New Coronavirus News from 7 Dec 2021

Gen Z most stressed by coronavirus, citing pandemic toll on careers, education and relationships, poll says [The New York Times, 7 Dec 2021]

By Andrew Jeong

About 45 percent of Gen Z respondents said maintaining ties with friends was harder, and 40 percent said their romantic relationships had become more difficult. (iStock)

Gen Z is feeling the stresses of the pandemic more than any other age group, according to a U.S. survey released Monday.

Higher proportions of Americans between ages 13 and 24 say the pandemic has made their education, career goals and social lives more difficult, compared with millennials and Gen X.
FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus

Nearly half of those in the Gen Z age group said the pandemic had made their schooling and career aspirations tougher, according to a survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research with funding from MTV. The survey polled 3,764 people between ages 13 and 56 from Sept. 1 to Sept. 19.

About 45 percent of Gen Z respondents said maintaining ties with friends was harder, and 40 percent said their romantic relationships had become more difficult. Fewer Americans in older age groups reported the same difficulties, and they were less likely to say that the pandemic had disrupted their education or careers, according to the survey.

“Overall, 35% of Gen Z frequently experiences stress and another 46% report experiencing it sometimes,” the survey’s authors said. “Uncertainty about the pandemic and fear of infection are among the top sources of stress for this generation.”

The survey’s results add weight to earlier studies that have reported that younger Americans, especially those belonging to Gen Z, are experiencing isolation, loneliness and stress from the coronavirus pandemic, while also being more exposed to the pandemic’s adverse impact on the economy than other age groups.

Who is handling the pandemic best emotionally? Boomers and other retirees.

In October, the American Psychological Association reported that Gen Z adults were the most likely to experience heightened difficulty in making major life decisions, partly because the pandemic had created more uncertainty about what the next few months of their lives could look like.

In March, the same association reported that members of Gen Z were the likeliest to say that the pandemic had hurt their mental health, or report an unwanted change in their body weight.

The pandemic also appears to have hit Gen Z job seekers hardest. (Historically, the youngest tend to be harmed most during hard times). In April 2020, as the pandemic’s economic devastation was spreading across the country, a third of job hunters between ages 16 and 19 were unemployed. That was more than twice the national unemployment rate.

Though youth employment has improved since then, the level of employment for Americans between 16 and 24 years old still remains below that of 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August.

Workers in the Gen Z age bracket outside the United States report similar difficulties. In June, the International Labor Organization, the United Nations-backed agency headquartered in Switzerland, said Gen-Z workers had seen their job prospects decline by more than twice the rate of their older counterparts.

“In fact, though the number of young unemployed has remained essentially unchanged between 2019 and 2020 worldwide, this is only because many young people without a job stopped looking for one or have delayed their entry into the [labor] market,” the agency said.

Pandemic-Era ‘Excess Savings’ Are Dwindling for Many [The New York Times, 7 Dec 2021]

By Talmon Joseph Smith

Americans’ Pandemic-Era ‘Excess Savings’ Are Dwindling for Many

The drop in cash reserves has vast implications for the working class and could dampen consumer spending, a large share of economic activity.

Infusions of government cash that warded off an economic calamity have left millions of households with bigger bank balances than before the pandemic — savings that have driven a torrent of consumer spending, helped pay off debts and, at times, reduced the urgency of job hunts.

But many low-income Americans find their savings dwindling or even depleted. And for them, the economic recovery is looking less buoyant.

Over the past 18 months or so, experts have been closely tracking the multitrillion-dollar increase in what economists call “excess savings,” generally defined as the amount by which people’s cash reserves during the Covid-19 crisis exceeded what they would have normally saved.

The poorest households saw the greatest impact from stimulus.

But spikes in savings faded quickly.

By Ella Koeze

According to Moody’s Analytics, an economic research firm, these excess savings among many working- and middle-class households could be exhausted as soon as early next year — not only reducing their financial cushions but also potentially affecting the economy, since consumer spending is such a large share of activity. Additionally, many pandemic-era federal programs expired in September, including the federal supplement to unemployment benefits.

In April 2020, after the pandemic’s outset, the nation’s personal saving rate — the percentage of overall disposable income that goes into savings each month — jumped fourfold from its February 2020 level to 34 percent. Some of that spike in savings resulted from government checks of up to $1,200 sent to most Americans; some simply stemmed from reduced spending by firmly middle-class or affluent households during lockdowns.

The rate peaked again at 26 percent this past spring after another round of direct federal payments.

But the personal saving rate doesn’t account for how those savings are distributed. Wealthy households, for instance, have saved the most.

“We do tend to see these broad-brush-stroke economic figures and assume that they apply to the broadest part of the populace,” said Mark Hamrick, the senior economic analyst at Bankrate, a personal finance company. “There’s a significant cross-section of the American public which is financially fragile.”

