Covid-19 is here to stay and we have to learn to live with it

Most scientists agree that Covid-19 is probably here to stay. The high rate of infection of newer variants, such as Omicron, means the virus will continue living in some form within the human population.

This is called endemicity, and it has happened before with other diseases, such as seasonal flu. The good news is that vaccines and natural immunity will help us keep the virus under control.

Nonetheless, endemicity is not a promise that life will return to how it was before March 2019, when the World Health Organization declared the global pandemic.

“Even catastrophically prevalent and deadly diseases can be endemic, as long as the crisis they cause feels constant and acceptable to whoever’s thinking to ask,” write Jacob Stern and Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic.

Herpes, Stern and Wu point out, is endemic and at least half of the people in the United States suffer it without showing any major symptoms.

Malaria, on the other hand, is also considered endemic and kills at least 600,000 people every year around the globe, mostly in Latin America and Africa.

An editorial published in Nature in January 2022 points out that the bigger question is not endemicity, but instead how society, in general, will handle living with the virus from now on.

“Countries must decide how they will live with Covid-19 — and living with Covid-19 does not mean ignoring it,” says Nature. Pretending the virus hasn't affected how we live and leaving it alone isn't the way to go.

“Each region must work out how to balance the deaths, disability, and disruption caused by the virus… as more therapies and vaccines become available — and as new variants emerge.”

Reaching that balance has not been easy. On one hand, China has drawn criticism due to its “Zero Covid Policy”, which many commentators regarding it as unnecessarily harsh.

On the other end, the choice of the US government to shorten the quarantine days of those who've tested positive among other issues has led many to feel that the Biden administration cares more about the economy than the people.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that by early February only 53% of the world population had been vaccinated.

Image: Martin Sanchez / Unsplash

Most of the unvaccinated population in the world live in developing countries without the infrastructure to properly inoculate their inhabitants.

Nigeria, for instance, only has fully vaccinated 2% of over 200 million people who live in the West African nation.

The United States Center for Disease Control warns that new variants of Covid-19 are expected to occur, and the best we can do is slow down the process through vaccination.

The truth is that there’s no magic formula to figure out what to do next. We’ll just have to play it by ear and hope for the best in the new, unknown world we live in.