Keep calm and carry on covid3/17/2024 ![]() Even the relentless bombing of London did not prevent citizens from carrying on.Ī similar combination of wariness and composure about the current Covid-19 pandemic, however, is not widespread right now in the US. In 1939, as the Second World War began to close in on them, the government articulated an attitude to reflect both wariness and composure: “ Keep calm and carry on.” This balancing act required ignoring, but not denying, the terrifying threat and the endless sleepless nights of dread and worry. How then to proceed from the less terrifying present into the still extremely uncertain months ahead? I suggest we should listen to British history. But easing the intensity of precautions carries with it the false suggestion that it is 2019 all over again. The current super-contagious-but-not-so-terrible subvariant needs different precautions than the severe-but-less-transmissible original variant required. We have created our own scientific drama.īut much of it is that SARS-CoV-2, like so many other coronaviruses before it, is one slippery character that requires adjustments and updates to guidelines based on which shape it has shifted to. We can name spike protein mutations and know the avidity of attachment to human cells within days of viral isolation. We have made routine the once-futuristic genetic profiling of every wisp of the virus. Some of the roller-coaster of the past two-plus years is a result of scientific progress. Perhaps most startlingly, these shifts in viral characteristics each have occurred within a few months which, in the world of infectious diseases, is lightning speed – even for a clever shape-shifter like coronavirus. Opinion: Rebound after taking Paxlovid is the latest twist in the Covid-19 puzzleįirst, it was infectious well before symptoms begin ( the original strain) a much more contagious variant ( Alpha) rapid evasion of a vaccine-induced immunity ( Delta and Omicron) evasion of disease-induced immunity ( our current sub-variant). REUTERS/Jennifer Lorenzini Jennifer Lorenzini/Reuters We only have to look back at the first four waves to remind ourselves of its unpredictability, as each was characterized by an unexpected and very consequential twist.Ĭoronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment pill Paxlovid is seen in boxes, at Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, Italy, February 8, 2022. If we have learned anything about the virus it is this: We have exactly zero idea what it will do next. However, the notion that we are in the clear once and for all is remarkably misguided. In other words, after two years, more than a million deaths in the United States and 6 million deaths worldwide the disease is finally, at least in some ways, behaving like influenza, as predicted by some early in the pandemic: It’s bad but not catastrophic an infection for which – for many people – the key metric soon may be neither death nor hospitalization but rather days of work or school missed. Given these relatively fortunate facts compared to what we saw from the worst variants, the “don’t worry, be happy” behavior shown by much of the public is not cause for acute alarm, at least for now. Right now, it seems to always be several steps ahead of whatever vaccine is chasing it. On the less promising side, Omicron BA.2.12.1 is even more contagious than the last Omicron sub-variant and seems to be an immune-evasive pinball of a thing, ducking past the immunity developed by those who caught the original Christmas Omicron just four or five months earlier. ![]() The newest dominant sub-variant, Omicron BA.2.12.1, causes less severe disease, though it is no walk in the park for many, and hospitalization and death rates have been slower to rise than with previous waves. No, instead, the Covid-19 pandemic is still barreling along – and will be for the foreseeable future.īut, thankfully, the pandemic has changed. The pandemic is not over, nor have we arrived in the gauzy realm referred to as endemic infection in which all Covid-19 spikes are local, not national, and each of us is left to just deal with it. Indeed, according to a recent Axios/Ipsos poll, this is the view of about a third of the country. If you didn’t know that more than 100,000 people a day were being diagnosed with Covid-19, you might think that the pandemic had come and gone.
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