Thinking of traveling to Europe this summer? (I'm not.) Italy is no longer requiring travelers to have a valid coronavirus pass. N95 masks will be required on public transit and in cinemas, concerts, and schools until June 15. US travel industry leaders want the government to drop the requirement that vaccinated travelers take a covid tests before flying to the US. They say it hurts the travel industry and is not a requirement in most other countries. In Canada, incoming vaccinated travelers are stopped at random for testing.
As I ponder turning 66 in a month, I note that coronavirus data consider "older" to mean ages 65 and over. I guess I'm already old or, as My Older Brother reminded me a year ago, an official senior citizen. The death rate for older people has soared during the Omicron wave. The Omicron death peak for older people was 163 percent of the Delta peak. For people ages 12 through 64, the Omicron peak was 69 percent of the Delta ones. Almost as many people ages 65 and up died in four months of Omicron as died in six months of Delta, even though Delta caused more serious illness. More stats on older Americans. The death rate for unvaccinated older people was 156 per 100,000 compared with 24 per 100,000 for vaccinated and seven per 100,000 for boosted. For the same age group, the estimate is that 13 percent are unvaccinated, three percent have gotten one dose of an mRNA vaccine, and 14 percent are vaccinated but have not gotten a booster dose. As of mid-May, over a quarter of Americans ages 65 and older had not had their most recent dose of vaccine within one year. The facility in which My Mom lives gave a first booster to everyone who would take one but does not plan to give a second booster until fall, hoping that the vaccines by then have been modified to better deal with Omicron. I offered to take her out for a booster, but she said she'd wait until they did the in-house one in the fall.
Many people have said that we should learn to "live with covid." The two million people in the UK who are literally living with (long) covid might disagree. One-fifth of them had the infection two years ago and are still having symptoms. Two-fifths have suffered covid symptoms for one year.
As for when the pandemic might end, one source cites two central questions. First, how durable is our immunity and how durable must it stay? Second, how fast will the virus continue to evolve? 2021 could be described as the year of the variant. First came Alpha, over 50 percent more transmissible in humans than the original virus was. Then came Beta and Gamma, both of which exhibited immune escape. Delta, 50 percent more transmissible than Alpha not to mention more severe, came next, followed by Omicron. Will 2022 be the year of reinfection? We won't reach the end of the pandemic on any one criterion.
Looking to how the next pandemic might develop, WHO agreed on Monday to form a committee with the intent to better respond to future global health emergencies. The committee would convene as soon as possible after an international public health emergency was declared. The lack of such a group is seen as one of the weakest points surrounding this pandemic.
Are we there yet? To the end of this pandemic? To the start of a new one? And just how will monkeypox evolve?
1 comment:
I am not going to spend my life worrying about the next virus that might or might not come along. There's nothing I can do about it and living under a rock is no good for my mental health. The Spanish flu fizzled out after a few years and I'm going to assume this will too. The economic and social effects might take longer to resolve, staff dropped that aren't there waiting to be rehired, backlogs from pandemic shutdown (driving tests) and appalling response times that have become the norm. I do go out for dinner but many times it's menu roulette - maybe there're no pizza or no pasta tonight. I worry that after two years we've forgotten what normal looks like.
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