An informed guide to the pandemic, with the latest developments and expert advice about prevention and treatment. |
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Even though people across the world are trying to move on from Covid, it's still here, all around us. |
Case in point: Half of all infections during the pandemic have taken place this year, as noted by my Times Opinion colleague David Wallace-Wells. Given the current pace, it's possible that more than 80 percent of all Covid cases will ultimately take place in 2022, he said. |
Have we reached endemicity? |
That's a complicated and controversial question, in part because it means different things to different people. But one way of thinking of it is that endemicity is what happens when the average infected person infects fewer than one other person. And that is not the case. With these new variants, the average person has been infecting many more than one person. So, by that standard, we're not in an endemic state. |
But we are in a place where the basic footprint of the disease has been pretty consistent. We've been at roughly the same number of hospitalizations and deaths in the country since the end of the initial Omicron wave in the winter. And because so much of that has to do with how much better our immune systems are working against Covid than in the past, there's probably no reason to think that those dynamics are going to dramatically change unless there's an out-of-left-field new variant like the original Omicron. |
And I think that fits the layperson's understanding of what an endemic disease is: It's circulating, but it's sort of in the background, and while there are some little peaks and some little valleys, they aren't so dramatic that they threaten to really upend life at a community level, let alone at a national level. That's a pretty fair description of where we are right now. |
So by some definitions we have made it to endemicity. Now what? |
Now we can begin to see the tragic outline of what it means to live through a once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-century pandemic. Epidemiologists I've spoken to have cited an annualized death rate of 100,000 a year. That would make Covid our most deadly infectious disease. It puts it in the neighborhood of things like diabetes. It's as though we've never heard of diabetes in the fall of 2019, and all of a sudden, we have diabetes. That's despite the incredible pharmaceutical interventions and innovations from the vaccines and therapeutics. And it's quite grim to think about that. |
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What do the coming months look like? |
There are a lot of variables. But if I had to sort of synthesize all of them, I would say that I think it's likely that, for the foreseeable future, we're living primarily with Omicron variants. That means the virus will find new ways to evade our immune response without totally eliminating the immune protections that we carried before. |
In the fall, we will begin to see some limited rollout of new next-generation vaccines, but they won't fundamentally change the trajectory of immune protection going forward. And we have very limited implementation of other social and political measures, such as mandating better air quality in schools and transportation systems and things along those lines. |
Where does that leave us? |
If I were telling the narrative, ironically, it would probably be the same story I would have told in the spring of 2020, which is to say that this is really an old person's disease now. That was true at the beginning of the outbreak, but it's becoming even more true now. It's quite possible that we'll see increasing relative vulnerability among the old, which is to say people who are in middle age are going to feel pretty safe living a totally normal life. But people of their parents' generation may not ever. That's because they have a much harder time building up immunity, which means they lose the benefits of the vaccines and previous exposure much more quickly. |
We're also seeing a significant death toll this year. We've more or less normalized it. We could have roughly equivalent numbers of especially elderly people dying as we did in the first years of the pandemic — and that's tragic. |
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Remote work's two Americas |
More than two years into the pandemic, American corporate workplaces have splintered. Some are nearly as full as they were before Covid-19, while others still sit abandoned — and there's a growing divide depending on where they're located. |
Workers in midsize and small U.S. cities have returned to the office in far greater numbers than those in the biggest cities. For example, in small cities — those with populations under 300,000 — the share of paid, full days worked from home dropped to 27 percent this spring from around 42 percent in October 2020, according to researchers at Stanford University and other institutions. |
In the 10 largest U.S. cities, days worked from home shifted to roughly 38 percent from 50 percent in that same period. |
Americans have always experienced the workplace in starkly different ways: Doctors stand on their feet for long shifts, truckers spend hours on the road and white-collar workers sit hunched over computers. But now, even people within the same profession can have vastly different work arrangements depending on where their desks sit. |
Your travel horror stories |
Traveling this summer has been nightmarish at times, with widespread delays and cancellations, packed airports and planes, and very few virus restrictions like masks or preflight tests to protect travelers from the virus. |
But how bad has it really been? Actually, we'd like to know. |
We're asking readers to tell us their travel horror stories from this summer as we navigate virus rules — or lack thereof — during this stage of the pandemic. To participate, you can share your story here. We may use it in an upcoming newsletter. |
What else we're following |
I live in an assisted living facility where masking has been optional. I, therefore, have stayed almost entirely in my apartment, avoiding the dining room and all activities. I do go out to get supplemental food and to take long walks early before it gets hot. I do not leave my apartment without a mask. I Zoom a lot to stay sane and write poetry, as well as read and play computer games. At 89, most of my friends are gone, so I don't have many phone contacts. Don't really mind being alone because most of the people here are demented and not much fun to talk to. — Sally Currie, Glendale, Calif. |
Let us know how you're dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter. |
| Thanks for reading. I'll be back Friday. — Jonathan |
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