Last month, it was as if we could see the future. Boosters were spreading. School-age children were photographed again to see grandma during the winter break. Life in the United States was moving towards something that seemed strange, not just a common plague, but perhaps a post-epidemic image.
And then he came Omicron type, squashing the prospect of a full vacation as Delta chilled hot vax summer in July. After a couple of weeks, we still do not know exactly what the symptoms are. That’s a lot more infectious. It can be either maybe not being very cruel. That’s right tearing through countries and spreads groups of friends and sending universities back on the Internet for the spring semester.
This is not the end of the year we want, but the end of the year we have found. Inside, like a gift basket left accidentally under a very high tree, you were hiding a vague truth: Vaccines, which look like 2021 salvation, worked but were not enough to save us. If we save 2022, we will also need to embrace, test, and stay home sometimes, which epidemics call intervention without medication, or NPIs.
Acknowledging that the challenges will allow us to practice the day Covid starts rolling around, endemic virus. The day has not yet come; enough people remain at risk of having to prepare for changes and surges. But next time, we will have a limit representing the amount of work we want to do to deal with Covid, as well as the number of illnesses and deaths we will allow to remain there.
“A crucial question — one that the world has never dealt with in this way of remembering living things — is how we can move forward, mentally and emotionally, to get out of a very difficult situation. [emergency] to a genetic predisposition? ” says Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease doctor who is the director of the world health philanthropy the Wellcome Trust. “This transition period is going to be very difficult, and it will look very different around the world.”
To begin with, let’s understand what endemicity is, and how it is not. The presence of disease does not mean that there will be no more sickness, even sickness and death. This does not mean that future illnesses will cause less disease than they do now. In short, it indicates that adequate immunity and disease will be achieved. There are not enough people who can deny that they are HIV positive. Not enough people will be at risk of causing widespread epidemics.
Influenza is common – and since some strains of the flu are caused by other coronaviruses, there has been speculation that the coronavirus may be resistant. finally too. (Coronavirus OC43, introduced in humans in the late 19th century, took a century to do so.) But the flu has spread, and for centuries before we started masking, it kills anywhere from. 20,000 to 50,000 Americans every year. Eternity, in other words, does not guarantee security. On the contrary, as epidemic expert Ellie Murray argued, it is an assurance that you should do so pay attention all the time.