By Carla K. Johnson -
The Associated Press
On the third anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus continues to spread and
the death toll approaches 7 million globally
as the majority of the population has resumed their normal lives, thanks to the immunity created by the infections. and vaccines.
The virus seems to be here to stay, as well as the constant threat of a more dangerous variant spreading across the planet.
“New variants emerging anywhere put us all at risk,” says virus researcher Thomas Friedrich of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Maybe that will help people understand how connected we are."
[USA. will remove mandatory COVID-19 tests for travelers from China]
The exhaustion of information sources has made it difficult to monitor the pandemic.
Johns Hopkins University shut down its case tracker on Friday, launched shortly after the virus emerged in China and spread around the world.
This Saturday marks three years since the World Health Organization designated the outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The main global health body says it is not yet ready to say the emergency is over.
This is what the current situation looks like, three years later:
The virus continues to kill
The pandemic continues to kill between 900 and 1,000 people a day around the world, and the virus that causes COVID-19 has not lost its strength.
It spreads easily from person to person through airborne droplets, killing some victims but leaving most to recover.
"Whatever the virus is doing today, it's still trying to find another way to win," said Dr. Eric Topol, director of California's Scripps Research Translational Institute.
A person is taken to United Memorial Medical Center after being tested for COVID-19 on Thursday, March 19, 2020, in Houston, Texas. David J. Phillip / AP
"
We have become numb to the number of daily deaths
,
"
says Topol, who considers that the figure is excessive.
Daily hospitalizations and deaths in the United States, while lower than in the worst spikes, have yet to drop to the low levels reached during the summer of 2021, before the surge caused by the delta variant.
At any moment, the virus could change and become more transmissible, able to evade the immune system, or more deadly, and we are not ready, Topol says.
In addition, trust in public health agencies has eroded, fueling an exodus of health workers.
Resistance to stay-at-home orders and vaccination mandates may be a legacy of the pandemic.
"I wish we would unite against the enemy (the virus) instead of each other," he said.
“A very different situation from three years ago”
There is another way of looking at things.
Humans cracked the genetic code of the virus and quickly developed vaccines that work extraordinarily well.
We create mathematical models to prepare for worst case scenarios and continue to watch how the virus changes, looking for it in the wastewater.
“The pandemic has catalyzed amazing science,” Friedrich said.
[The Department of Energy is evaluating the possibility that COVID-19 may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan]
The gains add to a new normal where COVID-19 "doesn't need to be at the forefront of people's minds," said Natalie Dean, an associate professor of biostatistics at Emory University.
"That, at least, is a victory."
Current omicron variants have about 100 genetic differences from the original strain of the coronavirus
, according to Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.
That means that about 1% of the virus's genome is different from its starting point.
Many of those changes have made it more contagious, but the worst is likely over due to population immunity.
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The world is in “a very different situation today than it was three years ago, when there was zero immunity to the original virus,” explained Matthew Binnicker, an expert in viral infections at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
This extreme vulnerability forced them to take measures aimed at “reducing the curve”.
Businesses and schools were closed, weddings and funerals were postponed.
Masks and “social distancing” later gave way to the need to present proof of vaccination.
Now, these precautions are rare.
“It's not likely that we'll be back to where we were before, because there are so many viruses that our immune systems can recognize,” Ray said.
Our immunity should protect us "from the worst of what we've seen before."
Lack of real-time data
Johns Hopkins University released the latest update to its coronavirus case count and hot spot map on Friday, with a tally of
more than 6.8 million deaths worldwide
.
Their government sources for the real-time count have dwindled dramatically.
In the United States, only New York, Arkansas and Puerto Rico continue to publish daily numbers of cases and deaths.
“We rely heavily on public data and it just doesn't exist
,” said Beth Blauer, the project's chief data officer.
Patients wait in a makeshift temporary treatment area in Hong Kong, Friday, February 18, 2022. Kin Cheung / AP
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to collect information from states, hospitals, and laboratories, as well as cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and detected strains of the coronavirus.
But for many counts, less data is now available.
“People were expecting data from us that we will no longer be able to produce,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
At the international level, the monitoring of COVID-19 by the WHO depends on the reports of each country.
Global health authorities have expressed concern that their figures severely underestimate what is happening and do not have a true picture of the outbreak.
[FDA authorizes first home test for COVID-19 and influenza]
For more than a year now, the CDC has moved away from case counts and test results, due to the
increase in unreported home tests
.
The agency focuses on hospitalizations, which continue to be reported daily, although that may change.
Reporting of deaths continues, though they are increasingly dependent on daily records and more on death certificates, which can take days or weeks to arrive.
The US authorities say they are adapting to the circumstances and try to establish a monitoring system similar to the one used by the CDC to control the flu.
"You don't know who will survive
"
“I wish we could go back to before COVID-19,” said Kelly Forrester, 52, of Shakopee, Minnesota, who lost her father to the disease in May 2020. She survived an infection in December and blames misinformation to ruin a long friendship.
"I hate it.
I really hate it."
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The disease seems to him something of chance.
“You don't know who will survive, who will have a long COVID-19 or a mild cold.
And then other people, they'll end up in the hospital dying."
Forrester's father, Virgil Michlitsch, 80, a retired meat packer, delivery boy and elementary school janitor, died in a nursing home with his wife, daughters and granddaughters watching from outside the building from lawn chairs.
Not being at his bedside "was the hardest thing," Forrester said.
Inspired by the ravages of the pandemic, her 24-year-old daughter is pursuing a master's degree in public health.
“My father would have been very proud of her,” Forrester said.
“I am very glad that he believed in that, that he wanted to do it and improve people's living conditions.”