COVID – the whatever phase
I hope to be wrong but it seems we are already living the “whatever” phase of the pandemic, where governments like England or Australia are giving up and promoting the message that “people will need to live with it”, which basically means “a lot of people will die anyway, but we are OK with that”.
Australia and New Zealand are still in the contain or eliminate approach (more or less), with slow vaccinations rollouts and mistakes along the way. Other countries like USA are already back to normal, regardless of new variants circulating and decreasing vaccination rates.
At this point on time things may get really dangerous as there are more contagious variants running free because of relaxed or removed social restrictions. I really hope to be wrong about this, but the future does not look bright in the mid-term with this approach. To put things in context: the current variant of the virus (so called delta variant) is more contagious (several times more transmissible than the original virus) and it continues mutating, as we leave it run free.
Regardless of new variants, England, for instance, is removing all masks and social restrictions in few days (July 19) even while facing a sharp increase or third wave of infections.
Boris Johnson to scrap most of England’s Covid rules from 19 July | Coronavirus | The Guardian
I understand people don’t want to hear about the virus, but just pretending this is over and/or lowering defenses while still in play is basically leaving the game at half-time, while still pretending we are doing a great job.
What should have been a 1-2 years pandemic, with proper vaccination and common practices may take longer to sort out.
Some may argue England or Australia are far-away, but the current virus variant originated in India, where sluggish vaccination or lack of supply left millions of people vulnerable to infection (then producing the delta variant)
New Zealand vaccination ratio is 10%, Australia 9%, other pacific nations less than that, so just giving up and leaving the virus run free is a really risky move, not for these countries only but for everyone.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
