done in the post-Omicron and post-vaccination period show that COVID is often transmitted far beyond the fifth day of infection.”
This is what worries people with compromised immune systems, and others, for whom COVID-19 remains a serious threat. To those who feel left behind as the nation mostly has moved on from the pandemic, it is one more reason to feel uncertain after four years of uncertainty.
Are we even still in a pandemic? The World Health Organization says we are. But the U.S. ended its federal public health emergency last May. And a Gallup Poll conducted earlier this month found that 59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over.
Eleanor J. Murray, Boston University School of Public Health assistant professor of epidemiology, told that university’s publication, The Brink, that with nearly “as many hospitalizations in January 2024 as in January 2023, it’s clear that COVID is not growing milder and it’s not fading away. The real question, then, is not whether COVID is still a pandemic, but how much COVID illness and death are we willing to accept?”
That’s a question we’ve faced since the pandemic’s start.
In that recent Gallup Poll, 57% of Americans reported that their lives have not returned to normal, and 43% expect they never will.
Which leads us to pose another question: Will we do things differently when we face another pandemic?
As LNP | LancasterOnline’s Albright reported Wednesday, a report from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council in partnership with the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania shows that Lancaster County had one of the lowest COVID-19 hospitalization rates among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties from March 2020 to December 2022. This is laudable.
But the report also shows that Lancaster County had one of the highest total COVID-19 case counts from March 2020 to May 2023.
Could we have reduced that total if we’d had fewer political battles over masking and vaccination? Might we have fared better if public health professionals, not politicians, were managing the county’s pandemic response?
In today’s Perspective section, retired general surgeon Dr. Edward T. Chory again makes the case for a Lancaster County public health department. Chory is a member of the board of Lancaster’s Partnership for Public Health.
We continue to believe that our county — the largest Pennsylvania county without a public health department — needs a dedicated local agency to help its more than 558,000 residents navigate serious public health challenges.
A lot of things have changed since COVID-19 first emerged in Lancaster County four years ago. But our stance on a public health department has only been strengthened, because of what the people of this county have been through. And because we believe they deserve better.
