Above is a screenshot from this morning's Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard. We have reached 6 million deaths in two years, and half a billion cases don't seem that far away. But the most alarming development in the pandemic is that we in the West, and many other countries, appear to have normalized COVID-19.
On January 30, the weekly case count reached 23 million; yesterday, March 6, it was down to 10,693,000. That's a dramatic fall, but it's still higher than any previous peak in the pandemic. The highest death count was 100,000 in the week ending January 21, 2021. This past week, it was 50,000.
These are of course official numbers; the true case counts and mortality are generally assumed to be two to three times higher.
Yet the US, Canada, and many other countries are dispensing with "restrictions." The US has dropped to fourth place in the tally of cases, well behind Germany, Russia, and South Korea. The Americans have endured almost 80 million cases and nearly a million deaths, but seem to think they can now go back to business as usual.
Russia counted 4 million cases in the past 28 days, a quarter of its total 16 million cases, and has lost 350,000 lives to COVID-19. Yet it has launched a war against Ukraine that seems sure to result in far more deaths from disease than from combat. Over a million Ukrainians have sought shelter in neighbouring countries, whose healthcare systems will soon be overwhelmed yet again by rising case counts.
No one seems to care. We appear to have decided that fighting a war is more interesting and important than fighting a pandemic, and it lets us ignore the suffering that continues in countries far from the Black Sea.
It's quite an achievement for a coronavirus no one knew about a couple of years ago: worldwide spread, a Holocaust's worth of deaths, and now acceptance as just another fact of life in the 21st century. I will not be surprised if some preprint soon reports on a new neurological effect of SARS-CoV-2: the stupefaction of all human beings, whether they test positive or not.
