Looking Forward

In a piece at Atlantic Joe Pinsker tries to predict how the American experience of SARS-COV-2 will change over the coming year. He ends with spring/summer 2022 and here’s his conclusion:

Life in the warmer months of 2022 should be normal, or at least whatever qualifies as normal post-pandemic. The virus will still exist, but one possibility is that it will be less likely to make people severely ill and that it will, like the flu, circulate primarily in the colder months; some people would still die from COVID-19, but the virus wouldn’t rage out of control again. Meanwhile, Americans should be able to do most, if not all, of the things that they missed so much in 2020 and 2021, mask- and worry-free.

Of course, this dreamy era is still more than a year away, and some unforeseen obstacle could delay the resumption of normalcy. Jha said he couldn’t picture what that might be, though. After a year spent gaming out how bad the pandemic could get, he can finally see ahead to a time when there are no more catastrophes to imagine.

On my part I don’t think events will be nearly as predictable as he apparently does. For example, I don’t know where he gets this:

The good news, though, is that even with these variants, existing vaccines appear to reduce the risk of severe illness, meaning more and more people will be protected as vaccinations continue. And vaccines can change individuals’ risk calculus.

That might be true if people’s present “risk calculus” were based in reason but it isn’t. It it were they’d think that their odds of contracting COVID-19 were much higher than they presently do but that the likelihood of their dying from it was much lower than they do. As it is it’s not too much of an oversimplification to say that they think it’s pretty unlikely they’ll contract it but if they do they’ll die. Sort of like they think of AIDS or Ebola when they should be thinking more like the seasonal flu.

For insight we should turn to how the Spanish flu pandemic wound down a century ago. That’s been covered to death, for example last fall in a piece at the Washington Post:

The longer the influenza virus existed in a certain community, the less lethal the sickness was. An epidemiological study cited by Barry in “The Great Influenza” noted that “the virus was most virulent or most readily communicable when it first reached the state, and thereafter it became generally attenuated.”

Experts say there’s this natural progression where a virus often — but not always — becomes less lethal as time wears on. It’s in the best interest of the virus for it to spread before killing the host.

“The natural order of an influenza virus is to change,” Barry told The Post. “It seems most likely that it simply mutated in the direction of other influenza viruses, which is considerably milder.”

By 1920, the influenza virus was still a threat, but fewer people were dying from the disease. Some scientists at the time started to move on to other research. Barry wrote that William Henry Welch, a famous pathologist from Johns Hopkins who was studying the virus, found it “humiliating” that the outbreak was passing away without experts truly understanding the underlying cause of the disease.

What Welch didn’t predict was that the virus never truly went away. In 2009, David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger — two influenza experts at the National Institutes of Health — co-authored an article with Anthony S. Fauci explaining how the descendants of the 1918 influenza virus have contributed to a “pandemic era” that has lasted the past hundred years. At the time the article was published, the H1N1 influenza virus in public circulation was a fourth-generation descendant of the novel virus from 1918.

I think that’s almost exactly what will happen with SARS-CoV-2. It will never “go away”. We’ll be inoculating against it forever.

Another factor I can’t predict is how political leaders will respond. So far they’ve been very reluctant to relinquish the dictatorial powers they’ve been wielding for the last year. Will they be relieved to stop issuing directives, refuse to stop issuing them out of “an abundance of caution” or what? And will people just get tired of obeying them? I think there’s evidence that’s the case.

And then there’s the role of COVID-19 as a cudgel to beat over the head of your political opponents. That’s not as effective a weapon as it was a few months ago. Will the news change to fit the politics? Or will the major media outlets continue to promote hysterical reactions because they capture more eyeballs? I simply don’t know.