When Should Our Public Health Emergency End?
Since first being implemented in January 2020, the state of public health emergency within the U.S. has been extended six times and is likely to stay in place “at the least through the end of 2021 — and presumably beyond,” The Washington Post writes.
The pandemic-sparked designation must, nonetheless, end at some point. So what would possibly that look like, and when might it occur, both legally and in its public impact?
“To me, the general public health emergency was premised on the ability of the virus to place a hospital into crisis,” stated Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “When enough high-risk individuals are immune through vaccination or natural infection and hospitals not have to worry about capacity, the general public health emergency is over though [COVID-19] will still be present.”
Physician and infectious disease expert Monica Gandhi stated the public health emergency needs to be declared over based on country-wide hospitalization rates — notably when they’re “< 5/100,000 population.”
However Leana Wen, a former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, believes an official end will probably be a bit harder to determine. “I would see lifting the state of emergency as being difficult as long as there’s so much spread and a considerable proportion of the population — younger kids — who aren’t yet eligible to be vaccinated,” she informed the Post.
When the public health emergency does end, it seems Americans ought to anticipate certain control measures to stay in place, at least temporarily. Stated Natalie Dean, an assistant professor at Emory University: “I can see vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and routine testing sticking around for some time, in addition to masks in crowded public indoor spaces while transmission levels are high.” Read more at The Washington Post.
