Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic do not patiently wait their turn. As Chicago braced for the potential appearance of the omicron variant, on Friday the Illinois Department of Public Health’s COVID data tracker reported more than 7,000 new confirmed and probable COVID cases, following more than 11,000 on Thursday.
Over the weekend, news filtered out of a small clutch of COVID-19 cases aboard a cruise ship off the coast of Louisiana, an early COVID-19 worry redux, despite the wide range of new onboard precautions. And there were reports Saturday of a superspreading event last week at an anime convention in New York.
Those worrying new Illinois cases are likely without the arrival of the feared omicron.
Although everyone should remain vigilant about omicron’s potential dangers, scientists still don’t know much about the variant beyond its fast-spreading nature. We still don’t have sufficient information about whether the vaccines will be equally effective against this new mutation, nor do we know the likely severity of the illnesses it could cause.
Our collective fingers are crossed that the infections will be mild and the danger overblown. But we don’t yet know. Only a fool would take unnecessary risks, especially since new British studies have shown that as many as 1 in 8 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 have seen at least mild damage to their hearts.
At least for the next couple of weeks, the best current policy is get your shots updated, keep calm and move into the holiday season with some measured caution.
But the pandemic’s persistence show how much the city needs to take what public health officials already have learned about pushing back a pandemic — and act on it with increased force.
Illinois doesn’t need the omicron variant, already confirmed in several other states and spreading rapidly, to bring a major life-threatening disaster to the state. We already are familiar with what that looks like.
Fortunately, Chicago public health officials report that the city has reached the goal set by Mayor Lori Lightfoot earlier this fall to have 77% of Chicago’s 12-and-older population up at least partially vaccinated by Thanksgiving. That is a significant achievement by her administration that should bolster our city’s defensive forces against this new invader.
But look at her success laid out on a map and you will see some dangerously large and questionable holes in it by income, ethnicity and ZIP code. Chicago Department of Public Health data, which measures vaccination rates by percentages of all residents vaccinated in a ZIP code, not just those 12 and older, show that for some ZIP codes on the South and West sides, vaccination rates continue to languish at lower than 50 percent. One in two Chicagoans going unprotected in those areas is not a good situation.
Even more disturbing, a new University of Chicago study suggests that at least 100 more lives could have been saved citywide if some well-known inequities of race and income between various neighborhoods had been addressed more effectively in the earlier stages of the pandemic.
“Equity is not only part of our COVID-19 strategy, equity is our strategy,” Lightfoot said in January while announcing the Protect Chicago Plus initiative and its 77% goal. But the university’s study indicates that the city fell painfully short of its equity goals. The new research published by the University of Chicago’s Healthcare Ethics and Allocation Lab, was further examined by WBEZ , MuckRock, a nonprofit news site, and Documenting COVID-19, a Columbia University journalism project.
Their bottom-line conclusion? A more equitable distribution of vaccinations would have saved more than 100 Chicago lives.
That doesn’t sound too far-fetched, considering how much already was known about the vaccination shortfall by ZIP code. And the translation of vaccine rates into lives likely lost certainly focuses the mind on the importance of completing the rollout throughout the city. A hundred lives lost is not an abstract figure. Simply put, vaccinating more people means more family members present to enjoy the holidays with their families and friends.
There’s no bringing back the lives Chicagoans who might have have been saved by a more effective rollout to chronically underserved communities. And we acknowledge the difficult of the task faced by the city in persuading everyone to get the vaccine. Personal responsibility absolutely must play a role. So must some gentle, nonjudgmental persuasion of reluctant neighbors. It is potentially a lifesaving act.
But this figure does present a humbling reminder to city and state officials of the need to focus in the future on communities that are most in need and, through no fault of their own, least able to rescue themselves.
Clearly, this crisis is far from over. We still all have to pull together to get everyone protected.
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