NDTV News:
After more than three years, the global Covid emergency is officially over. Yet it’s still killing at least one person every four minutes and questions on how to deal with the virus remain unanswered, putting vulnerable people and under-vaccinated countries at risk.
A key question is how to handle a virus that’s become less threatening to most but remains wildly dangerous to a slice of the population. That slice is much bigger than many realize: Covid is still a leading killer, the third-biggest in the US last year behind heart disease and cancer. Unlike with other common causes of death such as smoking and traffic accidents that led to safety laws, though, politicians aren’t pushing for ways to reduce the harm, such as mandated vaccinations or masking in closed spaces.
“The general desire in the world is to move beyond the pandemic and put Covid behind us, but we can’t put our heads in the sand,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. “Covid still infects and kills a lot of people. We have the means to reduce that burden.”
Even before the World Health Organization declared earlier this month that Covid no longer constitutes an emergency, most governments had already relaxed lockdowns and guidelines. After spending heavily in earlier phases of the pandemic, global leaders have dialed back efforts and are reluctant to pursue preventative measures for which the public no longer has much patience.
Meanwhile, the infection that caused at least 20 million deaths worldwide continues to evolve, leaving the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions at the mercy of luck, uneven access to medicine and little protection from others without face masks or recent vaccinations.
