MOST people still don’t have any level of immunity to the virus behind covid-19. But there is a growing risk that some of us are becoming immune to the enormous numbers that this pandemic is throwing out on a weekly basis.
As 91av went to press, the world was on track to exceed a million deaths from covid-19 within days (see “Coronavirus death toll nears 1 million – how did we get here?”). That is a number that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become blasé about.
Advertisement
Early in the pandemic, US President Donald Trump suggested covid-19 wasn’t as bad as the flu. He was wrong. In a bad year, the flu kills up to 650,000 people globally. Covid-19 has killed far more, with three months of the year still to go – and won’t stop when Auld Lang Syne is sung, or even when the first effective vaccine is manufactured. And covid-19 has killed those people not under normal circumstances, but in the face of a global lockdown the like of which we couldn’t even imagine a year ago.
Overwhelmingly, those who have died were aged 65 and over, but on average, they would have had more than a decade of life left had it not been for covid-19. The disease’s long tail, meanwhile, means the impact on younger people has still to be fully understood.
“The world is on track to soon exceed a million deaths from covid-19. It is a number we shouldn’t become blasé about”
Most concerning is the fact that 1 million is an underestimate: it only counts those covid-19 deaths that we have detected. Many people will have died from the illness untested and so may not be included in official death tolls.
The best approach will be to look at data on excess deaths – those above the long-term average for any given period – although in the world’s poorest places, a lack of baseline records means we may never fully know the true toll.
When people grumble about the UK’s new “rule of six” or rail against countries such as Israel adopting a second national lockdown during religious holidays, we should take a minute to remember that at least a million people – a million individuals – have died from this disease. We owe it to them to stay immune to indifference.