New research by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which assesses the bank accounts of 1.6 million families, found that low-income families experienced the “greatest percent gains” during each round of stimulus, yet also exhausted their balances faster. That’s in part because those households went into the crisis with the thinnest financial buffers.

The median balance among higher-income families (defined as those earning more than $68,896) was roughly 40 percent higher in September than two years earlier. The typical low-income family (those earning less than $30,296) experienced a much larger increase in relative terms — 70 percent — but that represented a total cash balance of only about $1,000.
Low-income households’ balances are still up, but not by much.

By Ella Koeze

And households making $30,296 to $44,955 also made significant gains compared with 2019, yet typically had less than about $1,300 in cash on hand. In a silver lining, the report found that the cash balances of families with children appear to have been helped by the three rounds of monthly child tax credit payments that began in July, which provided up to $300 per child under 6 and up to $250 per child 6 to 17.

“I’ve been trying to ask myself this question: Is this a lot or is this a little?” said Fiona Greig, a co-president of the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Ms. Greig said that when reviewing the data, she was torn between hope — when seeing that “families had a doubling of balances in some cases when they received their stimulus checks” — and disappointment knowing “there are some families for whom this is really all they have.”

By October, the U.S. personal saving rate, which had peaked above 30 percent, had reverted to its December 2019 level of 7.3 percent.

Technically, most households are financially better off now than before the crisis by several measures, an anomaly after a recession. Still, the fading impact of pandemic aid is quickly being felt. In July, one in three Americans reported having less money to fall back on in an emergency than before the pandemic, according to a Bankrate survey. Only one in six reported having more.

In a commentary published on a Federal Reserve Bank of New York blog in April, four economists argued that “although large by historical standards, the savings accumulated by U.S. households during the pandemic do not appear to be ‘excessive’ when set against the extraordinary need of many American families.”

Millions of Americans could be buffeted by financial volatility again with little safeguard as new variants of the virus emerge. For some, that reality has already begun.

“It was hard even before the pandemic hit,” said Maria Patton, a 57-year-old former real estate agent whose finances were ruined by a recent divorce. “And when the pandemic hit, it became impossible, almost.”

Ms. Patton, who has a teenage son, had just been hired at Nordstrom in Los Angeles when the virus surged and she was laid off. Despite immediately applying for unemployment insurance in March 2020, she went more than two months without receiving benefits. She tried to find work as a nanny — which had been her most recent employment — but wound up moving home to Tennessee, where she figured the cost of living was more affordable.

As she was moving in the middle of last year, she received back payments for all the weeks she was eligible for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance — an emergency federal program to help freelancers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits — which amounted to a lump sum of $15,000. Much of that cash, Ms. Patton says, went to paying down debt, as well as “paying for medical insurance out of my pocket” because she can’t afford health care coverage, and living in a hotel because landlords in Nashville didn’t like her credit situation.
Ms. Patton used more of her savings in January to move the two of them to Denver for a $25-an-hour nanny job she found online, which went well until she got Covid-19 and had to quit.
Now she and her son work for Amazon Fresh, the grocery delivery service, making $15 an hour. Her savings dried up in September.

“Now, I’m right back where I was,” she said. “I feel like a loser. I feel like a failure.” Making too much to qualify for assistance but too little to afford stable housing, she fears she and her son will be living out of her car soon after the holidays.

The drawing down of households’ cash will test competing theories about the extent to which those savings have increased worker power and wages and how much they contributed to labor shortages, inflation and even supply chain snags.

There has been wide agreement among business leaders and economists that after decades of wage and income stagnation, the burst in savings has eased poverty while giving employees and job seekers more leverage. But there is less agreement about whether this development has had unintended, negative consequences.

The cash buffer “gives people some discretion over whether they take the first job that’s available or if they want to leave the work force altogether for a time,” said James K. Galbraith, a progressive economist at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There may well be long-term lasting benefits,” Dr. Galbraith argued. “If in the short run, in order to bring people back into the work force, employers raise the low wages that they’re offering, then they’re probably not going to be in a position to cut them” down the road.

Wages were up 4.8 percent overall in November from a year earlier and were much higher in sectors like leisure and hospitality.

Many investors and business owners are wary of these wage gains continuing, contending that companies may pass more of their labor costs on to customers and that they may threaten companies’ profitability — or even their viability. With job openings at record levels, a large share of business groups remain hopeful that more people will accept wages at their current levels as their savings diminish.

A crop of high-profile economists in both major political parties contend that measures like the aid package from the spring, while well intentioned and effective in warding off some impoverishment, have caused consumer spending to outstrip supply this year as the economy reopened, worsening inflation and straining supply chains.

“From a macroeconomic perspective, it would certainly be helpful if consumer demand were to cool off,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “Rooting for low-income households to have less savings is not great, but I think it’s important to remember low-income households are the ones who are hurt the most by inflation. It doesn’t sit well thinking, ‘Boy, it’d be great if households burned through their excess savings.’ But we’re not in a normal period.”

