Dr. Cameron Webb, JD, MD is a senior policy advisor for COVID-19 Equity on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. He spoke with the Amsterdam News for a Q & A about the COVID-19 Winter Preparedness Plan.
AmNews: Can you discuss the need for the Winter Preparedness Plan?
The headline is the COVIDTEST.gov is opening up again. I think a lot of people are familiar with that program and know what’s important. [Through this website you can order free COVID-19 home tests].
Prevention is still key so making sure people can get vaccinated is essential. The secretary of HHS reached out to state leaders and governors, and said here are all the things you can be doing. The federal resources and tools can be leveraged to make sure that not only do you have vaccines in pharmacies and in clinics, but you also have mobile and pop-up sites as well to make everything more accessible for your community. We want to make that easy for people. We are depending on the states because of how they stepped up to make sure that people got vaccinated in 2021.
We are depending on them to do it again now because, to put it plainly, the fact that people got vaccinated a year ago isn’t going to protect them from hospitalization and death today. The fact that they may have had COVID in January or February of 2022 with the Omicron surge, isn’t going to protect them from hospitalization or death today. There are still hundreds of people each day dying from COVID-19. Overwhelmingly, they seem to be people who are older. Seniors and people who have other chronic medical conditions are the folks we need to be protecting the most. The way that we do that is to make sure that everybody has their highest level of protection.
AmNews: Is the United States still working to assist in the COVID pandemic efforts on a global level?
Absolutely. Our global team never broke stride so we’ve been doing ongoing work getting vaccines to folks in other countries. We even have pharmaceutical companies now reaching out to try to get treatments to other countries as well to support them. China’s situation with COVID is very different from ours because of their zero-COVID policy, so they have fewer folks who’ve had a prior infection. They also have a vaccine that doesn’t perform quite as well as ours, so when you put those things together, China has a population that’s really at risk.
We’re also trying to get into nursing homes and get more folks vaccinated. That’s a big issue because I told you a lot of seniors are the ones who are getting sick.
AmNews: Can you discuss how the federal government is collaborating with state and local officials on COVID?
If you are up to date with your vaccinations and if you are wearing a mask and if you have tests available to you, you’re in a pretty good situation. [Certain] recommendations are meant to be given at a local level. It wouldn’t make sense for us to tell every community, nationally, what to do about masking because New York is very different from Albemarle County, Virginia right now.
What I’ll say is public health leaders have been very good over the last few years of collaborating with people nearby, but it gets much dicier, over the holidays, when folks from one part of the country come into another part of the country. However, if you are up to date with your vaccinations and you’re wearing a mask in a high-COVID, community-transmission space, you’re in a pretty good situation to keep yourself safe.
Take action, go ahead and request your tests as soon as you can. That’s really important. Our models are telling us by mid-January we expect to see a real surge in cases and we’re on the upslope. Don’t take it for granted that the environment you had a month ago is the environment you’re going to have a month from now, and make sure to prepare yourself for where we’re headed.
The best time to get the booster in order to be protected today was two weeks ago. The second best time is right now.
For additional resources around COVID-19 please visit www1.nyc.gov/site/coronavirus/index.page or call 311.COVID-19. Testing and vaccination resources can also be accessed on the AmNews COVID-19 page: www.amsterdamnews.com/covid/