“Live with” Covid, but safely

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 3:24 Author: Martin Thomas
Covid cartoon

Seven weeks after the Omicron variant was identified in South Africa, and a month after it started spreading fast in the UK, case counts in the UK are tentatively dropping. Evidence from South Africa itself and other countries is hopeful.

Without waiting to see if the drop is a solid trend, or admitting that even in the best case deaths and the stress on underfunded hospitals will continue to rise for a few weeks, the Tory right has raised an outcry for dropping curbs and just “living with” Covid.

Solidarity has pointed out since mid-2020 that Covid is not going to “end” or “go away”. Governments previously geared to “zero Covid”, in Australia and New Zealand, have recognised that; even China, where the ferocity of the police apparatus has limited spread, will eventually have to adapt. As immunity from vaccination and previous infection spreads, and so the virus becomes less deadly, in time it will become beneficial that people other than the elderly and frail catch mild Covid from time to time to “update” their immunity.

So we have to “live with” Covid, in the sense that we also have to “live with” risk from flu, from road accidents, and so on. But safely. Not absolutely safely, which is impossible, but relatively safely, with mutual-aid measures which limit toll without disproportionately blighting life.

Covid is far from “settled down” yet. The weekly Covid death rate in the UK now is only 15% of what it was in early 2021, but it is still equivalent to about 70,000 a year. It’s been equivalent to 40,000 a year or more solidly since August 2021. There will be new variants after Omicron. Over the long term, probably, as partial-immunity widens, successive variants will usually hit less hard; but how long? And “usually” is not “always”.

There is more case now for tightening covid-distancing rules somewhat (like other countries in western Europe) than for scrapping them. And there is an urgent case for the longer-term social measures whichSolidarity has campaigned for since early 2020, both to make short-term curbs more effective when invoked to slow spread, and to curb the virus longer-term.

• Boost NHS pay (by the 15% demanded since summer 2020 by NHS workers) and resources; requisition private hospitals and staff to integrate them into the NHS

• Take social care into the public sector, with staff on NHS-level pay and conditions

• Raise isolation and sick pay to living-wage levels

• Workers’ control of workplace safety; upgrade ventilation

• A crash housing programme to reduce overcrowding; immediate publicly-provided quarantine accommodation for those otherwise trying to self-isolate in crammed conditions

The Omicron wave has taken a much lower toll in South Africa (and neighbouring countries) than Delta, despite low vaccination rates and probably because of widespread partial immunity from widespread previous infection as well as a younger population.

The next variant to hit Africa may be different. Over a year after the first vaccines were developed, vaccinations in Africa are still jogging along at about 0.15 jabs per 100 per day (and worldwide at about 0.4). Requisition Big Pharma, and in the first place its patents and production know-how, to enable a mass worldwide roll-out for all!

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