A Bank of America report in November noted that price increases for some goods, especially in food and energy categories, were “cutting the spending power of less-educated households by 4.6 percent on an annualized basis, compared to 3 percent for more-educated households.”

Still, a report from J.P. Morgan points out that consumers are likely to “eat into their accumulated excess savings to offset rising prices,” suggesting that vulnerable households could potentially face an even greater inflation challenge if those savings were absent.

Moody’s Analytics estimated that there was still $2.5 trillion left in overall excess savings as of October and that the total would decrease by $50 billion a month on average through the end of next year — with the fastest declines among those with the lowest incomes.

That mathematical modeling, by its nature, renders in statistics what many are feeling in more palpable ways. “The people looking at the data aren’t the people trying to put food on the table,” said Ms. Patton, the real estate agent turned Amazon Fresh worker. “The people that are writing this and thinking this have never struggled right now.”

Former CDC director: What's next with Omicron and the pandemic? [CNN, 7 Dec 2021]

By Dr. Tom Frieden

(CNN)On Thanksgiving morning, Covid reminded us that neither death nor mutations take a holiday. And while the virus gathers strength, a pandemic of pandemic fatigue undermines our ability to stop the virus. The newly discovered Omicron variant quickly led to border closures, a stock market plunge, and a collective sigh of despair: Will the pandemic ever end?

To stop disease spread, we need to learn quickly, communicate well, and act effectively.

There's a lot we don't know yet about Omicron, and definitive answers to the most important questions will likely take weeks or longer. The most valuable resource we need to live well and prosper in the age of Covid is timely, accurate information, accurately interpreted and appropriately acted on.

The most important unknown about Omicron is to what extent it evades protection from vaccines and prior infection. And the most important unknown about our response is whether governments can retain the trust of enough people to implement effective control measures.
Our best hope to control the pandemic is to learn together and spread best practices around the world.

Media coverage of Omicron has, understandably, driven a sense of despair. But it's encouraging to reflect on the enormous progress of the past year. We know more about how the virus is transmitted, risk factors for and treatments to better care for patients with severe disease, and that masks, ventilation, and distancing prevent spread. Most of all, we have remarkably safe and effective vaccines.

Let's not sugar-coat what's coming. The United States and Europe are already experiencing a large Covid surge from the Delta variant, the flu season is starting, and Omicron is likely to cause another wave of infections. Even without Omicron, the U.S. would be facing difficult months ahead. It's shaping up to be a hard winter.

Although there are important roles for better ventilation and effective testing programs, success confronting Covid will, on one hand, take increased vaccination and indoor masking, including through mandates, and on the other hand, individual and societal decisions on balancing individual and collective risks and benefits.

First, vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. That is: Reach those who haven't yet received their first dose. Even places with high vaccination rates are vulnerable to large outbreaks, primarily among the unvaccinated. A more infectious variant increases the threshold for herd immunity. Get third doses to those who are immunosuppressed, and boost everyone. And vaccinate the world. When it comes to immunity against a potentially deadly virus, more is better.

We set ourselves up for new dangerous variants by failing to address global vaccine equity.
Most people in high-income countries are fully vaccinated and tens of millions have gotten boosters while less than 10% of Africa's population has been fully vaccinated. Manufacturers have consistently missed their production targets, and poorer countries have been at the back of the line for vaccines.

Rapidly expanding production of highly effective mRNA vaccines is our best hope of preventing more dangerous variants from causing another pandemic wave. The persistent failure of Pfizer and Moderna to either expand vaccine production sufficiently themselves or license their technology to consortia of other producers means that billions of people, including virtually everyone in lower-income countries, remain avoidably at risk from infection and death.

The mRNA technology is faster to scale up and more easily tweaked to address variants; both companies announced they could have Omicron-specific vaccines ready within months. But the global need could easily be at least four times the current production capacity of both companies combined.

Second, although we've gotten used to going without masks, with increasing cases and a more infectious variant, it's time to mask up again. If everyone masks indoors where Covid is spreading, everyone is safer.

Just as your right to swing your fist doesn't extend to someone else's nose, your right to bare your nose and mouth doesn't extend to killing someone by spreading a deadly virus. Mask mandates need to be implemented, enforced, and adherence monitored to build a collective sense of responsibility and achievement at high levels of mask wearing.

This can be done by tracking and publishing rates of appropriate indoor mask usage and keeping them above 90%. Fix the market so anyone can buy an effective mask at a reasonable price, and give away masks, including N95s, to those who need them. If you're older or immunosuppressed or live with someone who is, and especially if others around you aren't masked, you'll be safer if you upgrade to an N95.

Third, balance risks and benefits. Vaccination and indoor mask mandates are required, both ethically and for disease control. But many other decisions need to be based on individual and societal values. Ratcheting protections up and down based on how much Covid is spreading -- how hard it's raining Covid outside -- can help, but which gatherings to restrict, whether to go to restaurants and bars, and how to balance economic activity with protecting public health can have different right answers for different people, at different times and in different places.

