It's simple: do not travel for the holidays this year
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- To control the spread of COVID-19, Experts and the CDC urged us to stay home for Thanksgiving. But many Americans ignored the guidance.
- With COVID cases soaring, deaths hitting record highs, and a vaccine on the horizon, we need to be more cautious than ever.
- For that reason, it is important to stay home for the holidays this year.
- Matthew Wellington is the Public Health Campaigns Director for U.S. PIRG.
- Krutika Kuppalli is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Medical
University of South Carolina. - This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Do not travel for the holidays this year.
The advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and most health experts is straightforward, but with December gatherings approaching it has never been more urgent.
We're just now starting to see the cost of many people ignoring that messaging over Thanksgiving - traditionally the busiest travel weekend of the year. This year, because of the surge of COVID-19 cases, the CDC issued the simple "do not travel" edict and instead urged people to stay home for Thanksgiving.
Millions of Americans heeded that warning to protect their families, friends and loved ones, but the CDC's recommendation came just one week before the holiday. For many people, it was too late to abandon their plans. As a result of the delayed communication, the Sunday after Thanksgiving was the busiest air travel day since mid-March.
Given what happened over Thanksgiving and the impending surge of cases, it is important for government and public health experts to start communicating with the public that the best course of action heading into the December holiday season will be to stay home.
Coronavirus is spreading unchecked in nearly every state, with record levels of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Thanksgiving travel will make those dire statistics even worse, and we won't know the full extent of that impact for two to three more weeks.
Hospital systems are already overloaded and many are at capacity. Healthcare workers are overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out. Despite these realities, many government leaders are hesitant to strengthen public health measures and instead encourage personal responsibility, despite evidence that a hands-off approach is not working. Individual responsibility can help slow the spread of COVID-19, but it's up to our policy makers to steer us to safety.
Making it through the holidays
The positive news is we have the scientific-based knowledge to contain the outbreak and save lives; we just have to use it.
When the coronavirus outbreak surged over the summer, nearly 1,400 health professionals signed a letter calling for urgent action. Those recommendations, which still apply today, include decreasing rates of transmission and getting cases down quickly by issuing both temporary closures of non-essential businesses and stay-at-home orders.
Decision makers should also reinforce important public health measures such as mask mandates, physical distancing, good hand hygiene and limitations on the size of crowd gatherings, particularly in advance of the upcoming holidays.
We also need to invest in scaling up and making testing more widely available, working to increase our contact tracing capability, and having support services for individuals who need to isolate and quarantine.
In addition, our government leaders and public health experts need to improve communication and have greater engagement with communities so we can understand public concerns and develop policies that are culturally competent.
Prior experiences demonstrate that not embracing these public health measures will keep us in a cycle of continued surges of infections until a vaccine is widely available and taken by a broad swath of the public.
For example, Hawaii's most populous island, Oahu, tried targeted closures and other more limited measures in hopes of avoiding more restrictive interventions during its summer surge, but it didn't work. The government ended up issuing a temporary stay-at-home order and cases dropped dramatically. At the same time, public officials ramped up testing capacity so that the island could better catch and contain outbreaks once the restrictions were lifted. Now, Hawaii has the lowest number of cases, adjusted for population, in the United States.
In most of the country, coronavirus is too widespread for limited restrictions to work. Washington,Michigan, and most recently California adopted more stringent measures to slow the spread of the virus, while New Mexico's Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a temporary stay-at-home order and closed non-essential businesses.
Despite limited examples of bold action, many governors are failing to act courageously, citing the health of the economy and fearing backlash from their constituents. The health of our economy depends on the health of our citizens. If we do not get the pandemic under control, we will continue this cycle of re-openings and lockdowns, which exacerbates and prolongs economic devastation.
There needs to be a reckoning that the long-term viability of our economy is tied to suppressing the coronavirus, as top economists have said. We rely on medical professionals, agricultural workers and other essential personnel to keep working.
Beyond these individuals, the best thing everyone else can do for society right now is to stay at home. Federal lawmakers should pass legislation that gives Americans the financial support and security they need to stay home so that frontline workers have the bandwidth to properly care for patients.
As we surpass 1 million weekly confirmed infections and regularly total more than 2,000 fatalities a day, it's a matter of when, not if, more restrictions will come. While all signs point to effective vaccines coming soon, we still have months to go before they're distributed and administered widely enough to make it safe to return to some semblance of normal.
A recent projection estimates that we could see more than 538,000 COVID-19 deaths by April 1. Implementing robust restrictions sooner will save more lives. Waiting could cost hundreds of thousands, which is a loss none of us can afford.
Matthew Wellington is the Public Health Campaigns Director for U.S. PIRG. Krutika Kuppalli is an Asisstant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina.
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