Global weekly deaths from Covid-19 are at the lowest level since March 2020, the month Ireland first went into lockdown. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” said the director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. After such a difficult two-and-a-half years, marked by trauma and upheaval unprecedented in peacetime, the shift in tone from the international health body is an encouraging landmark. It is also a tribute to the scientists who designed safe and effective Covid vaccines in record time. Some 12 billion doses have been administered around the world, and the WHO has estimated that, as a result, 19.8 million deaths were averted last year alone.
But the WHO’s message is carefully calibrated: the world can see how Covid can be defeated, making it a manageable and significantly less dangerous disease, but there is a lot of work to be done to make that a reality. For now the virus still presents an “acute global emergency”; during the first eight months of 2022 more than a million people have died from Covid.
If a pattern has taken hold, it appears to be two to three waves of infection a year, each caused by new variants or sub-variants. The effects differ from country to country, depending on the scale of natural- or vaccine-acquired immunity. The hope is that each of those waves is going to be smaller, with people’s immune systems putting up a stronger defence each time. The worst-case scenario is the emergence of a new, more dangerous variant that manages to evade immunity.
Either way, the current challenge for governments is the same. First, it is to ensure that health systems are equipped to deal with a sudden spike in serious illness, and for the combined pressure that a new wave of Covid and a rise in flu cases could bring this winter. Second, it is to ensure that vaccine booster programmes continue apace, protecting the vulnerable in particular. New vaccines that target all currently circulating Covid variants could be a game-changer, but only if people actually receive them.