Pandemics -- including pandemics caused by new SARS-CoV-2 variants -- are not inevitable.
Information is power. Viruses outnumber us trillions to one; our best hope is to outsmart them.

Pandemic Caused Uptick in Blood Pressure Across US [WebMD, 7 Dec 2021]

By Carolyn Crist

Dec. 7, 2021 -- Blood pressure measurements increased significantly in the U.S. last year as people dealt with the pandemic, lockdowns, unemployment, depression, and stress, according to a new report published in the journal Circulation.

Between April and December 2020, systolic and diastolic measurements were significantly higher than in 2019, which could affect people’s health far beyond the pandemic.

“These are very important data that are not surprising, but are shocking,” Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, president of the American Heart Association, told The New York Times.

“Even small changes in average blood pressure in the population can have a huge impact on the number of strokes, heart failure events, and heart attacks that we’re likely to be seeing in the coming months,” he said.

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic and Quest Diagnostics analyzed data from more than 464,000 employees and family members in employer-sponsored wellness programs that tracked health measures such as blood pressure and weight. The study included people from all 50 states and the District of Columbia who had normal or high blood pressure at the start of the study.

The research team found that blood pressure readings didn’t change much between 2019 and the first 3 months of 2020. But they increased significantly from April 2020 through December 2020, as compared with the same time in 2019.

The increases were across all age groups and both men and women, though larger increases were seen in women.

“We observed that people weren’t exercising as much during the pandemic, weren’t getting regular care, were drinking more and sleeping less,” Luke Laffin, MD, the lead study author and co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic, told the newspaper.

About half of American adults have high blood pressure, or hypertension, which can be life-threatening, the newspaper reported. Hypertension increases pressure on artery walls, which can damage the heart, brain, blood vessels, kidneys, eyes, and sexual function. High blood pressure can also put people at greater risk for severe COVID-19.

The study authors can’t say for sure what caused the increase in blood pressure, though it’s likely a combination of stress, alcohol consumption, less exercise, fewer doctor visits, and a not following medication schedules.

“It is probably multifactorial,” Lloyd-Jones told the newspaper. “But I think a critical piece is that we know so many people lost contact with the health care system, and lost control of blood pressure and diabetes.”

The study authors encouraged Americans to consider their overall health, particularly conditions such as high blood pressure that could affect them after the pandemic.

“There are also public health consequences from not seeing your doctor regularly, making poor dietary choices, and not exercising,” Laffin said. “If we think about the long-term implications, that’s potentially more profound.”

Scientist behind UK vaccine says next pandemic may be worse [ABC News, 7 Dec 2021]

By DANICA KIRKA

One of the scientists behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is warning that the next pandemic may be more contagious and more lethal unless more money is devoted to research and preparations to fight emerging viral threats

LONDON -- One of the scientists behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is warning that the next pandemic may be more contagious and more lethal unless more money is devoted to research and preparations to fight emerging viral threats.

In excerpts released before a speech Monday, Professor Sarah Gilbert says the scientific advances made in fighting deadly viruses “must not be lost” because of the cost of fighting the current pandemic.

“This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods,’’ Gilbert is expected to say. “The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both.”

Gilbert will be speaking Monday night when she delivers this year’s Richard Dimbleby lecture, named after the late broadcaster who was the BBC’s first war correspondent and a pioneer of television news in Britain. The annual televised lecture features addresses by influential figures in business, science and government.

Gilbert is set to urge governments to redouble their commitment to scientific research and pandemic preparedness, even after the threat of COVID-19 wanes.

“We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through, and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness,’’ she said. “The advances we have made, and the knowledge we have gained, must not be lost.”

The U.K. lifted most coronavirus restrictions in July after a successful vaccination campaign, but is now waiting to see whether the new omicron variant will cause a setback. It has seen a high number of new daily infections this fall and still has the second-worst COVID-19 death toll in Europe — over 146,000 deaths — after Russia.

The government has tightened travel testing and isolation requirements and barred visitors from South Africa, where the variant was first identified, and several other African countries including Nigeria.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Monday more than 300 omicron cases had been confirmed in Britain, some with no links to international travel, and “we can conclude that there is now community transmission across multiple regions of England.”

Much remains unknown about the variant, including whether it is more contagious as some health authorities suspect, whether it makes people more seriously ill, and whether it can thwart vaccines.

“We can’t say for certain at this point whether omicron has the potential to knock us off our road to recovery,” Javid said.

New Coronavirus News from 6 Dec 2021

Osterholm on what we know about omicron — and another pandemic winter [Minnesota Public Radio News, 6 Dec 2021]

By Cathy Wurzer

There's still a lot we don't know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus. We know it's been found in at least 16 states now. Minnesota was one of the first to report a case of the variant last week. But researchers are still not sure if it will make people sicker than the delta variant.

Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, joined host Cathy Wurzer to discuss. He said the evidence so far suggests omicron may be more transmissible than delta, but it might not make people as sick — perhaps due to genetic information that omicron picked up from another virus that causes the common cold in humans.

“If a lot of people get [omicron] but it's not causing — on a whole — severe illness across the population, this would be incredibly good news,” Osterholm said.

In an ideal world, omicron might even outcompete delta, infecting more people with a milder illness and leaving them with additional protection against SARS-CoV-2, Osterholm added.
“That could be Mother Nature’s way of helping us out of this pandemic,” Osterholm said. “But at this point, again, that's all just hypothetical.”

According to Osterholm, the emergence of omicron underlines the importance of vaccine equity. He said that President Joe Biden’s administration is taking action to support vaccination campaigns around the world.

As people gather for the holidays, Osterholm urged listeners not to let up on pandemic precautions, no matter how tired of the pandemic they may be.

• Omicron variantShould you travel? Health experts say it depends

“I think a family event where everyone is fully vaccinated, and, to add an additional layer of protection, using the rapid test in the morning before that family event to make sure everybody's negative — then celebrate the holidays, and have just a great time,” Osterholm said. “But if you don't do that, just know you may be the one individual who creates an outbreak.”

“The most important message … listeners can take away from today's discussion: Please get vaccinated if you haven't been, as soon as possible,” Osterholm said. “And for those who are eligible for boosters, get them.”

From pandemic to endemic: this is how we might get back to normal [The Guardian, 5 Dec 2021]

By Yasmin Tayag

Covid-19 is unlikely to be eradicated, experts say, but societies in the past have learned to live with diseases

First, the bad news. With unpredictable outbreaks still occurring around the world, and variants like Omicron raising questions about the virus’s contagiousness, we are very much still in a pandemic.

The good news: while it’s difficult to predict the exact timing, most scientists agree that the Covid-19 pandemic will end and that the virus will become endemic. That means the virus will probably never be eliminated entirely, but as more people get vaccinated and become exposed to it, infections will eventually arise at a consistently low rate, and fewer people will become severely ill. An area where vaccination and booster rates are high will probably see endemicity sooner than a region with lower rates.

What does that transition look like?
In practical terms, there will be an announcement. The World Health Organization and local health agencies will officially declare the global pandemic over, a designation informed by certain biological and statistical benchmarks: the virus’s contagiousness, mortality rate, and power to overwhelm hospitals, to name a few.

In some places, like the US and other wealthy nations with ready access to vaccines and antiviral treatments, endemicity could look a lot like the present: People emerging from despair, diners piling into restaurants, and vaccine cards being checked with decreasing rigor. But there could be other, more profound societal changes as well.

To understand how daily life will change if Covid-19 becomes endemic, we can turn to history for a useful (if imperfect) guide.

A shift in attitudes and behaviors
People generally respond to epidemics with fear and panic, on the individual level and as a society. According to Charles Kenny, a director at the Center for Global Development and author of The Plague Cycle, these reactions reliably take shape in some now-recognizable ways: shutting down borders, sequestering the sick, and withdrawing from society.

Until the advent of modern medicine, all people could do was hope (and pray) for outbreaks to subside on their own. When it became clear that a disease was inescapable –or endemic– societies would often make strides to reframe the illness as a regular part of life. This may also become true of Covid-19.

Kenny’s book offers one potential preview. In 17th-century Japanese cities, attitudes about smallpox shifted as the disease became endemic; by then, most people had already been exposed as children and subsequently recovered. Once people accepted “that everyone’s going to get smallpox”, Kenny says, they ritualized and normalized it as a childhood milestone, making it a part of the “growing-up story”.

It’s too soon to say how this process of normalization will unfold with regard to Covid. However, if infections turn out to become a normal part of the winter months, they may simply get absorbed into what’s known as cold and flu season. Much as with smallpox in Japanese cities, that change will be reflected in people’s language and day-to-day expectations. Already, some are beginning to use the term “Covid season”.

Effective medical interventions also make it easier for societies to accept the thought of coexisting with illness. “My parents were terrified [of polio],” says Nancy Tomes, a history professor at Stony Brook University and author of The Gospel of Germs. Tomes, on the other hand, was a part of “the generation that went to the local high school and got the sugar cube,” referring to a common dispensation method for an orally administered polio vaccine.

“We stopped worrying about polio after that,” Tomes says.

Though Covid remains prevalent, the advent of effective vaccines swiftly altered the scope of its threat. In March, when just 9.2% of Americans were fully vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its social distancing guidance to allow immunised people to gather indoors. And on Thanksgiving, Joe Biden declared that the US was “back” from pandemic hibernation – despite the nearly 100,000 new Covid-19 cases still being confirmed each day.

Finger-pointing and misinformation
Unfortunately, history suggests that some negative pandemic-related behaviors tend to persist after a disease becomes endemic or is eliminated. One of these is the disproportionate targeting of groups perceived as “outsiders” within the dominant society. When the pandemic subsides, says Kenny, the social restrictions likely to remain “are the ones that affect minority groups”.

