Covid-19

China’s reported seven-day-rolling-average Covid case count (which may be much less than the real count) is now at an all-time peak, surpassed only by a spike on 16 April. A surge in Guangzhou has brought ultra-lockdowns only in areas of the city, not a city-wide ultra-lockdown as in Shanghai earlier. But the government has still not moved to the vaccination drive for elderly people, with more effective vaccines, and the expansion of healthcare, necessary to move away from its hopeless drive for “zero Covid”. Even in the rest of the world, where Covid rates are not (or not yet) showing the...

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt accepts “the picture that the NHS is on the brink of collapse”, but will still go for austerity. Covid rates are currently going down in Britain and almost everywhere. But even a relatively small uptick could swamp an overwhelmed health system. We need: • a sustained public-health testing-and-surveillance system • good sick pay for all • restore NHS funding and repeal privatisation • requisition private hospitals to augment NHS resources • bring social care into the public sector with NHS-level pay and conditions for staff • specialist public clinics for post-Covid...

The science magazine Nature has published an assessment of scientific consensus on tackling Covid. It is based on surveying scientists’ opinions in early 2022. Then, recorded global case numbers were at their peak and the death count, at 1.4/ million/ day, was near the peak of 1.8 in early 2021. Now case, hospitalisation, case-fatality-rate, and death counts have fallen (deaths, to 0.2), and are falling. Wider vaccination (plus protection via previous infections), better treatments, and the non-emergence of a fiercer variant than Omicron, have helped. Yet some reverses must be expected in the...

Some of the news about China’s “Zero-Covid” policy is usefully collected on the webpage of Xi Chen , a professor of public health at Yale University. Instead of pushing hard for full vaccination and then reopening, with a Covid surge but a limited one, as countries like New Zealand previously talking of “zero-Covid” have done, China is doing little to fill its vaccination gap (or to use more effective vaccines). It uses repeated ultra-lockdowns, forced quarantining, and mass PCR testing (which produces results only with delay). The latest bout of ultra-lockdowns, including a new one in Wuhan...

The Tory party melée may now subside a bit, with Rishi Sunak nodded in as the new prime minister on 24 October. But it has triggered an economic crisis. It has taken the lid off a swirl of dispute in the Tory party. And it has raised the stakes for the labour movement. The usual pattern of capitalist crises is that debt builds up in a boom, with easy credit and speculative ventures, then a jolt reveals that many debtors are unlikely to pay, and collapse snowballs. Not through a boom, but through the Covid lockdowns, government debt has increased hugely since early 2020, corporate debt mildly...

According to Eric Topol in the British Medical Journal : “If we had a variant-proof vaccine, if we had nasal vaccines [which can cut transmission more than jabs], and if we had back-up drugs to the only pills that are available today, we’ll be in much better stead and we’ll finally get containment.” Scientists think all those possible, and maybe also a vaccine effective against all coronaviruses . Without the spur of immediate emergency, resources are not being put into vaccines and vaccinations. Worldwide Covid vaccination is running at less than 0.1 doses per 100 people per day, down from...

On 18 September, US president Joe Biden declared that “the [Covid} pandemic is over”. His chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, has rebuffed the claim, and Fauci is right. The USA has not yet reported an autumn-winter revival of infections, but is likely to follow the pattern of other countries, including Britain, where hospitalisations have tripled since 10 September (though levelling off since 4 October). A group of US health experts has written : “We need a robust national booster campaign, more investment in tests, treatments, and next-wave vaccines, better protections for the...

The Covid hospitalisation rate in England is, on the latest figures, 3.3 times what it was at the low point of 10 September, and still rising fast. Epidemiologists always predicted a new surge in winter. It has started early, and it will continue. The surge may be relatively mild, as e.g. in Australia in its winter. The rate of deaths with Covid on the death certificate is still going down, and went up only modestly in the big surge of Omicron cases in late 2021 and early 2022. But it’s also possible it will be less mild, and that it will combine with a flu surge. And it may create new...

“Almost two million [in the UK] report Covid-19 symptoms persisting for more than four weeks; 807,000 for more than a year; and 403,000 for more than two years… For a substantial minority, ‘recovery’ currently means developing the ability to manage limited energy, continuing pain, cognitive limitations, and ongoing flare ups in what has become a long-term condition”. That summary, quoted from the British Medical Journal , also notes that little is known about managing these conditions, let alone curing them, though research is under way and techniques have been “copied over” from other...

The two-and-a-half-week Covid lockdown in the 21-million-strong Chinese city of Chengdu is being gradually lifted from 18 September. Lockdowns in China are different from in other countries: workers are banned from leaving their workplaces, or residents from their blocks of flats, for weeks, and non-Covid patients are sometimes banned from hospitals. The human (and health) cost is unknown. The Chinese government insists that it will continue these lockdowns for as long as it takes to reach “Zero Covid”. Even the World Health Organisation, which has to be diplomatic, thinks that is not possible...