The world is ready to move on, but risks remain

Lately, there is less news about COVID. Many feel that it is time to move on.

Even the World Health Organization (WHO) website is devoting less space to it. Since the first months of 2020, a list of links related to the pandemic has dominated the site. Now the page dedicates the same amount of space to health emergencies in Ukraine as to COVID.

To some extent, that may be justified. The number of reported cases fell 16% last week, a fourth consecutive decline. The number of weekly deaths fell by 10%.

Outside of Hong Kong and other parts of Asia that are seeing record levels of transmission, life in many places appears closer to normal than at any time since 2020.

As the world grows weary of constant COVID restrictions, the challenge now is to be fully alert to the dangers of pandemics.

The numbers are still shocking. Ask your friends and family how many people die from COVID each week around the world. Few would guess that it is 60,000, the same number that was first reached in October 2020, when governments around the world resorted to a second round of lockdowns. At the current rate, that would be more than three million deaths a year, more than any other infectious disease.

Even with new COVID treatments and the relatively mild nature of the omicron variant, it would be foolish to become complacent. Long-term COVID can affect the body for months — possibly years — after infection, and scientists aren’t sure how many millions of people might have it.

According to the WHO, between 10% and 20% of COVID patients may have persistent symptoms five months after initial infection. The uncertainty means that the full public health burden of COVID will only be known for years to come.

But it’s not just about COVID, it’s also about upcoming pandemics. Here’s another question for friends and family: In the last four decades, how many dangerous disease outbreaks have been caused by viruses that jumped from animals to humans? The correct answer is at least six.

There’s HIV, which may have originally crossed over to humans decades before emerging in the early 1980s; bird flu in 1997; SARS in 2003; the MERS in 2012; Ebola in 2014; and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is now widely considered to have animal origins as well.

It is not time to move on when we know that the next pandemics are on their way.