![]() How can this be? It’s because these countries didn’t just flatten the curve through half measures, they crushed it through strict containment. While Bay Area parents have kids in classrooms just a few hours a week, other countries are living again. In Taiwan and Australia, crowds are safely returning to live, in-person sports matches and concerts, restaurants are at full capacity, and students are back in classrooms every day. It’s happening in other parts of the world. The increase in potentially more-contagious, vaccine-resistant variants is all the more reason for Bay Area public health leaders to pursue a more-decisive approach that both minimizes the opportunity for further virus mutations and accelerates a return to something much more like pre-pandemic life. But, as we saw last summer, this progress can vanish quickly. To be clear, things are looking up in the Bay Area and across California: Vaccination rates are rising and case rates are dropping. ![]() Now, more than a year, 420,000 cases and nearly 6,000 deaths later, Bay Area leaders once again have a choice: Continue the course of half-measures and a reopening strategy based on arbitrary metrics that will lead to more COVID-19 cases and deaths, or reopen safely in just a matter of weeks by pursuing a “zero COVID” approach. ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, in the months that followed, political pressure pushed local and state leaders into a rushed reopening process that led us to where we are today. It was a bold move at a time when few leaders had the courage and foresight to take such aggressive action. On March 16, 2020, six Bay Area counties acted with decisiveness and unity, ordering residents to shelter in place in an effort to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, which by that point had caused nearly 300 cases of COVID-19 and five deaths. ![]()
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