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Is this a ‘Normal’ covid winter?

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A very hungry caterpillar

Nov 29, 2021, 09:13

Winter 2021-22 may not quite qualify as our first “normal” Covid season, but we’re getting there.

The US probably still has 25 million adults who’ve managed to avoid both the virus and the vaccine. Nobody knows, but perhaps 400,000 of these are over-65s most likely to take up a hospital bed and who are still without any natural or vaccinated immunity.

By this time next year or the year after, these numbers will be at asterisk levels. All of us, including the vaccinated and previously infected, will also have to realize we’re playing a role in circulation even if the unvaccinated dominate hospital admissions. A rational vaccine strategy, it will be more obvious than ever, would prioritize the vulnerable rather than the Biden approach of prioritizing anyone who works in a company of 100 employees regardless of infection history.

But then, as the White House prolifically leaked at the time, its vaccine mandate was always more about protecting the Biden presidency from the vicissitudes of Covid than protecting anyone from disease.

First, where we are: The administration’s leakers didn’t go deeply into the political calculation but I will. Older voters, understandably, have been terrified of Covid and also unstinting in their willingness to impose costs on young people for steps that lack any real benefit. As wonderful as the jabs are, these same voters have been inundated with unrealistic expectations about what universal vaccination can accomplish. A case in point is the Aaron Rodgers hysteria. Whatever the Green Bay quarterback was thinking, he could expect to be infected eventually and expect a good outcome without his vaccination status mattering a great deal to him or anyone else. Sure enough, he’s back playing alongside numerous NFLers who recovered from Covid whether or not they were vaccinated.

 
More insidious is how the media’s Covid ideology is influencing decisions made for children, where the risk-benefit trade-offs are an even narrower squeak. Only muddle exists concerning the perhaps half of kids who’ve already acquired some natural immunity. In their agonizing decision to recommend shots for the 5-to-11s, federal officials also had to run a gauntlet of subtle pressure to weigh the benefit to third parties—teachers, grandparents, the economy, the Biden administration—against the risks to children.

The same is true of masking in elementary schools: unlikely to be effective, possibly deleterious socially and developmentally. It’s done mostly to placate older people. Even if successful, there’s a question of whether you do kids any favor by delaying their inevitable first encounter with Covid when their young immune systems are best primed to cope with it.

The latest news about where we are going is not ideal: New variants continue to emerge, including a worrisome strain in South Africa that pounded the stock market on Friday; the virus is taking up residence in animal populations, such as U.S. white-tailed deer, a spooky new wrinkle.

All this may mean that natural immunity, which is broader spectrum than vaccinated immunity focused on spike proteins, may have to play a bigger role in adapting humankind to a new pathogen.

For some people of all ages, a bad bout of flu begins a decline in their health that approximates “long Covid.” This reality is finally getting notice. Our healthcare system will also need to resize itself. It remains scaled to annual influenza in which 70 Americans out of 100,000 need hospitalization in a bad year (such as 2014-15).

Future presidents and candidates will need policies on winter flu and Covid and not on the model of the Biden administration, which has treated the virus as a problem in blame management. When authorizing boosters that U.S. voters wanted, it tried to blame Moderna for shortages in the developing world. Even so, today’s winter surge would be worse if individuals and whole states didn’t ignore the administration’s attempt to restrict boosters to over-65s. Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Which brings us to a final point: Analysts have puzzled over why similarly situated countries, even Nordic neighbors, varied so widely in their actions, including mandates and lockdowns. The answer begins to seem obvious. Countries, each with their own conflicted electorates, went their separate ways because there was no successful standard solution or “best practice” to converge on, because none has been found. Once this particular virus began spreading outward from a major city in China, it was perhaps fated to take up global residence in human and animal populations regardless of what we hoped to do about it.

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