The week
Why COVID-19 variants could extend the pandemic to 2024
Last week, New York provided worrying details of what is happening in the Brazilian city of Manaus, whose population was believed to have developed extensive protection against the virus last year, only to find itself experiencing another major outbreak. There are theories about how this happened – the immunity of the community being overestimated, the protection of antibodies decreasing, the variant becoming more transmissible or, perhaps most worrying, the virus adapting to avoid the antibodies. In any case, an increasing number of variants such as Brazil’s could theoretically delay the final game. Axios put it in slightly different terms – the current pandemic may be almost over, but the variants could trigger others. Several vaccines have been shown to work well against the main coronavirus strain, and the most transmissible British variant also appears to be quite susceptible to them, but the South African variant appears more resistant. And, New York notes, even a slight drop in effectiveness could prevent “population-scale protection only through vaccination.” The New York Times, however, explains that reports on the vaccine’s effectiveness often don’t tell the whole story. Scientifically speaking, vaccine research considers any transmission to be a failure, but that may not be the most important thing. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson provided data that showed that their vaccine candidates did not prevent infections in South Africa as well as elsewhere, but have still been very successful in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death. This suggests a possible scenario in which vaccines reduce coronavirus to a much milder pathogen. But that may still not be enough globally, according to New York. Even though vaccines significantly reduce the worst results from COVID-19, the world’s poorest countries are not expected to achieve mass immunization by 2024, so while the tide may turn more rapidly in the United States, the global pandemic may still ongoing in the coming years, especially if the variants impede the herd’s natural immunity. Read more in New York, Axios and The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comBiden may revoke Trump’s access to classified intelligence. Rise of the Barstool conservativesAmerican overreaction syndrome