Covid cases are surging. We need more from government than ‘Keep coughing and carry on’ | Arwa Mahdawi

Almost a year after Joe Biden declared the pandemic over, coronavirus is still officially a global health risk'. So what are the authorities in the US and UK doing about it?

I feel terribly retro saying this, but in recent weeks I have started to worry about a horrible virus that is going around called Covid-19. Perhaps you remember it? If you have had the luxury of forgetting about the pandemic, I suspect you are due for a wake-up call. A new variant, BA.2.86 or Pirola", has emerged that is causing concern. There has also been a notable surge in Covid cases and hospitalisations. It is hard to calculate exactly how many people have Covid because a lot of the tracking has stopped, but the Arwa-anecdata-meter is off the charts: I know seven people based in the US who have tested positive in the last couple of weeks.

I am not saying this to fearmonger - none of my friends are seriously sick (although they were put out of commission for a while). I am just confused about what we are supposed to do amid this new surge. We keep getting told that, thanks to natural immunity and the vaccines, Covid is no longer a big deal and we need not panic about the fact that most of us will get reinfected multiple times. Yet, at the same time, there have been endless headlines about the dangers of long Covid and reinfections. Some of these warnings, it should be noted, must be viewed in context. There was a paper published in Nature Medicine last November, for example, which found that reinfected people are more than twice as likely to die and three times as likely to be hospitalised as a result of Covid than people who have been infected only once. While that sounds terrifying, the patients the study looked at were mostly men averaging 63 years of age, many of whom had existing health conditions.