COVID - The End (Sorta)

This past Friday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus finally declared the international COVID emergency over after three years, three months, and five days.  The United States - which of course won the booby prize for the highest case and death count of any nation on this earth - ends its emergency on Thursday.

Of course, the rest of the world figured this out long ago.  But though COVID is no longer the threat it was when it had us mask up and lock down, Tedros is asking the world to remain vigilant because COVID is going to be with us until the end of time and it's going to take some time before it truly becomes no worse than influenza.  In fact, the latest strain, Arcturus (sounds like a car), can cause itchy red eyes not unlike springtime allergies.  So now we have to look out for the Arcturus variant (now that sounds like a car, particularly a German station wagon!) and cross our fingers that it doesn't start another massive wave. And Tedros has said that he would not "hesitate to convene another emergency committee should COVID-19 once again put our world in peril."

For now, at least, the COVID scare is over, and many of us are back to living our lives.  I'm not, really.  For reasons both related and unrelated to the pandemic, I continue to refrain from making plans and from getting involved in anything.  I once said that I saw myself going to Europe in 2023 with the assumption that the public health emergency would end by then; despite the end, I have no plans to go this year or any time after.  I just can't see it happening.  With a couple of visits to New York City - my first in four years - behind me, I have no plans to return any time soon, mainly because bus service in my area has been severely curtailed and there's noting in particular I want to see or do in the city.  And, as always, I no longer wish to get involved in any social or political causes, as I remain convinced that it's all a colossal waste of time.        

I'm still in a funk, mainly because I had to give up on my Volkswagen Golf 8 blog (we're never getting the base model in North America) and also because a Facebook friend unfriended me after over a decade and turned out not to be a true friend after all.  Add to that some personal problems I'd rather not go into here and you can understand why I'm now more, not less, reluctant to put my life back together in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Besides, if I withdraw more from public life, I can more easily avoid Arcturus.  

The Forever Pandemic

Not only is the COVID pandemic not over, the BA.2 variation of Omicron is causing an uptick in the United States that some commentators are already calling a wave.  And, as usual, the Northeast, long the most vigilant part of the country when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, is bearing the brunt of it.

So, just when we thought we'd get a reprieve with the warmer weather, we're already dealing with another possible surge.  

Both the Biden administration and World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have declared that the state of emergency will continue for the time being, which I take to mean a very long, long, long time being.  Some epidemiologists have said it will take at least eight years for SARS-CoV-2 to mutate into a harmless cold. Coincidentally, that's the time it takes to get through medical school.

But wait - there's more!  Omicron keeps mutating into . . . new versions of itself!  Two new mutations of Omicron have been found in upstate New York, and a third has been found in Britain.  Two more have been discovered in Africa.  That's seven variations of Omicron in just the past five months. 

Needless to say, the BA.2 wave in the U.S. has brought back face-covering (FC) mandates, including in the city of Philadelphia, and it's extended existing mandates on public transport until May 3 and in Broadway theaters until May 31.  Although there are no new FC mandates in New York City, the mere threat of BA.2 has caused me to drop plans to go to the New York International Auto Show, back after a three-year hiatus.

Incidentally, BA.2 is just one reason I'm not going to the show this year.  Another reason is the long list of brands skipping the show this year (go here for more on that), along with the fact that most of the days I would have been free to go have since been planned for other engagements.  But BA.2 is enough reason to stay the f**k at home.

Tedros said earlier in the pandemic that 70 percent of the world had to be vaccinated to end the pandemic.  The last time I checked, the global COVID vaccination rate was 59.2 percent and rising.  Pretty good, huh?  Except that Tedros has since clarified his statement to mean that 70 percent of the populations of each country has to be vaccinated.  Terrific - even the U.S. can't reach that threshold! 

As far as I am concerned, I have stopped waiting for the pandemic to be over.  The only thing that's over is my hope of ever getting my life back.  This is why I've been quitting everything I can divorce myself from.  The auto show is just more more thing I have to give up (and besides, it's just not the same anymore).  I'll be quitting more things in the near future.  I have to get used to the fact that I have to stop living and just settle for existing.

The silver lining?  Although eight distinct COVID strains developed between Delta and Omicron, not one new strain different and distinctive enough to warrant its own Greek letter has formed since Omicron in November. That has to count for something.

WHO's Fooling Who?

It seems ironic that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), because his pronouncements on the COVID pandemic are making me sick.

An increasing number of experts seem to agree that, even though Omicron won't be the last mutant strain of COVID by a long shot, its antibodies and its rapid spread will combine along with vaccinations and antiviral treatments to turn COVID into an endemic disease.  But Tedros - and, I might add, his minions at the WHO - insisted that the pandemic is "nowhere near over" after two years, even though Tedros began 2022 by saying that we have a chance to end the pandemic this year.

