Learning to live with Covid, the WHO says, doesn’t mean we should tolerate this many deaths. Why are Europe and the U.S. so eager to do so?

(Originally published Jan. 13 in “What in the World“) Major media continue to be distracted by Omicron’s lower apparent severity, failing to focus on the rebounding overall death toll it is wreaking. But even late-night talk show comedian Stephen Colbert gets it: prevention remains key to reducing the overall level of danger, just as requiring people in cars to wear seat belts remains important even as cars become safer, merely because so many more people travel by car. Omicron isn’t a time-saving convenience, it’s a disease. We need to do more to discourage its transmission.

That remains the message from the World Health Organization, whose director-general yesterday held a press conference to plead that the world—and it’s truly unbelievable that a health official would need to ask this—”not allow this virus a free ride, or wave the white flag…” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reminded reporters that half of the world remains unvaccinated, much less received a booster shot. “Let’s be clear,” Tedros said, “While Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, it remains a dangerous virus, particularly for those who are unvaccinated.” He then went on to drive home a point this newsletter has been banging on about as recently as yesterday: “Almost 50,000 deaths a week is 50,000 deaths too many. Learning to live with this virus does not mean we can, or should, accept this number of deaths.”

The WHO’s mistake is that it keeps appealing to the West to consider the plight of people in poorer, developing countries. But people in rich countries have made clear they not only don’t care about people in poor countries, they don’t care about less fortunate people in their own countries. More and more governments, faced with rising public fatigue and resistance, are declining to revive restrictions to stem Omicron’s spread. The New York Times lists several rich nations that aren’t just rejecting any revival of restrictions, but actually loosening them in the face of Omicron’s spread: Australia, France, Germany and the United States. In all but Germany, the rate at which people are dying from Covid is climbing. In Australia, the death rate is at its highest since the pandemic started and has been accelerating ever since the nation lifted its strict controls on entry from abroad.

In fact, the death rate from Covid-19 in France, Germany and the U.S. is higher than it was in India at the peak of the Delta outbreak last May, but no one is holding fundraisers to ship medical supplies to America despite hospitals there being stretched to the breaking point by skyrocketing, record-high hospitalizations. It’s true what they say: in the West, life is cheap.

Indeed, even U.S. health officials now seem resigned to treating Omicron like an unstoppable natural disaster, with the Food and Drug Administration’s acting head Janet Woodcock proclaiming that “most people are going to get Covid, all right?” This defeatism doesn’t spark howls for Woodcock’s resignation because of the popular but dangerous fallacy that, as Katherine Wu at The Atlantic writes, because Omicron is milder than Delta it isn’t dangerous and that Covid no longer poses a threat. The assumption in this new, let it burn, “false binary” seems to be that once everyone gets Omicron, no one will get Covid from then on. But we already know from Omicron that this isn’t true. Reinfections are increasingly common with the new strain—here’s a poor guy who’s caught it three times. And with everyone getting Covid, a new strain is bound to emerge. That’s how we got Omicron in the first place.

For those too stupid to remember not to touch a hot stove, Reuters offers this handy primer on why it’s not a great idea to get sick with Omicron:

1. Omicron can still make you very sick;
2. You can then infect others, who may get very sick;
3. You might get “long Covid,” we don’t know yet;
4. If you get very sick, medicine to help is scarce; and
5. You might be the one that produces a new strain that makes everyone sick.

One of the most glaring oversights in the West’s diminishing defenses remains its children. Kids remain woefully undervaccinated—only 17% of Americans aged 5 to 11 have had the jab. That’s alarming not only because Omicron is putting a record number of kids in the hospital, but because it’s adding to the number of asymptomatic carriers helping to spread the disease. Kids have supercharged immune systems, and so are less likely to get seriously ill from Covid-19 with or without a vaccine.

Adding vaccination protects those more vulnerable tots from an unpleasant stint in the hospital and, just as with adults, lowers their risk of even catching the virus and transmitting it to a vulnerable adult. But we tend to treat kids like a privileged class of space aliens: Kids are guaranteed if under the age of 5 to be unvacccinated and therefore the most likely people to be carrying and transmitting live virus to those around them. Yet young children in many places aren’t expected to wear masks, even in the enclosed confines of a plane.