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Lessons on how to live with Covid-19 still have to be learned

The writer is a scientific commentator

Saturday marks exactly two years since My first time writing about a viral pneumonia of unknown cause affecting 59 people in a Chinese city that I had never heard of. The obvious connection to a live animal market, echoing the origins of Sars-1, gave me a vague sense of omens but no idea what to expect. World Health Organization has since been recorded 300 million infections and 5.46 million deaths.

Two years have passed, the beginning of 2022 is filled with winter: hospitals in the UK are full of Covid-19 patients; The coronavirus briefings, in which advisers Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty played rock-faced Cassandras with Boris Johnson’s Pangloss, are back on British screens; The reopening of schools amid widespread outbreaks feels as difficult this year as it did last January.

However, this is 2022, not 2020 or 2021. Vaccines and antiviral drugs have changed the pandemic game in high-income countries. Currently most of the intensive care beds are unvaccinated. Science has provided what has been claimed about it.

However, beyond that, many lessons have yet to be learned. The first is that vaccines alone, while providing protection against severe illness and death, will not end the pandemic. They reduce transmission but they don’t stop it. In addition, much of our connected world remains unvaccinated. Both factors allow for continued spread, with the risk of creating variants, like Omicron, that can evade immunity.

That has long been a compelling argument for both vaccinating the world and controlling transmission – but that remains a distant prospect. Less than 4% of adults in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is fully vaccinated. The IMF warned in October that a ‘massive vaccination split’ could cost the global economy $5.3 billion over the next five years.

As for transmission, we know that the spread of this airborne virus can be slowed using measures such as masks, ventilation, teleworking, testing and tracing. , isolation, quarantine – and remote treatment as needed. This method of ‘vaccination’ is clearly not a ‘muscle lock’ but a way to prevent it.

That hasn’t stopped some countries, such as Britain, from going their own tumultuous paths. Johnson’s reluctance to put in place measures in the face of super-transmitted Omicron, despite expert advice, has left the NHS overwhelmed. Omicron may be less severe than Delta, but patients still need beds and staff. Hospitals, which hit record levels of Covid-related staff absenteeism, are suspending normal services and reporting serious incidents; military medicine is being drafted.

It is the daily infection numbers – 180,000 new cases on Thursday – that tests are now low and isolation times are being cut to avoid staff shortages in critical infrastructure. Inadequate testing means loss of visibility of the virus. Countries with uncontrolled spread run the risk of hoarding an uncertain future health burden, including lingering Covid, harboring new variants, and being red-listed as restricted areas. Go. Mass infection also does not protect against future outbreaks. Clearly, the only possible way to learn to live with Covid-19, even in its milder form, is to live with it a lot less.

However, countries like the UK and the US Still clinging to the legend that health and wealth is a zero-sum game. In fact, by keeping disparities lower, countries like South Korea and Taiwan have largely prevented prolonged lockdowns, minimized deaths and illnesses, and prospered economically. . South Korea, with a population of 52 million, has had fewer than 6,000 deaths. By contrast, the UK has lost 150,000 lives to the pandemic; in the US, this exceeded 675,000 deaths from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. I did not expect such high levels of avoidable suffering to be normalized in wealthy economies. Doing better requires political leadership, including a credible health message and a willingness to act early. Perfect data is the enemy of good pandemic policy.

Perhaps the final, somewhat obvious, lesson took me a long time to learn: that a pandemic is caused not by a virus alone, but by our collective response to it. We’ve all come into this outbreak carrying with us our previous hopes, beliefs, prejudices, and fears. It never occurred to me that, in the face of the worst pandemic in a century, so many of my compatriots would view Covid-19 as a hoax, denying a safe and effective vaccine, transmitting spread conspiracy theories and become the enemy of scientists, doctors, and nurses. .

That is Reliability of vaccines The project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine pushed me to engage with people who think differently, rather than judge them. That’s how I learned that, for an ideological young person I know, rejecting the Covid hit was an act of political rebellion.

For some, denial of a vaccine has nothing to do with contempt for science and everything to do with maintaining individual self-determination during a crisis that has left many helpless. I once sympathized with Emmanuel Macron, determined to “emmerder“Have not been vaccinated in response to record levels of infection. Now, as I wait in line to be grateful for my third dose of the first among those who stepped forward for their first, I wonder if empathy may not have helped end the pandemic sooner.

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