We are thinking about the pandemic as something that will be over – what if we are wrong? 

ByMartyn Bradbury

I don’t think we have our head around how enormous Covid is and that the sooner we start appreciating that this is the new normal, the sooner we can acknowledge the level of adaption required.

Hyper tourism is dead: We just won’t see the vast number of people travelling which in turn will push up prices which in turn will start to make air travel something only the middle classes and up use.

Global Herd Immunity will take at least 7 years to achieve: Bloomberg found that even if everything goes our way, it’s going to take 7 years to ensure 75% of the planet has had th shot.

Lockdowns will become the norm: Whenever the hospital system is threatened with being over run, a Government will revert back to lockdowns.

Annual vaccination infrastructure: It is obvious that because of the mutations, we will require annual Covid shots to maintain that herd immunity.

Next Pandemic: The moment we get a pandemic that has a far higher mortality rate is when we truly start to suffer.

Covid is here and it won’t magically disappear. The naked reality is that Western Governments are struggling to build the extra hospital capacity and mortuary capacity that will allow a seasonal flu level of ongoing deaths. Take NZ, flu annually kills 500 but because we are used to and accept that number it occurs within a system that has capacity for that. We require an expansion of hospital and morgue capacity to include a percentage who will die from Covid once we’ve hit 75% because without that capacity we must still remain in an ever ready sense of response that will get weaker and weaker as the years go by.

The level of death a Government can accept within a system that has the extra capacity for that death is the balancing act here between public health and the economy, but no one has that capacity yet so smothering the virus with lockdowns to prevent it overwhelming the hospital system is the only game in town.

The only certainty we have is that it won’t and can’t go back to business as usual.

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2 Comments

  1. We enter not a new normal but the return of an old one.
    The constant presence of serious, contagious illness is not actually new. What is new are the travel and trade networks that spread it so quickly.
    When I did papers in Social History at Massey I found out something that intrigued me and others.
    Nobody knows why diseases suddenly become virulent, then benign.
    The reason world population is now approaching seven billion is that the devastating disease plagues that struck nearly every generation suddenly eased and no-one really knows why.
    I know readers do not want me to spend too long on this but some examples:
    Bubonic plague is always present in Central Asia. The Black Death was frequent and virulent in epidemic form for hundereds of years – then stopped. Outbreaks in many countries, including New Zealand, were isolated, not very virulent and not contagious.
    Samuel Pepys provided evidence that seventeenth century children were encouraged to catch smallpox because it was not considered dangerous to young people and immunized them. Historians who examined death records of this time found relatively few people seemed to die of smallpox even in epidemic years.
    But in the eighteenth century smallpox was terribly virulent and many died. Then it faded.
    From vaccination? Relatively few people were vaccinated. Better hygiene and medical care? Louis Pasteur was the first person to seriously recognise microbes spread disease and do something to combat it. The great mass of people knew nothing about the way disease was transmitted.
    There are other examples but this has happened before and as before it may reduce populations, warp and shrink the world we know and, most importantly, launch social and political change.
    Viva La Post Covid Revolution

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