“If we can create positive outcomes from this — I don’t want to get tearful — then we would have memorialized in a positive way all the people who’ve died,” said Anne Lusk, a nutrition researcher at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Controlling heavy drinking so fewer people get injured or die
To free up hospital beds for expected Covid-19 patient surges, authorities around the world canceled non-urgent surgeries and postponed other care services. South Africa, which has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Africa and the fifth-highest worldwide, went further: it banned alcohol and cigarette sales.
The rationale: free up hospital capacity and reduce crime levels.
During the sales bans — which stretched from March 27 and May 31, and again from mid-July to mid-August — emergency room admissions for traumas caused by car accidents or violence almost halved. While the decline in trauma injuries coming into ERs cannot be entirely linked to alcohol, the ban seems to have played a significant role in the drop, said Charles Parry, director of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Research Unit at the state-funded South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC).
Weekends are the busiest period for hospital trauma cases, and a survey of five South African hospitals found those cases dropped from an average 150 to 90 cases per weekend during the alcohol sales ban, highlighting the cost of alcohol-related trauma.
South Africans come in sixth in a global ranking of per person alcohol consumption. Drinkers consume an average of 65 milliliters of alcohol per day in the country — the equivalent of around six standard drinks (single shot of liquor, small glass of wine). That leads to violence, particularly against women, accidents and deaths.
The sales ban also had downsides. The hospitality industry lost jobs, and 20 people are thought to have died from drinking industrial alcohol.
Still, South Africa’s ruling ANC party is warming to policies that further control alcohol consumption. “I haven’t seen this in 25 years,” Parry said.
Cigarette sales restrictions — justified by the fact that coronavirus targets those with weakened lungs — has shown that higher tobacco prices and reduced availability can lead people either to quit or to smoke less, said Catherine Egbe, a tobacco specialist at the SAMRC. During the ban, cigarette packs were still illegally available in some places, but at a higher price than usual.
Around one-third of South Africans smoked tobacco products in 2017, according to the World Health Organization. Egbe hopes a stalled draft bill proposed in 2018 — which would ban smoking in public places and make cigarette packs less visually attractive — will now be revived.
South Africa isn’t the only country that’s tested such consumer restrictions during the pandemic. Neighboring Botswana imposed a cigarette sales ban during its lockdown, while India banned both alcohol and cigarette sales. Thailand and some areas in Mexico, the Philippines and Panama also banned alcohol sales.
Changing the mobility system so fewer people and animals die
In the car-dependent United States, one of the biggest coronavirus-adjacent health effects has been a drop in car accidents.
Across California, car crashes resulting in injury and death halved from about 400 to about 200 per day during the state’s lockdown, according to a report from the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis.
In total, researchers attributed 15,000 fewer collisions per month and 6,000 fewer injury/fatal accidents per month to the state’s shelter-in-place order.
Fraser Shilling, one of the report’s authors, is now looking into how many animals may also have been saved during the pandemic. About 1 million animals are thought to be killed on U.S. roads each day.
He thinks more than 100 million animals could have been saved because of the pandemic lockdowns. Some human lives may have been saved, too: Car collisions with big animals are sometimes fatal for both parties.
“If we can learn from these experiences where we dial up and down human activity, we can have an incredible knowledge base for developing policies that are really based on how we impact our world and ourselves,” Shilling said.
Lusk, the Harvard scientist, hopes mobility will change permanently thanks to the pandemic. With some cities seeing an unprecedented increase in bicycle use — a 151 percent rise in Philadelphia in March, for example — authorities and real estate developers should start thinking about how to continue to encourage cycling in non-pandemic times, she said.
Wider bicycle paths or bike lanes to accommodate both e-bikers and regular bikes, as well as private bike parking spaces in new housing, would help, Lusk said. Trees should be planted by the paths, which should be well-lit and extend into lower income communities, she said. The long-term benefits would include healthier hearts and lungs and greater equality between racial communities. “We need to help people be healthy,” Lusk said.
Flu numbers down thanks to pandemic protective measures
Fall is looming in the globe’s Northern Hemisphere, and with it, concerns about a flu season adding to the coronavirus burdens on hospitals. But the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season, which is now ending, offers some reasons for optimism. Pandemic rules around social distancing, wearing face masks and washing hands have helped countries including Chile and New Zealand record milder than expected flu outbreaks.
“We may not see a bad flu season in October, November,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, and a former head of the CDC. Besides the anti-coronavirus measures, travel is also a big spreader of the flu around the world, he said. Countries that draw large numbers of tourists are likely to benefit most from the pandemic precautions. In Spain, for example, international tourism numbers have dropped by 98 percent.
“We should prepare, but we should anticipate that it may be very different this year,” he said.
COVID VACCINE RACE LATEST
By the numbers — 31: Coronavirus vaccines that are being tested, out of which six are in the final testing phase, according to the WHO.
Speed vs. trust: Fears that President Donald Trump will pressure the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prematurely authorize a vaccine against coronavirus have returned, after the agency authorized the use of plasma from people who recovered from Covid-19 to treat those fighting the disease. The FDA had initially held off the authorization over concerns that the evidence for the treatment’s effectiveness is thin.
Trump made the announcement about the plasma treatment authorization the day before the Republican National Convention kicked off. Critics worry he will seek a similar announcement on vaccines before the November election.
Public health experts have warned that rushing out a vaccine without solid proof it works could result in fewer people taking it. China has already authorized a domestically produced vaccine for emergency use.
Looking into the crystal ball: Science’s Derek Lowe lays out how things may look once final vaccine test results start coming in.
Latest results: Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine candidate appears to be safe and produce a strong immune response in older adults, according to new data from an early trial presented by the company this week.
GLOBAL HEALTH SNAPSHOTS
Another good thing: For some of the 61 million Americans with disabilities, the ability to work, learn and socialize from home has created an unexpected expansion of opportunity, The New York Times reported. People who would not be invited to gatherings before the pandemic because of lack of access for their wheelchair, for example, are now included in online get-togethers.
Africa is free of wild polio: The world had something to celebrate this week, despite the global pandemic turning lives upside down. Africa has not reported any case of wild polio in four years and has thus been declared free of the virus, which causes a highly infectious disease that can paralyze children in a matter of hours. Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the last two countries in the world where the transmission of the polio virus continues.
A strain of the virus derived from the vaccine against it continues to circulate in 16 African countries, however.
Asia: The South Korean government has ordered striking doctors back to work as it battles yet another surge in coronavirus infections. The doctors are on strike because they disagree with the government’s plan to increase the number of medical students over the next decade to deal with crises such as the current pandemic. Doctors’ groups argue the country already has too many of them, competing in a very crowded labor market.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s young population may have helped the country avert a high number of pandemic deaths and the crippling of its health care system.
Americas: A woman in California who was infected with HIV in 1992 may be the first person in the world to be cured of the virus without any medication or a bone-marrow transplant, which has cured two other people so far.
Europe: Germany and Belgium issued a travel warning for Paris because of the high number of infections there. Germany also extended a ban on major events until the end of the year, while Sweden gave the green light to seated events of up to 500 people.