Covid: Ominous new trends
Our post-Omicron reprieve “seems to be over,” said Andrew Joseph in STAT. As the virus keeps evolving, subvariants such as BA.2.12.1 are proving to be even more infectious than the original Omicron strain and are racing through the U.S. population. Known new cases are exceeding 90,000 a day; “more worryingly, hospitalizations have started to increase,” and are up more than 20 percent in two weeks. Recent studies in South Africa and elsewhere suggest that infection by Omicron “does not provide much cross-protection from other variants,” and it’s becoming likely even vaccinated people will get Covid two or three times a year.
Alas, most of America “simply no longer cares,” said Daniel Drezner in The Washington Post. Those polled by the Pew Research Center last week ranked Covid “dead last” among 12 issues affecting the country. Those results bode ill for the Biden administration’s request for $10 billion in additional Covid aid, which congressional Republicans have thus far blocked. If funding for new vaccinations runs out, the Biden administration is already preparing to ration vaccines “for only the highest-risk Americans” this fall, when the CDC warns a new Covid wave could infect 100 million Americans. That warning is based on “pure speculation,” said Joel Zinberg in the New York Post, and it’s designed to scare even more money out of Congress, even though “tens of billions of dollars” allocated for Covid remain unspent. With “record inflation” soaring, let’s not throw more money at the virus.
To “surrender’’ to the virus is “unfathomable,’’ said Eric Topol in The Guardian. Those who insist we must now “live with Covid” are ignoring the fact that the virus keeps getting better at evading existing vaccines and reinfecting the previously infected; vaccine effectiveness against severe illness has declined from 95 percent against the original Wuhan virus to 80 percent even among those who’ve been boosted. Every infection carries the risk of long Covid, which can cause cognitive impairment, strokes, heart damage, persistent fatigue, and extreme shortness of breath. If we ever hope to make a “definitive pandemic exit,” we must revive Operation Warp Speed’s urgency and “double down” on funding for boosters tailored to variants, easily administered nasal vaccines that block infection, and pancoronavirus shots that defeat all variants. “No, we don’t have to live with Covid.”