Which is sort of funny, because one of his minions, Michael Ryan, an Irish doctor who's been echoing Tedros' statements, just said early last week that "we have a chance to end the public health emergency this year if we do the things that we’ve been talking about" - such as vaccinating more people in poor countries.

So what is it, guys? Is this pandemic going to continue well into the 2020s or can we get it behind us by June or July?  Of this year, I mean? 

As long as the WHO, which Tedros leads,  keeps contradicting itself, it doesn't matter what message it's putting across.

I'm well aware that African countries, among others, need more COVID vaccines.  I'd be pleased to see President Biden donate all of the COVID vaccines in the U.S. that vaccine-resistant Americans don't want (i.e., most of them).  Tedros himself has been calling for more vaccines for poor countries as a way to end the pandemic  But he hasn't suggested how we could do that and end vaccine inequity, at least as far as I know.  He's mostly been pontificating without offering any constructive criticism.

But then, it's hard for your organization to provide constructive guidance when you let the Chinese government strong-arm you into abandoning an investigation of the origins of a virus that same government allowed to proliferate in its own country and then beyond. 

If Tedros can't offer any suggestions as to how we get out of this mess - it he just keeps talking in admonitory tones with a wag of the finger - maybe he should get out of the way.  Because he clearly isn't leading or following. 

Oh yeah, get vaccinated.

COVID-22

After all, that's what the Omicron strain really is.

Omicron is a new disease that is nothing like the original Wuhan strain of COVID, and it's creating more havoc than even the Wuhan strain did when there were no vaccines.  Mainly because one thing vaccines did not take care of was access to vaccines. But it's also because the virus has mutated to the point where vaccines are less effective.  What if a future strain is completely vaccine-resistant?

Numerous experts have speculated that Omicron is so contagious that the latest surge of infections - already plummeting in South Africa, where the Omicron strain was first detected, and beginning to recede in the United Kingdom - will give us so much immunity in the form of antibodies, in tandem with vaccinations, that it will end the pandemic once the virus can't infect anyone. "Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus," Australian physician Nick Coatsworth told a news site from Down Under.  Dr. Julian Tang, a respiratory-science professor at Leicester University in Britain, concurs.  "The virus will evolve itself out of the pandemic strain very soon and become milder, more transmissible to the point where you may only need to think about vaccinating the more vulnerable members of the population," he said.

To assume such a thing would mean that there's no chance of the virus mutating into something more contagious, as everyone assumed when Delta was receding. But it obviously did.  And so there's no reason to assume that a new strain - the next Greek letter to be used is pi, by the way - won't be worse than Omicron.  The only solution to avoid new mutations (I won't call them variants, a variant is a German station wagon) and prevent contagion (I won't say "transmission;" it's a virus, not a radio signal!) is to vaccinate more people.

That's where we're really far off.  

In a good deal of the world, many countries have met or exceeded the World Health Organization's year-end goal of vaccinating 40 percent of its populations, even with so much misinformation of and resistance to vaccines.  In the Western Hemisphere, every country has met that goal except for Guatemala, Bolivia, Surinam, Haiti, Jamaica and a few of the countries in the Lesser Antilles.  In Africa, however, you can count on one hand with fingers to spare every country that met that 40 percent standard at the end of 2021.  In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and, at 211 million people, the seventh most populous country in the world, the full-vaccination rate is a pathetic 2 percent.  And there are other undervaccinated countries in Europe and Asia, as well.  

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has declared that the booster programs of wealthy nations lead to the hoarding of vaccines by these same wealthy nations and deny poorer countries the ability to get more vaccines, which will thus prolong the pandemic by allowing new strains - especially one that throws the proverbial finger to vaccines by evading them completely and making them worthless - to proliferate.  Dr. Anthony Fauci and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have disputed this, insisting that there are plenty of vaccines for everyone, including boosters, and Dr. Fauci has noted the numerous vaccine supplies the U.S. has already donated for the rest of the world.  American protests of the World Health Organization's lecturing, however, seem irrelevant in light of all the donated vaccines that have expired or have arrived in poorer countries without any plan to distribute them.  One must conclude that the plan to vaccinate the world is not getting anywhere.

Or maybe it is.  As of December 21, the latest date for which data is available, 48.3 percent of the world's population have been fully vaccinated - about 3.76 billion people, with 4.49 billion people, or 57.5 percent of the world's population, have gotten at least one dose.  And if you look at the chart below - click on it to enlarge it and see it better - the vaccination rate is going upward in a steady diagonal climb, with a couple of big jumps in the spring and summer of 2021. 

It's for that reason, as the seriousness of the Omicron surge makes itself clear, that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros (he's Ethiopian, they go by first names there) sees hope and optimism for the pandemic to end in 2022. On the other hand, maybe Omicron will end the COVID plague and turn the virus into an endemic contagion, like the flu.  But we still have to get the rest of the world vaccinated to prevent future strains.  If not, we won't end the pandemic.  The pandemic will end us. 😢 😭