Roughly 38,000 deaths involved COVID-19 in 2022, compared to more than 95,000 in 2020.
Before the pandemic, England and Wales, along with other countries, would ‘accept” between 10,000 and 25,000 deaths a year caused by influenza. And it is arguable that countries opening up and living largely as if the pandemic is not ongoing, signals a similar acceptance of the still high numbers of deaths from COVID-19.
Whether this is acceptable or abhorrent is a matter of debate. But given what the world has gone through in the past three years, we must take lessons, says Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London.
She says that the pandemic experience should make us less tolerant of the toll of airborne diseases
because now we’ve learned that things like ventilation can massively reduce the mortality associated with all airborne diseases, not just COVID.
In other words, we know we can save lives with simple interventions, so why don’t we?
Wendy Barclay, head of the Department of Infectious Disease and chair in influenza virology at Imperial College London, who sits on various UK government advisory bodies, is less certain that public perception will change. “I think we live with deaths from seasonal flu,” she says. “And I think we will live with deaths from COVID as well. I don’t think there’s any alternative to that.”
“What people forgot is that when SARS-CoV-2 first emerged into the human population, it was a brand new animal virus, which humans had not seen before,” Barclay says. That lack of precedence, and the lack of immunological readiness for the effects of the virus in humans, is what caused such severity of disease in the pandemic’s early days. “The whole world was completely susceptible. A proportion of those people were going to get really quite ill because they had no immune backup whatsoever to rely on.”
That is not the situation many populations are in now. Though more frequent than flu, encounters with COVID continue to be common; with some degree of immunity from exposure to prior variants, vaccination, or both helping to lessen their severity – so far.
This article is based on a BMJ editorial by Chris Stokel-Walker.
