The pandemic and the need to respond remain.
“ending the emergency doesn’t mean that the world has fully addressed the problems that made this an emergency. Global vaccine distribution remains wildly inequitable, leaving many people susceptible to the virus’s worst effects; deaths are still concentrated among those most vulnerable; the virus’s evolutionary and transmission patterns are far from predictable or seasonal. Now, ending the emergency is less an epidemiological decision than a political one: Our tolerance for these dangers has grown to the extent that most people are doing their best to look away from the remaining risk, and will continue to until the virus forces us to turn back.
The end to the PHEIC [public health emergency of international concern, a designation from the World Health Organization], to be clear, isn’t a declaration that COVID is over—or even that the pandemic is. [..] But no set-in-stone rules delineate when either starts or ends. Plenty of diseases have met pandemic criteria—noted by many epidemiologists as an epidemic that’s rapidly spread to several continents—without ever being granted a PHEIC, as is the case with HIV. And several PHEICs, including two of the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade and the Zika epidemic that began in 2015, did not consistently earn the pan- prefix among experts. With COVID, the WHO called a PHEIC more than a month before it publicly labeled the outbreak a pandemic on March 11. Now the organization has bookended its declaration with a similar mismatch: one crisis designation on and the other off. That once again leaves the world in a bizarre risk limbo, with the threat everywhere but our concern for it on the wane.
For other diseases with pandemic potential, understanding the start and end of crisis has been simpler. After a new strain of H1N1 influenza sparked a global outbreak in 2009, disrupting the disease’s normal seasonal ebb and flow, scientists simply waited until the virus’s annual transmission patterns went back to their pre-outbreak baseline, then declared that particular pandemic done. But “we don’t really have a baseline” to return to for SARS-CoV-2, says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. This has left officials floundering for an end-of-pandemic threshold to meet. [..]
Given how the virus has evolved, even, say, an 85 percent vaccination rate probably wouldn’t have squelched the virus in a way public-health experts were envisioning in 2021 (and wouldn’t have absolved us of booster maintenance). And even if the death toll slipped below 100 deaths a day, the virus’s chronic effects would still pose an immense threat. But thresholds such as those, flawed though they were, were never even set. “I’m not sure we ever set any goals at all” to designate when we’d have the virus beat, Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at NYU and an editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Family Foundation Health News, told me. And if they had been, we probably still would not have met them: Two years out, we certainly have not.
Instead, efforts to mitigate the virus have only gotten laxer. Most individuals are no longer masking, testing, or staying up to date on their shots; on community scales, the public goods that once seemed essential—ventilation, sick leave, equitable access to insurance and health care—have already faded from most discourse. That COVID has been more muted in recent months feels “more like luck” than a product of concerted muffling from us, Scarpino told me. Should another SARS-CoV-2 variant sweep the world or develop resistance to Paxlovid, “we don’t have much in the way of a plan,” he said.
If and when the virus troubles us again, our lack of preparedness will be a reflection of America’s classically reactive approach to public health. Even amid a years-long emergency declaration that spanned national and international scales, we squandered the opportunity “to make the system more resilient to the next crisis,” Gounder said. There is little foresight for what might come next. And individuals are still largely being asked to fend for themselves—which means that as this emergency declaration ends, we are setting ourselves up for another to inevitably come, and hit us just as hard.”
Full article, KJ Wu, The Atlantic, 2023.5.5