Pyroclastic Flu

Tedros has been at it again.

One feels this tsunami metaphor is already suffering from overuse. Given my location, I'm now leaning towards pyroclastic fluow. 

Anyway, another handy analogy beckons. In the world of malicious software the anti-virus application that probably came pre-installed on your computer is typically updated via regular patches, almost imperceptibly. 

Contrast the world of biological viruses. The patches are still being produced, but not released. There are many reasons for this, relating in the main to the lengthy approval process (with the Pfizer or OU platforms, around 3 months minimum) and the fact that vaccines and boosters are being delivered slowly and physically, rather than via wifi. 

Updates released in the middle of an existing programme can also be seriously disruptive. (The very same WHO was tut-tutting rather sternly just 8 days ago about the roll-out of boosters in the developed world when large parts of the world remain partially under-covered by the basic jabs.)

But if we need them, the new shots are pretty much there...barring phases 2 and 3 of trials. 

So when the head of the WHO suggests that new variants may evade our existing vaccines, he is basically stating the obvious. If you have never updated your anti-virus package from nearly two years ago, would you really expect it to have remained fully protective? Duh!...right?

Another question we need to ask ourselves — as covid becomes ever more indistinguishable from a bad case of the common lurgies — is do we really have to care all that much? 

In a sense we do, because as the disease itself becomes less severe, its economic impact could turn more lastingly ruinous.  

In 2020 millions of people were temporarily removed from their places of work or conspicuous consumption in a largely artificial and (relatively) coordinated manner and GDP duly shrunk — yet the moment they were released, pretty much everything except supply and demand snapped back to how it was before, often with a nifty little bump from all those accumulated savings (and...ganas.) 

With Omicron and its successors the workforce is likely to shrink less uniformly and in many cases due to actual sickness. For many the pandemic will not now be something that is being kept away at arm's length by the state and the psychological impact of this is unpredictable, but could well exacerbate existing recessionary pressures. 

There is already talk of 'Economic Long-Covid' in the UK, this being the 'dragging on' part of the next phase I alluded to yesterday. 

And, however much it might resemble a cold, it still won't actually be a cold.