As the Ukraine crisis stews, worries rise about China, North Korea—and Omicron’s cousin BA.2

(Originally published Feb. 9 in “What in the World“) While the crisis in Ukraine appears to have reached a brief stalemate, Taiwan watchers say the lack of a more forceful U.S. response to Russia’s moves toward Ukraine are emboldening Beijing about potentially grabbing its longtime renegade province.

Western weakness in the face of the pandemic has already encouraged North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. After a spate of missile tests in January, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington have located what they say is a new base for storing intercontinental ballistic missiles only 15 miles from the Chinese border.

The BA.2 variant of Omicron is meanwhile making rapid gains in Asia and Europe, having now been detected in 57 countries. That may extend, if not intensify, the pandemic.

The subvariant is much more contagious than Omicron, but no more severe, and thus many don’t seem worried about it. How quickly they’ve forgotten Omicron’s math lesson: a virus may kill fewer of the people it infects, but if it infects many times more people, more people may end up dead.

Despite this, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware are dropping mask mandates for kids in school and California is easing restrictions on masks and gathering even as Covid fatalities climb, only because the daily case rate has dropped from its peak. That alone risks prolonging the pandemic. Worse is that Omicron has joined previous strains of Covid in hopping the species barrier, and after being found in cats, dogs, hamsters, lions, minks and deer in the U.S. Midwest, has been detected in deer on Staten Island.

While U.S. Covid hospitalizations are falling, they remain almost as high as they’ve been at any time during the pandemic. The great relaxation in the U.S. and Europe—where countries like Denmark, Italy and Spain are rapidly flinging off anti-Covid restraints—is akin to leaving home without an umbrella because a blackout rainstorm has slowed to a torrential downpour.

Unfortunately, the political pressure to lift restrictions is in many places formidable, the latest example being the right-wing trucker blockade of Ottawa that is now spreading globally. Politicians who once worried about having Covid deaths on their hands can now plausibly point to the public’s fatigue and do a volte-face on pandemic controls without immediate repercussions. The question is whether this can spare them from accusations that they have blood on their hands when, come election-time, opponents plaster the campaign trail with pictures of those who died of Covid after they lifted restrictions.

To those whose answer is “too bad, most of those people were unvaccinated,” remember this: 45% of the world is still unvaccinated, most not by choice, but because vaccines aren’t available. Also, vaccine immunity fades over time. Booster drives are already far behind the initial push to get people vaccinated. Without regular vaccinations, it looks like we’ll all eventually be unvaccinated.

And to those who claim that Covid-related restrictions are delaying vital medical care for other diseases (suggesting that every life spared from Covid means one potentially lost to some other disease), consider this: the reason non-Covid patients are turned away from hospitals isn’t because of social-distancing measures, but because those hospitals are overwhelmed by Covid patients. In areas where social-distancing has kept transmission rates lower, people still get crucial, non-Covid medical care. And non-Covid illnesses aren’t helped by Covid. Neither is preganancy, apparently. A new study warns that catching Covid may increase the risk of complications.

It’s clearly still best to avoid infection by Covid and work to reduce the rate of transmission in the population.