Pandemic could soon be over

COVID: DISEASE WILL BECOME ENDEMIC, LIKE FLU

Glaring inequity in vaccine access a challenge.

The world could see the Covid pandemic begin fading next year into an endemic disease like others humanity lives with, unless glaring inequality in vaccine access drags it out and worse variants emerge.

Even as countries scramble to address a new worrying virus variant and Europe battles a winter resurgence, health experts say taming the pandemic over the next year is possible.

All the knowhow and tools needed to bring the virus under control exist, with ballooning stocks of safe and effective vaccines and new treatments becoming available.

But it remains unclear if the world will make the hard choices needed, or allow the pandemic to continue to rage, potentially opening the way to a far worse situation.

“The trajectory of this pandemic is in our hands,” Maria van Kerkhove, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) top expert on the Covid crisis, said recently.

“Can we reach a state where we have gained control over transmission in 2022? Absolutely,” she said. “We could have done that already, but we haven’t.”

A year after the first vaccines came to market, more than 7.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally. And the world is on track to produce about 24 billion doses by next June – more than enough to inoculate everyone on the planet.

But a dire lack of vaccines in poorer countries and resistance among some to get jabs have left nations vulnerable as new, more transmissible variants have sparked wave after wave of infection. So, the scenes of intubated patients in overcrowded hospitals and long lines of people scrambling to find oxygen for loved ones have continued. Images of improvised funeral pyres burning across a delta-hit India have epitomised the human cost of the pandemic.

Officially, more than 5.1 million people have died worldwide, although the WHO says the actual toll is likely two to three times that figure.

In the US, which remains the worst-affected country with close to 800 000 deaths, the flow of short obituaries on the FacesOfCovid Twitter account include many who did not have the jab.

“Amanda, a 36-year-old math teacher in Kentucky. Chris, a 34-year-old high school football coach in Kansas. Cherie, a 40-year-old 7th-grade reading teacher in Illinois. All had an impact in their communities. All deeply loved. All unvaccinated,” read a recent post.

Two years after the virus first surfaced in China, countries are still bouncing between opening up and reimposing restrictions.

Anti-vaxx protests are rocking a number of countries in Europe amid fresh lockdowns and looming mandatory vaccination.

Despite such scenes, many experts suggest the pandemic phase will soon be over.

Covid will not fully disappear, but will become a largely controlled endemic disease that we will learn to live with, like flu, they say.

It will “become part of the furniture”, Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California in Irvine, said.

Top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has said increased vaccination should soon get us to a point where Covid “might occasionally be up and down in the background but it won’t dominate us the way it’s doing right now”.

Glaring inequity in vaccine access remains a challenge.

About 65% of people in high-income countries have had at least one dose, but just over seven percent in low-income countries, United Nations numbers show.

Branding the imbalance a moral outrage, the WHO has urged wealthy countries to refrain from providing booster shots to the fully vaccinated until the most vulnerable everywhere have received their first jabs – to no avail.

Health experts stress that allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chances that new, more dangerous variants could emerge, placing the world at risk.

“No-one is safe until everyone is safe,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeated. –

Covid will become part of the furniture