The Pandemic Blog

I don’t have time to go back and read many of my old posts in this blog (there are 337 of them as of today), but in the course of finding a topic for this post, I came across this post from May 15, 2020. I was particularly struck by it, for two reasons: The first was that the person who appeared to be waving the white flag on Covid was none other than Leanna Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore who was writing for WaPo (and continues to, thank goodness); she later became one of my heroes for her forthright stand on anti-Covid policy. However, in the article I referred to in my post, she appeared to be giving up on beating Covid at all – essentially saying we should drop our various lockdown policies and figure out how to live with it. She wrote this at a time when 1,000 to 2,500 people were dying of Covid every day. On that day, 21% of all Covid cases in the US resulted in death (vs. a fraction of 1% now), although even this was down from late March 2020, when close

Europe is now experiencing a new Covid wave as infections rise in many countries, including the UK, France and Italy. Last week, cases were up 104 percent in Portugal and 42 percent in Switzerland. And it’s not just Europe. Daily reported new cases were up 44 percent in Singapore last week, and they were up in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. What’s driving these waves? Will you be surprised if I tell you that it’s more Omicron subvariants? You shouldn’t be, since this has been the case all year. Singapore’s wave is driven by the XBB subvariant, which “jumped from a 22 percent share of local cases to 54 percent over the course of a week.” Of course, we’re no longer at the mercy of each new subvariant, since now there’s a booster that targets Omicron subvariants in general. That’s the good news, but here’s the bad news: Even though the booster was made available starting on Labor Day weekend, only 4% of the eligible US population has received it – 8 out of 200 million. In both art