Covid’s continued death toll fails to mollify exasperated elites, who demand politicians tolerate higher body counts to achieve “normalcy.”
(Originally published Jan. 12 in “What in the World“) The U.S. has set another new daily record for new Covid cases—1.5 million. Making fewer headlines is that Covid hospitalizations have also hit new highs and that 2,100 Americans died the same day of Covid—that’s more than 860,000 so far in the pandemic. Despite all the hoopla about Omicron supposedly being a less severe strain, America is losing more and more citizens every day to it at an accelerating rate.
Omicron is sweeping across Europe so fast that the World Health Organization warns that half of the population could be infected by March. And despite early hopes that the Omicron surge would pass more quickly than past surges, we’re six weeks in and there’s no sign of a peak in sight (though there are glimmers of a peak in the U.K.). We still don’t really have enough data yet to know whether Omicron is really less deadly to the unvaccinated or those whose vaccines have worn off, or whether Omicron can cause “long Covid.” A new study has found that children infected by Covid are more likely to become diabetic.
But Omicron is already much more dangerous than Delta in that it is becoming so prevalent and infecting so many vaccinated people with mild or even on symptoms, that many are starting to dismiss it. This is particularly true for those frustrated with continued limits on travel and gathering. They’re forgetting four critical points:
- every infected person who may not become very ill or remains asymptomatic transmits the virus to others who might;
- every infected person provides another opportunity for the virus to mutate into something more infectious or more severe;
- every infected person may still yet come down with “long Covid;” and
- Omicron’s mild symptoms so far seem somewhat dependent on recent vaccination. And vaccines wear off over time, meaning without repeated boosters, even the vaccinated may eventually be vulnerable to reinfection and severe illness.
Now on that fourth point, the latest study suggests Omicron may even be milder to unvaccinated people. But the study was based on Covid patients in highly vaccinated California—which has no shortage of statistics because surging infections are pushing the healthcare system there to the brink—not on laboratory studies of the virus itself. The risk of sampling bias in a field study like that is high. But it corroborates other statistical surveys in South Africa and the U.K.
What we need is to take serious steps to control and limit Omicron’s transmission, as inconvenient as that will be. Most places are now trying to reimpose restrictions, but they’re fighting widespread pandemic fatigue and growing public complacency brought on by two years of half measures. Resignation is setting in among those who feel Omicron cannot be beat. Even China is now battling outbreaks. But let’s keep an eye on the prize, which is keeping people alive and healthy as long as we can until science—or biology—finds a solution.
Who’s Doing a Better Job of “Living” with Covid?
Of course, developing Asia’s economies are growing more slowly than the West’s this year thanks to the constraints on activity imposed to limit transmission—in addition to reduced global activity and, with it, demand for Asian exports. And of course thanks to the rising death toll, GDP/capita in the West is truly shining as growth rebounds. But anyone who thinks GDP growth is the priority during a pandemic needs to calculate a unit value for each life lost in the name of resuming economic activity and figure out a way to redress the costs and lost future income borne by the families who’ve lost economic actors (consumers as well as wage-earners) so that other families could more quickly resume their own economic activity, a process that is exacerbating income inequality since of course the brunt of the virus isn’t borne equitably. There’s also the hidden cost and transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare, where workers are still toiling and dying in an effort to minimize deaths due to Covid. And then there’s the transfer of wealth to consider from those who succumb to the virus, for whom the net present value of recovering economic growth is zero.
Oh, and then they need to do some serious soul-searching and ask themselves how they became a heartless vampire.