Imposed in 1987, America’s xenophobic and homophobic travel ban on people with HIV lasted for 22 years. And today, people wrongfully associated with Covid, like those from Asia or Africa, are still being harassed and shut out despite the full understanding that the coronavirus isn’t discerning of race.

A propensity for misinformation and conspiracy theories has also been associated with epidemics – “a shit show”, says Tomes, with a legacy “that goes all the way back to every epidemic that we have any written records of”. Some of these mistruths prove to have staying power. “There are still people who don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS,” she says.

During pandemics, groups of people also become susceptible to developing extreme views on topics that stir up strong opinions – like vaccination and personal liberty – which they may not have initially held. Even once a pandemic has ended, that phenomenon of “group polarization” may remain “lingering in the background,” says Steven Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of The Psychology of Pandemics. That polarization is liable to “get stirred up again when something similar arises” in the future.

Knowing what we can’t know (yet)
Importantly, the return to normalcy won’t happen evenly across the globe. After people in wealthy nations ease into endemicity, those in the global south may continue to grapple with the coronavirus for a long time, as has been the case for a host of tropical diseases that have been all but forgotten in places like the US.

Like all the infectious diseases that gripped the world before it, Sars-CoV-2 will hopefully fade into distant memory, for better or worse. This forgetfulness can bring relief, growth and recovery, but it could also leave us woefully unprepared for the next pandemic. The 1918 flu taught us that masking and social distancing could reduce deaths, says Kenny – a lesson that we relearned too late in 2020.

The world has the tools to end the coronavirus pandemic. They're not being used properly [CNN, 6 Dec 2021]

By Rob Picheta

London (CNN)The Covid-19 pandemic will not last forever.

It will likely continue to fizzle and fade as it heads towards its third year, resurging with new variants and then waning in the face of vaccines, mitigation measures and human behavior. But even if the virus is never stamped out, immunity will improve and the world will eventually be able to live with Covid.

On that, experts generally agree. "The large majority of infectious disease specialists think, and have thought for many months, that SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay," said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

"Our grandchildren's grandchildren will still be catching (the virus)," he said. But "Covid, the disease, will become part of our history as the infection morphs into just another cause of the common cold."

There is, however, a far more pertinent question, the answer to which is frustratingly elusive: How long will it take to get there?

And that answer is not up to luck -- it is, at least in large part, within our hands. Pandemics fade out of view as a result of human efforts like vaccine development, contact tracing, genomic analysis, containment measures and international cooperation. In short, the world has a toolkit to bring an end to the pandemic as quickly as possible.

The problem? Even after 20 months, those tools are not being put to best use. "This is the major issue: There was never a plan, (and) there still isn't a plan at a global level," said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programs at the Duke Global Health Institute.

"We're not good at dealing with global crises as a world -- we don't really have the infrastructure, or leadership, or accountability," she added.

Some countries have fared better in the face of Covid than others. But to accelerate the endgame, countless experts -- including Taylor -- are calling for a new, global approach, particularly when it comes to vaccines, treatments and information sharing.

Such an effort is the best way to end the pandemic quickly, they say -- and unless it happens, people in every corner of the world could still be living under a Covid cloud through 2022 and beyond.

"We knew ahead of time what would happen if we took this nationalistic approach, but we did it anyway," Taylor said. "And we are now living with the consequences of that."

The world's key tool
If the world has an arsenal to help it end the pandemic, the most important weapon in it is an obvious one.

"The first tool that we have is the vaccine," says Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at San Raffaele University in Milan, a high-profile commentator on Italy's pandemic response.

The development of several vaccines, all highly effective in stopping severe disease and useful too in stemming transmission, was a world-first. The previous record to get a shot on the market was four years, but the Covid-19 pandemic ripped up all expectations and reset the gold standard in the field.

It is easy to see how crucial shots are to the concept of a Covid-19 endgame. "As more people get infected, vaccinated and reinfected, the severity of illness will gradually decline because of accumulating immunity -- that is the theory," Hunter said.

It is not enough to simply have a vaccine, though; it must be administered to as many people as possible, as many times as required.

Even in developed countries where the availability of shots is not an issue, gradually waning immunity, the transmissibility of new variants and pockets of vaccine skepticism have made clear that extremely high rates of coverage are needed to prevent waves of infections.

"What we should achieve is widespread immunization," said Burioni. "One possible scenario is that, if we are able to vaccinate a huge majority of people, this virus will circulate but will not do much damage."

As well as their continued efforts to encourage unvaccinated people to get a first dose, richer countries now have two main planks to their inoculation strategies: ensuring school-age children are vaccinated, and administering booster shots -- as many as prove to be necessary to keep protection high.

"Vaccination of children could have a huge impact on the future," Burioni said.

