In 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic will end. Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus.
The basic proposition of a pandemic, an infectious disease spreading globally among an infection-naive population, will be void. We will live our lives again as part of the incredibly social and incurably optimistic human species that thrives on this planet and has emerged from countless pandemics over history stronger and more capable of managing the next.
Dr Nick Coatsworth at his home in Canberra.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
In Australia, we have seen extraordinary displays of community unity over the past two years, none more so than our uptake of vaccination. The primary driver has been a desire to protect our community, our family, and our vulnerable. Witness the extraordinary and world-leading vaccination rates of Victoria and NSW being mirrored around the nation. Witness the willingness to accept extreme restrictions to protect our vulnerable during 2020. Witness the fact that young Australians endured without complaint extreme imposition on the most formative and important years of their lives.
With a significant contribution from Australian science, COVID-19 is now the most treatable respiratory virus known to man. The case-to-fatality ratio of Omicron is likely to be less than that of influenza, and not a particularly bad flu at that. That will allow us to release all but the least intrusive of restrictions.
Most critically, this means we can leave behind any policy that impacts upon a child’s education in the name of COVID-19 control. It means our adolescents and young adults will be free to associate, to travel the nation and the world, and any restriction to that liberty will arise in only the most dire threat to our health. Such a threat grows more and more improbable by the day.
Loading
The virus itself has also helped us. It has evolved into a definitively milder illness with a complete uncoupling of case numbers and hospitalisations. The evidence for this emerged from South Africa very early in the Omicron wave and now has been validated around the world to the point of being conclusive. Both length of stay and disease severity are lower. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of cases have not brought the National Health Service to collapse. Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford John Bell concluded earlier in the week that Omicron is not “the same disease we were seeing a year ago”. Every nation has seen the same phenomenon. We are seeing it in Australia.
In light of our community success, the evolution of the virus to a milder form and effective new treatments, the time for mandates and whole-of-community restrictions is therefore over. The case for fear of COVID-19 is now restricted largely to the social media platform of Twitter.
Absent the perennial efforts of a small but vocal section of public health academia and a dwindling number of media personalities, our community is ready and can move to a phase of living with COVID-19 as an endemic virus.
Welcome to 2022, the year this pandemic ends
Source: Philippines Alive
