That infection rate for such a serious disease is still catastrophic. Given the effects of “long COVID”, many more people could be in trouble for years to come. The number of infected people is stated as 109 million people. The number recovered is shown as 61 million. That’s 48 million people in No Man’s Land. Normality is a long way off for them. “
Long COVID” numbers are starting to look pretty nasty, too. 21% of people are reporting symptoms 5 weeks after infection according to The Guardian. Nearly 10% still had symptoms 12 weeks later. Those symptoms can be pretty bad, and those are truly horrendous numbers if they’re any sort of benchmark.
The vaccinations are speeding up. According to the World Economic Forum, 60% of the population must achieve immunity through exposure or immunization to achieve “herd immunity”. (That expression is far more than objectionable – It’s a symptom of the inexcusable utter indifference of some governments, too.)
That’s fine, but…? Ah, er, but everything, really.
COVID has shown a lot of new angles on immunity and infection. The new strains of COVID seem to have appeared pretty rapidly, and in large volumes. This virus is just doing what viruses do – Refining itself into new more prolific strains. The problem is that nobody’s too sure exactly how this will work out in terms of immunization.
The other problems are:
• Reporting – Political interference downplayed and digressed from the basic functions of getting hard numbers in the US and UK. Reporting agencies were stonewalled, and much mystic babble was produced on everything but managing the pandemic. The legacy effects of this utter incompetence are yet to be seen.
• Endemic COVID – A disease becomes endemic when it’s part of the environmental furniture, a hazard of living in a particular place. Malaria is an example of an endemic disease. Exactly what new strains of COVID could become is the question here, and it’s hard to look forward to the answers.
• Endemic political irresponsibility – Thanks to the imbecility of “populist” governments, there are multiple locations worldwide where this disease could be around for centuries. Every single basic principle of epidemiology was ignored. This is the result. “The solution to the problem is to deny the existence of the problem” doesn’t work, never has, and never will. If this had been a more “dramatic” disease like Ebola, the effect would have been even worse. Public health needs to be taken out of political and commercial spheres. It’s just too dangerous to let these highly unqualified fools get involved.
Outcome scenario – Not so great at all
The end of the pandemic, if it does actually end, and whatever the final numbers are, will have X numbers of dead and X numbers of “long COVID” patients. That means a lot of people in conditions of chronic ill-health. That is hardly satisfactory.
Means of managing “long COVID” and restoring health are the logical best options. That inevitably means much more research, diverting research resources from other conditions, etc. This is another legacy of incompetence, a predictable outcome. There’s a good argument here for systematic global research using centralized resources to maximise research efficiency, but try convincing anyone of that. WHO is probably best placed and most generally accessible. That’s if politicians condescend to take on their responsibilities, of course.
Another obvious issue is the chronic ill-preparedness of the world for managing large-scale pandemics. (To be fair, the risk was immediately recognized. Coronaviruses are serial offenders, and warnings were prompt. It was the dithering, babbling, global reaction which was so utterly inadequate.) COVID has shown the world exactly how not to manage pandemics and how to recover from catastrophic failure, but none of it needed to happen at all.
Historically, the pandemics usually win. They do a lot of damage and eventually fade into the scenery, still around in some form. That’s not good enough anymore. The world’s getting way too small and the population’s getting too big and too integrated for pandemics to be purely local. Any damn disease can go global anytime. Everyone knew that; not much was done about it.
This is the wakeup call. Another big pandemic could be much worse and far more disruptive.