School-age vaccination rollouts are being ramped up in much of the world, and in the US, the Food and Drug Administration recently approved Pfizer's vaccine for children aged 5 through 11.

And the UK announced a deal Thursday to purchase 114 million extra doses of the Pfizer jab for its 67 million citizens for 2022 and 2023. It is a move that many developed nations are expected to make as they prepare for a future where vaccines are administered on a semi-regular basis.

"We don't know how many boosters we will need, but this is a problem of a logistic and an economic nature," Burioni added.

That is the case, at least, in the world's developed regions.

But the world has had ample evidence that the Covid-19 will remain a threat anywhere until it's under control everywhere -- and experts warn there is dramatic action needed to achieve that goal.

'Feast or famine'
The emergence of the Omicron variant in sub-Saharan Africa, where vaccination rates are low, has underlined once more the importance of a strategy to vaccinate poorer nations.

The problem? There isn't one, some experts warn.

"It isn't just pockets -- huge swathes of the world have unacceptably low vaccine coverage," Taylor said.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), less than 8% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile, 63.9% of people in high-income countries have received at least one shot, according to WHO.

In both the European Union and the United States, around 70% of people have received at least one shot, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The potential consequences of that disparity are obvious: New, globally problematic variants of the virus have all been first detected in places that experienced large, uncontrolled outbreaks where vaccine coverage was low -- Alpha in the UK last December, Delta in India in February, and Omicron in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Vaccine inequity ... will prolong the pandemic," said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton. "The best way to be selfish" is to be unselfish, insisted Burioni. "You need to provide vaccines to all of the world."

The solutions are less clear-cut -- but they are not out of reach.

Firstly, supply of vaccines needs to be increased and stabilized. WHO's vaccine-sharing program COVAX forecast in September that 25% fewer doses will be provided to the developing world than previously anticipated.

"It's feast or famine at the moment -- (countries) get nothing for three months, and all of a sudden they get millions of doses," said Taylor. "Supply has to come in a predictable, reliable manner."

Head, who has published research on vaccine supply in Ghana in the past year, added that when vaccines do arrive through COVAX, they have often been close to their expiry date, and were not accompanied by the necessary freezers or equipment to transport them throughout their destination countries.

He called for the creation of new vaccine production centers in Africa to establish a more reliable flow of shots. WHO blamed shortfalls at one Johnson & Johnson plant for its missed COVAX target in September, and backlogs at an Indian plant developing AstraZeneca vaccines caused supply issues in the United Kingdom and the EU in the first months of 2020 -- showing the dramatic effect that just a single facility can have on global distribution.

"Supply has to be coupled with financial support to make sure that those doses can get into arms," Taylor added.

Richer countries should also be funding research and on-the-ground help to nations where vaccines aren't being distributed quickly, Head and Taylor agreed. "There's a real lack of clear data about what's happening on the country level across sub-Saharan Africa. We need more clarity on that, so we can understand the scope of the problem," Taylor said.

That's the issue Duke's COVID Global Accountability Platform, which Taylor helps run, is attempting to address. The initiative is providing analysis of trends and obstacles in poorer nations where vaccine rollouts have been stuttering.

And developed nations should lead by example, too. Head said participants in his Ghanian study "were seeing how the Western world had handled the AstraZeneca vaccine," which is the shot that COVAX most relies on but which suffered several false starts during its rollout in Europe. This included a number of countries suspending the rollout of AstraZeneca shots in March over blood clot concerns. Europe's medicines regulator later pronounced it safe to use but confidence was undermined.

Vaccine hesitancy among his participants increased after those hiccups and pauses in the European rollout, Head said. "What we see and do in the global north in regards to vaccines is seen and heard in other parts of the world."

But above all, experts are calling for leadership.

"It's really similar to what's facing us with climate change -- we have leaders who are leaders of nations, we don't really have global leaders. We don't have global accountability," said Taylor.
Fighting the next pandemic

National measures are still vital as the pandemic inches closer towards its final phase, experts say. Waves will continue to hit different nations at different times, and "countries will need to work within their own experiences and capabilities," Head said.

That could mean a selection of measures to keep Covid at bay are here to stay. "As individuals, we should keep protecting ourselves and protecting people around us through face masks, social distance, and vaccination," said Ana García, professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Valencia in Spain, a country which has achieved a high vaccination rate but has kept in place rules on masks.

In neighboring France, the government announced Monday that nightclubs will soon close for four weeks, and mask-wearing will be mandatory in primary schools, as the country battles a fifth wave of the coronavirus.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex added in an address to the nation that a lockdown or curfew would have been a "disproportionate" measure. Instead, the French government is calling on its people to "take it easy" regarding social interactions "until the end of year festivities."

While French children under 12 are currently not eligible for Covid-19 vaccinations, these will soon be made available to those young people most vulnerable to Covid-19, Castex said.

But national measures must be coupled with an international outlook to speed up the pandemic's endgame, experts say.

