We imagined that the restoration of certain things would signal that life was returning to normal after the Pandemic. Offices would fill up, schools would reopen, and restaurants would buzz with diners. We got all those things back, but we didn't get rid of the virus. It is hard to imagine what could have happened if their return was not the signal.
The founding leadership of the CDC's new epidemic forecasting center say there won't be a single moment. In the future, we will recognize the transition. She points out that we have only achieved the third milestone, which isinterrupting transmission. She says that moving from emergency to routine involves living in the way that you want to. We might be close to there.
It's a socio political decision to move on from the epidemic. We can be pretty sure that it hasn't settled into a steady state yet. On the same weekend that Biden declared the Pandemic over, Swedish researchers announced in a preprint that they had found a new variant of the disease. According to the senior author of the preprint, it exhibits more extreme antibody escape than any other variant we have seen so far.
We might not be done with Covid, but we might not be done with them. It feels like making another exhausting circuit through a bunch of the same events. The moral of the day is that intentions can change the future. There are lessons we can use in the epidemic. Most of them haven't been taken advantage of by us.
In 2020, as awful as it was, I thought: This is finally the time that we're going to end the cycle of boom and bust, because this event is so profound that we aren't going to want to head back into another one.
Things that could make a difference to the next Pandemic have yet to be created despite the US spending trillions of dollars on Covid. Funding state and local health departments so they can build back permanent workforces and reconsidering the health care cost-cutting that left understaffed hospitals so vulnerable to Covid overcrowding are some of the things that need to be considered. Fix the collection of disease data in the US is part of it. According to a coalition of public health organizations, it would take almost $8 billion to fix the leaking pipe. One recent example of the system's ineffectiveness was when men who believed they were at risk for monkeypox, but also thought they were protected by childhood vaccinations, discovered their paper vaccine records had never been uploaded to digital systems.
Asking if we are ready for the next one is another way to know when the epidemic is done. About that, we're not. Kates doesn't think we're prepared for the next Pandemic. We won't be ready for a long time.
Which sounds defeatist. One way to think about getting to over is to imagine what actions it would take to suppress Covid as much as possible, and then make them milestone that lead us to the end of the epidemic. When there's little left that we can do, it will be over for me. We can close the booster gap for severe disease and death, as well as reduce the spread of super-spreading. They won't get done if the political will isn't behind it.
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