■ Around the globe, people and governments are finding out that when it comes to COVID-19, we are not out of

Virus unlikely to be thrashed into extinction as cases rise, vaccines lag

Just a few weeks ago, much of the world seemed poised to leave COVID-19 behind.

U.S. President Joe Biden declared the U.S. close to independence from the virus. Britons hit the dance floor to celebrate “Freedom Day.” Singapore’s legendarily strict government signalled it would begin to loosen its zero-cases approach and make life and travel more manageable.

But if those places were ready to be done with COVID, COVID wasn’t done with them.

Around the globe, people and governments are finding out that COVID won’t be thrashed into extinction, but is more likely to enter a long, endemic tail. With that will come delayed recoveries in the places that have had the least access to vaccines.

Vaccines have made a difference — in the places that have deployed them widely. In recent weeks, U.K. cases had risen dramatically, but there hasn’t been an equivalent surge in deaths, and the number of new infections has dropped over the past few days.

At its current pace of vaccination, 75 per cent of the EU population will be inoculated within two months, a level that may be sufficient to push back the virus. China and the U.K. are running at a similar pace, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.

But after racing ahead, the now-stalled U.S. vaccine campaign will take eight or nine months to reach 75 per cent coverage because of entrenched pockets of vaccine resistance in parts of the country. .

Many lower-income countries are reliant on Covax, the program set up last year to equitably distribute vaccines to every corner of the planet. But the initiative has delivered just 140 million doses of the 1.8 billion it aims to ship by early 2022, hurt by delays in supplies from India.

“The world is divided between countries which do have vaccines and countries which don’t have vaccines,” said Klaus Stöhr, a former World Health Organization official who played a key role in the response to SARS in 2003. In the have-not regions, “the virus is going to end the pandemic, not the vaccine, unfortunately.”

Although the worst is likely over for the U.S. and its European peers, those fortunate countries can’t let their guard down.

The bottom line is nations will need to figure out how to live alongside the virus. Many scientists expect the disease to become endemic, circulating for years to come but likely posing less of a threat over time as people develop some immunity to it through natural infection or vaccines.

“Wanting the pandemic to be over has really caused many people to just not face the facts,” said Osterholm, the University of Minnesota infectious disease expert. “I don’t think the final script has been written for this pandemic at all.”