"We have been talking about globalization for a long time (in) commerce, finance, tourism," Garcia said. "This pandemic -- as (with) climate change -- seems like a test. It seriously requires us to act like in a global world."

That sentiment has been echoed by world leaders, but experts say action hasn't followed.
Most recently, travel bans placed on South Africa and other nearby nations after authorities successfully detected the emergence of the Omicron variant have divided scientists.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has complained the bans are "unjustified," and they have been condemned by the UN and WHO. "It's deeply concerning to me that those countries are now being penalized by others for doing the right thing," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added Wednesday.

"There's a very real risk that what we're doing now is discouraging them from coming forward with the next one," Taylor said. "Because there will be a next one."

Experts are calling for countries to come together on Covid, not pull apart -- and that call was taken up by WHO this week when it called for a global treaty to avoid the same mistakes when the next pandemic strikes.

"Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics: Our current system disincentivizes countries from alerting others to threats that will inevitably land on their shores," Tedros said.

"At its heart, the pandemic is a crisis of solidarity and sharing," he said.

It may be a tough sell. Several scientists raised parallels with the push to fight climate change -- an effort which, even at this critical hour, is being slowed by competing national interests.

But it's a proposal that many are desperate to see realized. "Some kind of binding legal agreement that countries sign onto could give us something of a coordinated global plan, which is what we're lacking now," Taylor said.

"We're never going to make a successful case on altruism," she concedes. But with a fresh outbreak anywhere in the world threatening every country, "you can make a nationalistic case for the need to do things in a coordinated, global way."

"It would make all the difference," Taylor said. "If we could make it happen."

Scientists Say Another Pandemic Is Inevitable, Here's Why [HuffPost UK, 6 Dec 2021]

By Faima Bakar

One of the scientists behind the AstraZeneca vaccine thinks the next pandemic could be more "lethal" than Covid.

The next pandemic is coming and it could be lethal, says one of the scientists who helped develop the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Dame Sarah Gilbert warned during the 44th Richard Dimbelby lecture, that while this “pandemic is not done with us”, following ones could be even more catastrophic.

The professor of vaccinology at Oxford University and her team developed the AstraZeneca jab, which – despite controversies over rare blood clots – has been used in more than 170 countries.

Speaking at the lecture, she said: “This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods. The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both.”

Professor Gilbert added that we could be more prepared for future catastrophes, if we take on lessons from Covid-19.

She added: “We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through, and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness.

“Just as we invest in armed forces and intelligence and diplomacy to defend against wars, we must invest in people, research, manufacturing and institutions to defend against pandemics.”

Encroaching on animal territory can heighten the risk of future pandemics.

The thought of another pandemic while we’re deep in the throes of a current one seems hugely worrying. But is it completely inevitable? We spoke to some experts to find out.

Dr Julian W Tang, an honorary associate professor and clinical virologist at the University of Leicester, says time will tell.

“Unfortunately, we cannot yet predict the exact nature or timing of pandemics,” he tells HuffPost UK. “The 2009 ‘swine’ flu pandemic was relatively mild, Covid-19 was more severe, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic is still severe if long-term, reliable access to drugs is not guaranteed like in sub-Saharan Africa.”

And the main reason why we may experience future pandemics could be the mixing of animal-human environments, he adds.

“Given the closer interface between humans-animals environment, another zoonotic spillover event is very likely,” Dr Tang says. “But whether it will be like Ebola, avian flu, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus), SARS, or something entirely new, we cannot know for certain.”

Whatever the cause of future pandemics, Dr Tang agrees with Prof. Gilbert that we must be better prepared.

“Professor Gilbert’s talk is really just emphasising the need for increased funding to prepare for any such pandemic – to avoid a last minute scramble (as we have seen in the UK and other Western countries) to set up and maintain such vaccine and drug development programmes, surveillance, testing, isolation/quarantine systems – for if/when the next pandemic arrives.”

Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health, is less optimistic.

“There will definitely be future pandemics.” he says. “They have occurred throughout human history, and will continue to happen. In the 21st century, we have now had two pandemics, the previous being ‘swine flu’ in 2009. There have also been outbreaks that have caused great concern, including ‘bird flu’, the previous SARS coronavirus and also MERS, and the West Africa Ebola outbreak.”

Dr Head agrees that globalisation, increased agriculture, and taking over animal territory can contribute to the problem.

“Increased human encroachment onto animal habitats means greater opportunities for a pathogen to mix between species and make that perfect jump into humans. Increased globalisation means more travel around the world and thus a greater chance of any new or existing infection spreading widely,” he explains.

“We can of course learn our lessons, and put global plans in place that reduce the chances a pandemic happening, or at least can minimise the impact of the next pandemic. Whether we take that opportunity or not, that’s another matter altogether.”

But, we can of course apply pressure to government and organisations to do better and act more carefully for the preservation of humanity. As the saying goes: fail to prepare, prepare to fail.