The COVID-19 pandemic will not last forever. It will likely continue to fizzle and fade as it heads towards its third year, resurging with new variants and then waning in the face of vaccines, mitigation measures and human behavior, reports WSDU.
When will COVID leave?
On that, experts generally agree. “The large majority of infectious disease specialists think, and have thought for many months, that SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay,” said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
Pandemics fade out of view as a result of human efforts like vaccine development, contact tracing, genomic analysis, containment measures and international cooperation. In short, the world has a toolkit to bring an end to the pandemic as quickly as possible.
Even after 20 months, those tools are not being put to best use. “This is the major issue: There was never a plan, (and) there still isn’t a plan at a global level,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programs at the Duke Global Health Institute.
Some countries have fared better in the face of COVID-19 than others. But to accelerate the endgame, countless experts — including Taylor — are calling for a new, global approach, particularly when it comes to vaccines, treatments and information sharing.
Such an effort is the best way to end the pandemic quickly, they say — and unless it happens, people in every corner of the world could still be living under a COVID-19 cloud through 2022 and beyond.
The world’s key tool
If the world has an arsenal to help it end the pandemic, the most important weapon in it is an obvious one.
The development of several vaccines, all highly effective in stopping severe disease and useful too in stemming transmission, was a world-first. The previous record to get a shot on the market was four years, but the COVID-19 pandemic ripped up all expectations and reset the gold standard in the field.
It is easy to see how crucial shots are to the concept of a COVID-19 endgame. “As more people get infected, vaccinated and reinfected, the severity of illness will gradually decline because of accumulating immunity — that is the theory,” Hunter said.
It is not enough to simply have a vaccine, though; it must be administered to as many people as possible, as many times as required.
“What we should achieve is widespread immunization,” said Burioni. “One possible scenario is that, if we are able to vaccinate a huge majority of people, this virus will circulate but will not do much damage.”
As well as their continued efforts to encourage unvaccinated people to get a first dose, richer countries now have two main planks to their inoculation strategies: ensuring school-age children are vaccinated, and administering booster shots — as many as prove to be necessary to keep protection high.
And the UK announced a deal Thursday to purchase 114 million extra doses of the Pfizer jab for its 67 million citizens for 2022 and 2023. It is a move that many developed nations are expected to make as they prepare for a future where vaccines are administered on a semi-regular basis.
Are we on the right track
The emergence of the omicron variant in sub-Saharan Africa, where vaccination rates are low, has underlined once more the importance of a strategy to vaccinate poorer nations.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), less than 8% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile, 63.9% of people in high-income countries have received at least one shot, according to WHO.
In both the European Union and the United States, around 70% of people have received at least one shot, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The potential consequences of that disparity are obvious: New, globally problematic variants of the virus have all been first detected in places that experienced large, uncontrolled outbreaks where vaccine coverage was low — alpha in the UK last December, delta in India in February, and omicron in sub-Saharan Africa.
“It’s feast or famine at the moment — (countries) get nothing for three months, and all of a sudden they get millions of doses,” said Taylor. “Supply has to come in a predictable, reliable manner.”
Vaccine hesitancy among his participants increased after those hiccups and pauses in the European rollout, Head said. “What we see and do in the global north in regards to vaccines is seen and heard in other parts of the world.”
But above all, experts are calling for leadership.
“It’s really similar to what’s facing us with climate change — we have leaders who are leaders of nations, we don’t really have global leaders. We don’t have global accountability,” said Taylor.
Fighting the next pandemic
National measures are still vital as the pandemic inches closer towards its final phase, experts say. Waves will continue to hit different nations at different times, and “countries will need to work within their own experiences and capabilities,” Head said.
But it must be coupled with an international outlook to speed up the pandemic’s endgame.
“We have been talking about globalization for a long time (in) commerce, finance, tourism,” Garcia said. “This pandemic — as (with) climate change — seems like a test. It seriously requires us to act like in a global world.”
That sentiment has been echoed by world leaders, but experts say action hasn’t followed.
Most recently, travel bans placed on South Africa and other nearby nations after authorities successfully detected the emergence of the omicron variant have divided scientists.
“There’s a very real risk that what we’re doing now is discouraging them from coming forward with the next one,” Taylor said. “Because there will be a next one.”
Experts are calling for countries to come together on COVID-19, not pull apart — and that call was taken up by WHO this week when it called for a global treaty to avoid the same mistakes when the next pandemic strikes.
But it’s a proposal that many are desperate to see realized. “Some kind of binding legal agreement that countries sign onto could give us something of a coordinated global plan, which is what we’re lacking now,” Taylor said.
“We’re never going to make a successful case on altruism,” she concedes. But with a fresh outbreak anywhere in the world threatening every country, “you can make a nationalistic case for the need to do things in a coordinated, global way.”
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Source: WDSU
