The shape-shifting virus threatens disease cycles and blockages

The new variants pose two threats. First, to counteract the increased risk of infection, restrictions on activity can be tightened, pushing some savings back into recession. Britain, where a fast-spreading variant is now widespread, returned to a total blockade on January 5. Its economy, which shrank 10% last year, is probably contracting now. The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that it will grow 4.5% this year, below the October forecast of 5.9%.

The second threat is a possible new variant resistant to the immunity conferred by existing vaccines and previous infections, which could trigger a new cycle of restrictions and require a new round of vaccinations.

If such a variant emerges, manufacturers think that vaccines can be updated relatively quickly. However, James Stock, an economist at Harvard University who studied the virus and economics, warned of a “scenario that this will last much longer”.

“All economic adaptations were seen as temporary: restaurants with a 25% capacity and so on,” he said. “If this were to become chronic, there would have to be really massive reorganizations” of the United States’ economy.

Singapore Education Minister Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs his government’s Covid Ministerial Task Force, said on Monday: “It could take four to five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the beginning of a normal post-Covid ”.

Mutations are intrinsic to viruses – and economies, by the way. Financial crises are recurrent because financial innovation ends up bypassing the regulations established after the last crisis. Likewise, viruses mutate all the time, and natural selection determines which variants that are best able to reproduce eventually predominate.

Viruses, however, mutate much faster than finances. Almost 300,000 variants of Covid-19 were detected last year, according to an article by Eduardo Costas, professor of genetics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and two colleagues.

To gain a foothold, variants like the UK’s must acquire highly advantageous mutations – relatively rare in combination. But as more people in the world become infected, the likelihood of new highly infectious mutant strains will arise, Costas said in an email.

“It’s like playing the lottery with a lot more numbers,” he added.

The UK variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, spreads 30% to 70% faster and could be 30% to 40% more deadly than previous variants, according to the scientists. This implies that non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as masks and social distance, must be significantly increased to keep deaths unchanged. It also means that more people must be infected or vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity” when the epidemic is over.

In Britain, David Mackie of JP Morgan estimates, the new variant has increased the number of reproductions of the virus – how many people each infected person infects, in the absence of immunity or interventions – from 3.3 to 4.9. Masks, hygiene and social distance pushed the number of reproduction to less than one, the threshold at which cases decrease. This comes at a very high cost: the British economy is almost certainly shrinking.

In fact, as the importance of life-saving activity restrictions may be increasing, public tolerance for them is decreasing, as the recent curfew disturbances in the Netherlands demonstrate. In the United States, some states have refused to enact restrictions, and most others target only high-risk activities, such as indoor meals.

Still, if the cases came up again, the restrictions would likely intensify – and even if they didn’t, more people would voluntarily distance themselves. Any of them would hinder recovery. Goldman Sachs estimates that a delay in obtaining herd immunity would delay the US recovery by two months and reduce growth this year by 2 percentage points.

The widespread administration of existing vaccines should extinguish epidemics linked to current variants. But the likelihood of a vaccine-resistant variant increases over time and in worldwide cases.

“This is one of the reasons why it is important to think not just locally, but globally,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a scientist at Northeastern University who models pandemics. “We could have a vaccine campaign perfectly implemented in the United States and Europe. But if we let the virus spread and we have a lot of cases elsewhere, it could be a boomerang – there may be a variant that can escape the protection of our immune system. “

This increases pressure on the Biden government and the governments of other wealthy nations to speed up vaccination not only at home, but also in poor countries, to minimize the number of variants. The IMF assumes that a vaccine will be widely available this summer in most advanced economies and in some developing economies, but not before the second half of 2022 in the rest of the world.

Mr. Vespignani added: “We need an infrastructure so that, whatever happens, we are much better prepared than in March, April and even now”. This means broader genomic surveillance for dangerous variants; ability to update and rapidly apply vaccines to the entire population; and cheap and rapid tests widely available to contain outbreaks.

Write to Greg Ip at [email protected]