Like the legendary British superspy’s latest avatar Daniel Craig, the exit of prevailing Double-O Delta may only set the stage for a new leading strain.

(Originally published Oct. 11 in “What in the World“) It’s so tempting to look at the falling slope of new global coronavirus infections and conclude hopefully that the pandemic is nearing an end. If only.

We’ve seen this movie twice before: It ain’t over. So as the world hurtles into autumn and people start packing bags and heading to airports to gather for the year-end Holidays, it’s important to heed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warning over the weekend against letting down our guard. Let’s first see if we can get through November without a fourth global surge. Let’s see if infections drop below the nadirs of February and July. Only then might there be cause for cheer.

Until then, we won’t really know whether this is just another temporary lull before a new storm. Until then, we won’t know if Covid’s toll in human lives has dropped anywhere near a less alarming, flu-like, rate. For that to be true, the daily toll would need to fall below 2,000 a day, a level Covid shot past in March of 2020 and remains a tiny speck in its rear-view mirror.

Yet governments continue to lift restrictions against their better judgment, in a two-steps-forward-one-step back process that only increases the public’s frustration with the inconsistency and lack of consistent benchmarks for lifting them.

The pandemic has meanwhile moved on to afflict the largest remaining population of vulnerable individuals, the 65% of the planet’s population that remains unvaccinated.

While many of those people live far away from the wealthy folk privileged enough to have access to vaccines, it also includes idiots who refuse to get vaccinated as well as a guiltless population still ineligible for vaccines—children. The virus is thus spreading fastest among the youngest. True, most of them have immune systems strong enough to avoid severe illness, but—as this column has reminded readers time and again—every new infection provides the virus another opportunity to mutate into a new strain that can evade the immunity vaccines provide. Just as Bond says, as he comprehends the weapon being unleashed by archvillain Lyutsifer Safin in No Time to Die, “the people become the weapon.” Until the virus mutates into a more benign form or we can reduce its transmission rate, no one is safe.

That’s why the oddly triumphal note in media coverage of Asian nations abandoning their “zero Covid” strategy rings so hollow. The main objective of governments in Asia, led by China, in maintaining tough restrictions on gathering and travel for so long wasn’t only to eliminate Covid, but to save lives as the pandemic raged on elsewhere. Asia’s failure came in not obtaining enough vaccines quickly enough, and then being able to administer them fast enough, to open up sooner. But Western nations are also to blame for not holding up their end and reducing supply of infected individuals as quickly as Asia has. After all, for months the only new cases in Asia have come from individuals flying in from elsewhere.

Singapore’s experiment in opening after achieving a near-80% vaccination rate offers a disappointing bellwether: infections have skyrocketed, and with them Covid-related deaths, as the Delta variant tests the vaccines. But the overall goal in Asia has been achieved: governments there have avoided the kind of death tolls the West now seems all too willing to accept. In the war against Covid, Asia may not have won, but the West has clearly lost. Here’s a chart of the biggest losers in the war against the virus, the countries whose governments failed them…

And here’s where Asia stacks up:

When the pandemic is over, people in Europe and the Americas should undertake a serious examination of why they and their governments weren’t able to do a better job of limiting the spread of Covid-19 and reducing the scale of this tragedy. Poverty is clearly no excuse, since some of the highest death tolls are in some of the world’s wealthiest nations.

If there is a silver lining to the pandemic, it will be that the science perfected to deliver mRNA vaccines will provide new weapons against other diseases, including influenza and cancer. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/N_gD9-Oa0fg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0