Hospitalisations And Mortality Are Still Oscillating
A new variant could push numbers up and XBB is slowly on the rise
The good news though: Most of us need not worry any more (and we don't). This includes everybody below 70 years because in this group, virtually nobody dies of Covid any more. Likewise, Post-Covid Syndrome, which affects all ages, affects only few people and we can thus easily block it from our minds.
The bad news for those over 70 or otherwise vulnerable: You still need to worry.
Some countries, e.g. Sweden, but also Germany, are experiencing more deaths than others but with the health care system no longer in peril, the actual deaths have ceased to be newsworthy for months. The still-high-and-not-abating US death rate is probably caused by an abysmally low vaccination rate, especially for the latest booster.
What a virus can do to an unprotected population was seen when the pandemic started. What we have learnt is that it is beneficial to let the virus escape into the population in a controlled way by:
1) lockdown, followed by 2) protection through vaccination, followed by 3) gradual reopening, all the while using the strain on the health care system as a determinant for the speed of the reopening.
China and, more recently, Japan, have failed on the second part and thus had a surge of new deaths. On the other hand, Tunisia, as a stand-in for the poorer countries, had an incomplete lockdown and poor vaccination and thus the virus was able to infect the whole population more than once. But, possibly owed to prior infections with viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, the cumulative number of deaths (per 100 000) is well below those of the USA and even of France and Spain. As a result, Tunisia now has very good protection and one of the lowest Covid-19 numbers in the world.
As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, the WHO declared that Covid-19 still constitutes a public health emergency of international concern but it is nearing an inflection point (ars technica, PDF) and the virus will remain a permanently established pathogen in humans and animals for the foreseeable future.
Nothing new there. But it puts the focus back on who can declare the end of a PAN-demic, with PAN meaning everywhere: a world body alone and not some local health authority.
As I have pointed out before, what distinguishes Covid-19 from most other diseases is that it is able to cause long-lasting secondary illnesses in a non-negligible percentage of the infected, particularly those with mild courses of the initial disease. And thus, personal preventative measures might become a common sight, in the form of masks, or, in a matter of speaking, a non-sight because vulnerable people might avoid places where risk of infection is high.