Pandemic Relief

Five years ago, the Covid pandemic was disrupting everything, and it felt like we were risking our lives to go out in public.  Today, we are coming out of a Covid death spike so mild that most of us barely noticed.  If you look at the heat map of Covid-related deaths across different states, you see that the pandemic is finally under some degree of control.  The chart of weekly deaths shows the same pattern—diminishing spikes that look like an increasingly feeble heartbeat.

That means that the deadly disease has become what pandemic experts call an ‘endemic’ disease, likely never to go away, but also not a major public health crisis.  That doesn’t mean it has no impact on our society.  Another endemic disease is the seasonal flu, which still kills thousands of people each year.

Like the flu, Covid-19 is mutable, which means it constantly changes and evolves new strategies for infecting its hosts, sometimes with more deadly consequences than others, depending on the strain.  That’s why public health officials recommend flu shots and Covid booster shots each year.  

They also note that the precautions that people took during the height of the pandemic—social distancing, more frequent hand-washing, and wearing masks in crowded public spaces like airports and airplanes—have reduced not only the incidence of Covid, but also the flu and other diseases.  They’re beneficial health habits that lower our chances of infection from a multiplicity of microbial attackers, which means they should be continued even as the pandemic abates.

Sources:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00

https://www.ideas42.org/blog/what-it-means-to-say-that-the-covid-19-pandemic-is-over/