![]() Moreover, individuals must remain on their drugs for life, and the viruses within them may evolve resistance towards the first or second lines of therapy, forcing use of more complex cocktails of increasingly expensive therapies. ![]() It never “vanished,” and the still-evolving virus shows no sign of dampening either its pathogenicity or transmissibility. But HIV is still spreading, sickening, and killing. The AIDS pandemic never stopped-humanity simply ceased paying attention to it once effective treatment was found, which both reduces the risk of severe illness and lowers the amount of virus in individuals’ blood to as near-zero as can be measured, reducing the chance of passing it onto other people sexually or through contaminated blood and needles. It is hoped that COVID-19 will follow a similar trajectory, dampening its virulence and pathogenicity over time to become, as Kishida forecast, just like the flu.īut there is another pandemic to turn to for clues to the COVID-19 future: HIV and AIDS. Those who liken the coronavirus to influenza have noted that the H1N1 form of flu that killed as many as 75 million to 100 million people in 1918-19 remains in circulation today, albeit in less lethal forms that most people experience as mild disease. There is no inevitable trajectory for COVID-19. Worse, the virus remains in early stages of evolution, adapting not only to Homo sapiens, but dozens (if not hundreds) of other mammalian species ranging from hippos to anteaters. Tens of millions cases of long COVID-19 have been diagnosed worldwide-certainly an undercount-with at least a third of those impacted suffering neurological or cardiovascular damage that is proving disabling. We are only able to guess how many people died of COVID-19, and how many more suffer terrible long COVID-19 ailments that are likely to have permanent impacts. Despite our technological tools, unprecedented amounts of money and resources put to the task, enormous economic costs to the global economy, and spectacular advances in genetic sequencing and analytical technology, the virus spread worldwide, killing millions of people. In predicting a 36-month war with COVID-19 back in 2020, I framed it as a defeat for humanity. The scientific advisory group that studies epidemics for the World Health Organization (WHO)-and determines whethera given microbe constitutes an emergency threat to mankind-told the agency’s director-general that the Public Health Emergency of International Concern should be lifted, and on the morning of May 5 in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus did so. Around the world, governments have followed suit. President Joe Biden made a similar proclamation, saying the special emergency status of COVID-19 would cease in the United States, effective May 11-a promise he is keeping. Also in January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced his country would downgrade COVID-19 concern by May, likening the coronavirus threat to that of influenza. In New Zealand, which maintained a lower per capita death rate than the world average throughout the pandemic with a mix of tough behavioral and travel restriction policies, once-popular Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shocked the world in January 2023 with her sudden resignation, citing the vitriolic response, at home and abroad, to the COVID-19 policies she oversaw. Once Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in December 2022 an end to China’s zero-COVID policies, leaders around the world began to yield to pandemic fatigue among their populations. Sadly, I was right about everything else. ![]() I apologize for the two-month miscalculation. It wasn’t 36 months from the declaration of a pandemic in March 2020-it’s 38 months. I added at that time that choices made by governments in the first weeks of the pandemic would decide whether the 36-month point marked cessation of all human deaths to the new disease, or merely the virus’s retreat from explosive spread to a new, permanent threat to humanity, akin to HIV. In early 2020, I widely predicted that the then-new COVID-19 pandemic would be a 36-month battle.
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