The end of covid
Its last weeks won’t be televised
WHEN will this pandemic end? It was easy enough to declare when it started, but who will say when it’s safe to go inside again? When will a government agency (or the WHO) declare all safe? Like a military unit does after a chemical attack on its troops? Who blows the horn to announce All Clear, and the gas masks can come off? Or at least the N95 surgical masks?
We are happy and gratified to be able to answer those questions: We don’t know.
An official end may never happen. The publication that once called itself The British Medical Journal—and now is referred to simply as The BMJ—had a most interesting piece the other day, written by a couple of academics named David Robertson and Peter Doshi.
And unlike most academic writing, this was readable. It was as if somebody decided to combine medical research with English. It’s about time somebody put the two together.
Our writers say that the covid-19 pandemic might not be declared over, even when it’s over, because declaring pandemics to be over just isn’t done:
“There is no universal definition of the epidemiological parameters of the end of a pandemic. By what metric, then, will we know that it is actually over? The World Health Organization declared the covid-19 pandemic, but who will tell us when it’s over?
“The ubiquity of dashboards has helped create a sense that the pandemic will be over when the dashboard indicators all reach either zero (infections, cases, deaths) or 100 (percentage vaccinated). However, respiratory pandemics of the past century show that endings are not clear-cut, and that pandemic closure is better understood as occurring with the resumption of social life, not the achievement of specific epidemiological targets.”
The researchers looked at past pandemics. The Spanish flu of 1918 didn’t end in 1918 any more than the Asian flu of 1957 ended in 1957 any more than the Hong Kong flu of 1968 ended in 1968. These bugs don’t announce that they are leaving and don’t follow any calendar. (And you’ll notice that the press wasn’t too pure back then to name the viruses after places where they were first found.)
The BMJ says previous pandemics came in waves, some bigger than others, some lasting longer than others: “The notion, reinforced by dashboards, that a pandemic ends when cases or deaths drop to zero is at odds with the historical evidence that substantial influenza morbidity and mortality continues to occur, season after season, between pandemics.”
Previous pandemics were declared over long after they were over. Not by a government agency given the task to count down to their ends (three… two … one … zero!) but by looking back at when people decided to return to normal. Because they had no other option.
John Barry, the American historian whose work on the Flood of 1927, “Rising Tide,” is among the best nonfiction of the last 25 years, has also done a lot of research and writing on pandemics (including a book of note, “The Great Influenza”). The BMJ quotes him saying that many people who lived through the 1968 flu pandemic didn’t know they were living through one. So they weren’t looking for it to be declared over.
THERE won’t be a dramatic end, and probably no celebration. The BMJ article says the end of the pandemic will have a more sociological than biological end. And keeping up with hot spots and numbers and charts and graphics, while interesting and a media favorite, might keep covid-19 in the news now, in this first draft of history, but it may actually prolong how long we humans think we are in a pandemic.
“Deactivating or disconnecting ourselves from the dashboards,” these researchers say, “may be the single most powerful action towards ending the pandemic. This is not burying one’s head in the sand. Rather, it is recognising that no single or joint set of dashboard metrics can tell us when the pandemic is over.”
The pandemic will end. Gradually. Unevenly. Spikes and hot spots will happen.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t worry about covid-19 any longer. Or that we should avoid our boosters—and the boosters to come. But that . . . .
Let the writers end this editorial the way they ended their own article. We can’t say it much better:
“As an extraordinary period in which social life was upturned, the covid-19 pandemic will be over when we turn off our screens and decide that other issues are once again worthy of our attention. Unlike its beginning, the end of the pandemic will not be televised.”