Covid: a comma, not a full stop

Submitted by martin on 15 March, 2022 - 3:17 Author: Martin Thomas
Vaccinations

Solidarity 626 and 627 were the first issues since early 2020 to have no articles on Covid.

That was mostly was to do with the pressure on space from coverage on Ukraine, and only partly to do with a slight pause in Covid developments in Britain.

It's only a slight pause, not an end.

Case counts and hospitalisation have been rising again, since late February, and by now substantially. Numbers in mechanical ventilation beds have levelled after falling steadily since early November (they didn't rise with Omicron).

This may be no drama. Across the European Union, as Covid curbs have been slackened, Covid death counts continue to fall (from a spike in mid-February).

Other European countries have seen small Covid-count surges, after easing curbs and with the spread of the slightly-more-infectious BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron, which have then subsided. It is beneficial in the longer run if many people get Covid mildly now - while they still have partial immunity, while the dominant variant is relatively mild - to refresh their partial immunity before the next variant.

But I may be wrong. Maybe partial immunity is withering because months have passed since boosters.

To keep tight curbs for years on end is unworkable: they fray, and blight life. But mild curbs - facemasks, avoiding crowded spaces, self-isolating when infected - can be sustained without blight, and provide a safeguard.

There are two dramas, for sure.

In Britain, even without waiting to see whether the recent case-count uptick burgeons or not, the Tories are dismantling much of the structure of Covid surveillance and provisions (the meagre boost to Statutory Sick Pay, and the £500 isolation pay provided to a few others).

But new variants are certain. They may be relatively mild, in a population which now has a lot of partial immunity from vaccinations and previous infections; but they may not be.

The Tories are also doing very little to boost the NHS so that it can deal with the next surge. On the contrary, they are push new destructive measures: the Health and Care Bill, now in its Report stage in the House of Lords.

The are guaranteeing that the next surge will be met by tardy and chaotic measures, as each surge has been so far.

The measures which Solidarity has campaigned for since the start of the pandemic remain urgent, and essential underpinning for new Covid curbs if and when they are necessary.

• good sick pay for all

• restore NHS funding and repeal privatisation

• requisition private hospitals to augment NHS resources

• a public-health testing-and-surveillance system

• bringing social care into the public sector with NHS-level pay and conditions for staff

• workers’ control of workplace safety (especially ventilation).

And there is already drama elsewhere. Hong Kong now has a Covid death rate more than twice the UK's was at its worst in January 2021. Corpses are stacked outside mortuaries there for lack of space.

HK's plight comes from the combination of a relatively low vax rate (more from reluctance than from lack of vaccine supply) and an attempted "Zero Covid" policy which has blocked the gradual development of partial immunity through widespread, mostly mild, infections.

Mainland China is still sticking to "Zero Covid". Its official figures are unreliable (The Economist reckons China underestimates its Covid death count by a factor of 160), but even on those its case-count is now twice its peak in early 2020.

China has shown that an efficient police state can limit Covid spread, by fierce local lockdowns and bans on movement. Whether even China's police is fierce enough to stop Omicron spreading, we don't know.

China has a much higher vax rate than HK, but all with Chinese-made vaccines, some of which seem outside China to have provided less partial immunity than others. So China may be unable to manage a "controlled" retreat from "Zero Covid" on the model of New Zealand. If it is unable, we couild see a Covid drama there on the scale of the worldwide early-2021 drama.

And that will have its knock-on effects for the rest of the world. The British government is talking about fourth jabs for the older and frailer.

But worldwide only a bit more than 50% of people are fully vaccinated. The world vax rate has dropped from a slow-enough 0.4 jabs per 100 per day (as it was between mid-2021 and early 2022) to about 0.2. The next surge could still find many millions unvaccinated.

Requisition Big Pharma to speed vax production and delivery worldwide!

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