UNPREPARED STILL

World enters an endless loop of disease outbreaks and remains dangerously unprepared for such crises even in third year of the COVID-19 pandemic

- TARAN DEOL AND KIRAN PANDEY

The COVID-19 pandemic has entered its third year, with no signs of ebbing. Till the last week of December, the novel coronavirus was raging in almost 200 countries and had killed more than 5.3 million people. Such is the impact of the pandemic that the average life expectancy has plummeted in several countries. Researchers at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s Centre for Research in Health Economics in Barcelona, Spain, estimate in their study published in Scientific Reports in February 2021, that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost due to COVID-19 in 81 countries. In India, life expectancy has reduced by nearly two years, as per an October 2021 study by the International Institute for Population Studies under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

The fear and turmoil have deepened since the arrival of Omicron—by far the most mutated and transmissible of all the five variants of concern identified in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The severity of disease by the variant may be low but the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems,” warns Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (who), adding: “It might have already made its way through most countries. We have learned by now that we underestimate this virus at our peril.” In hardly a month since South Africa first informed who about this new variant on November 24, 2021, some 91 countries have reported its presence. The subsequent uncertainty among countries and the public was similar to when COVID-19 first struck the world in late December 2019.