Precautions such as shutdowns and social distancing, combined with the fast rollout of vaccines, saved 800,000 lives in the United States from the clutches of COVID-19, a new study co-authored by a University of Colorado professor estimates.
But the price of that prevention was also tremendous. Shuttered schools creating lasting learning loss and achievement gaps. Delayed routine medical care leading to bigger problems and deaths down the road. And, perhaps most serious of all, a newfound hostility to public health measures, which could leave us more vulnerable for the next pandemic.
“Our hope in the paper is not to downplay those things or say these measures saved 800,000 lives, period,” said Stephen Kissler, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder.
“My concern,” Kissler’s co-author, UCLA economics professor Andrew Atkeson told CU Today, “is that the next pandemic will be deadlier, but people will ignore it, because they will say, ‘Oh, we overdid it during COVID.’”
Instead, Kissler and Atkeson intend the new study, which wades into some of the most controversial debates of the pandemic and was published in a Brookings Institution journal, as a call to intensify public health efforts. A better public health system, they argue, would allow authorities to better understand diseases earlier in outbreaks so that such broad, heavy-handed countermeasures won’t be necessary in the next pandemic.
“If we had been able to gather better information more quickly, we would have been able to reduce the burden of our countermeasures,” Kissler said in an interview with The Sun.
Kissler’s speciality is mathematical epidemiology — using data and computer models to track the spread of disease and its outcomes. He said the new study fits with a movement to look back on the lessons of COVID.
“We’re starting to do some retrospective thinking about the pandemic,” he said. “Thinking about what happened. What could we do better now.”
For the study, he and Atkeson relied largely on data from blood tests to determine how many people were vaccinated prior to being infected with COVID. From there, they ran modeling scenarios to estimate how many people would have been infected before vaccination — and how many would have died — had social isolation and distancing policies not been in place or had vaccines rolled out more slowly.
Their two models, one that was simpler and another more complex, ended up returning the same result: The U.S.’s COVID countermeasures, which slow-rolled the spread of infections across the country, saved between 800,000 and 850,000 lives.
The study was published last month. What happened next wasn’t entirely unexpected to Kissler, who worked on epidemiological studies about COVID throughout the pandemic. People started emailing him. And they were angry — about the toll of lockdowns, vaccine mandates and all sorts of other things related to COVID.
“I was a little surprised how quickly and forcefully some of those responses arrived,” he said.
But Kissler doesn’t see this study as divisive. He sees it as attempting to chart a better path forward.
In his view, the study shows how much impact humans can have through their behavior on the course of a disease outbreak. Now comes the work of trying to make that impact more precise.
By learning more now about how different types of viruses spread, by doing a better job of tracking emerging outbreaks, and by developing even faster vaccine-development and distribution systems, we can manage pandemics with less social pain.
“Clearly we can have a huge impact,” he said. “And we just need to do what we can do now to make sure we can have a similar impact at a lower cost.”