Curbing the coming Covid surge

Submitted by martin on 31 August, 2021 - 4:20 Author: Martin Thomas
Covid test

A new surge of Covid cases is probable in the coming months.

It is likely to be blamed on schools reopening. Research worldwide suggests that will be secondary. (Children get Covid less severely than adults and transmit less). Other drivers are certain: people returning from holidays; more indoor time; university students crowding into halls of residence and bars; erosion of voluntary Covid precautions; waning of immunity from early-2021 infections or vaccinations.

Israel mass-vaccinated before Europe and has had an earlier new surge. Ran Balicer, Israel’s lead Covid expert, reckons that the “booster” (third) vaccine doses given there have had a “visible” role in the tentative levelling-off of that surge since 24 August.

The World Health Organization has now come out in favour of “booster” vaccination. The scandal remains of Africa being able to vaccinate at only about 0.1 doses per 100 people per day, and so having given only seven doses per 100 people so far. Africa’s Covid death rate has decreased from an all-time peak in early August, but we don’t know for how long.

The South Korean government has called on the US government to press Big Pharma to share technology to new vaccine factories in South Koreas. Labour movements must fight for Big Pharma to be taken under public ownership and democratic control, to enable emergency vaccine production and distribution worldwide.

The Financial Times has reported that the Oxford University researchers behind the Astra Zeneca jab quietly sent information to the Serum Institute in India before doing their production deal with Astra Zeneca. AZ then proved more willing to license other manufacturers and sell vaccines profit-free than the other Big Pharma companies.

High-vaccination countries have reduced their Covid case fatality rates drastically, to 10% or less of early-2021 rates, and comparable to flu. Still, new lockdown-type measures may be needed in Britain over coming months.

The labour movement should fight above all for the social measures which make lockdown-type policies “work”, or may even avert them:

• Full isolation pay for all

• Rehousing from crowded accommodation

• Bring social care into public ownership, with workers on NHS-level pay and conditions

• Boost NHS pay and funding

• Workers’ control of workplace safety, especially improved ventilation and reduced numbers in offices and classrooms. (The government is sending CO2 monitors to schools to detect poor ventilation, but making no provision for actual improved ventilation).

The longer term prospect looks something like this. Everyone will get Covid eventually, and probably several times over our lives — except the unlucky ones, old or frail enough that we die of something else before we get Covid. But eventually almost all will get Covid mildly and build up immunity over our lifetimes to limit its impact until we get old and need a vaccine boost.

Even New Zealand (which unlike other closed-border countries, Australia and Vietnam, may have limited its recent Delta outbreak to keep infections very low until it can vaccinate widely) now recognises that it must reopen its borders some time and cannot avoid some Delta surge then.

It remains important to slow down the spread of Covid, so that cases come after vaccination, at a rate which hospitals can deal with, and after improvements in treatment and (if we can win them) in social conditions. Worldwide, more socially-equal countries and areas have had lower Covid tolls.

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