Covid 19 is still with us, and pretending it’s over is making Americans more vulnerable. (Read story here.) What to expect in the year ahead is summarized below:
Covid-19 is still deadly
The virus hasn’t gone away, and with Americans taking fewer precautions, relatively few getting booster shots, and more infectious variants appearing, it’s going to be like “an airplane of people falling out of the sky every day,” according to a Tulane researcher likening the ongoing pandemic to never-ending air crashes.
Masks are still needed
Health experts say masks are still necessary indoors, in densely populated areas, and communities with high transmission rates.
Plan on get re-vaccinated annually
Coronaviruses like Covid-19 mutate quickly, and become immunity-resistant, which means vaccines — like flu shots — must be continually upgraded. However, Covid booster shots may eventually be replaced by nasal-spray vaccines.
A shift from preventing to curing Covid infections
With Americans making less effort to prevent getting infected, public health managers are turning their attention to treating the disease. One expert said, “I don’t think many health professionals would think that this would be the best way to do this. But I think that’s kind of where we’re going.”
Improved treatment of “long COVID” may be coming
Some Covid-19 patients continue to suffer from debilitating symptoms for months or longer. Doctors still don’t fully understand why, but are having some successes in treating it. Meanwhile, experts warn people can get long Covid even from mild infections, and the public “should be paying a lot more attention to that as a possible outcome if they become infected.”
Rising risks from China’s COVID-19 outbreak
China’s government, faced with mass protests, backed down from its strict lockdown policies and now has a raging outbreak running out of control. China uses its own vaccine, which is less effective, and has a health care system that’s inadequate for the large number of cases now occurring there. Other countries have imposed some restrictions on travelers from China, but what’s happening there still could spill over into the rest of the world. Worse, the Covid-19 virus probably is mutating very rapidly there. “China is really scary, frankly, not just for the impact on them alone, but the likelihood that there are lots and lots and lots of infections happening, and this virus mutates as it moves from person to person to person,” a U.S. expert said. “There’s no way to predict what the variant [coming from there] is going to be like.”