Prepare Now for Tomorrow’s Threats
As Michael Phelps racked up record numbers of Olympic swimming medals, commentators reminded us about how his success in the minutes and seconds of a heat resulted from the days, weeks and months spent preparing for those few minutes and seconds. If Phelps never spent a minute in the pool until the Olympics, he never would have become a champion.
Preparation—planning—prevents a small issue from becoming a big issue, a slip from becoming a fall, a mishap from becoming a catastrophe. Attend Safe provides risk mitigation and planning services for those reasons.
Despite scientists cautioning health officials for decades about the increasing likelihood of widespread viral outbreaks. When one happened, it put the whole U.S. health system on its heels. It became a matter of reaction, and often inconsistent and confused reaction at that.
Right now, we’re in the latest of several lulls during the three-plus years of dealing with coronavirus. By “lull,” I mean that deaths from its infections fell this week to a rate roughly equal to deaths from diabetes, another of the major, ongoing threats to Americans’ health and lives.
Instead of using this time to prepare, whether for the next spike in COVID-19 or other virus threats, such as the H5N1 “bird flu,” which made the jump from birds to people in several places, it seems we’re resting.
Yet in the last year, doctors’ options for COVID-19 treatments shrunk to basically one—Paxlovid—because new coronavirus variants arrived that made earlier drug options less effective. While Paxlovid remains effective, many who need it can’t take it, because of dangerous interactions with other medicines.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine says a single injection of an interferon drug cut the odds of COVID patients needing hospitalization in half. Interferon drugs have been used for a variety of diseases, such as cancer, hepatitis and muscular sclerosis. In a clinical trial of almost 2,000 patients, the results rivaled the success of Paxlovid, and scientists said by helping the body to defend itself against an invading virus, interferon drugs potentially could defend against the flu and other viruses beyond COVID-19 and its many variants. It has the potential to help in the event of future pandemics.
But in late 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declined to authorize it for emergency use, because the trials were conducted by academic researchers, instead of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, and because the trials were conducted in Canada and Brazil, not in the U.S. Some experts say the development of next-generation COVID treatments and vaccines—and that might give researchers a head start in preparing for the futures pandemics—will be hindered by similar roadblocks.
While we continue to fight COVID-19, we also need to prepare for what’s ahead. It’s too late to buy an extinguisher when the house is on fire.
COVID-19 BY THE NUMBERS: In the U.S., 1,862 people died from a coronavirus infection during the week that ended March 13, per the CDC, with 170,576 new confirmed infections. The percentage of Americans who received an updated booster ticked up slightly to 16.3% of eligible people.
Amanda Schleede is founder and CEO of Attend Safe, which helps people to attend to life with sensible safety protocols. Visit Attend Safe online at AttendSafe.com.