COVID is over?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. Has it really ended? We are getting mixed messages.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has quietly updated their COVID guidance to say that the virus “can cause serious health problems, so it is more important than ever to protect your child’s health.” If it is still dangerous for children, I guess us seniors over 65 should remember we are in our second childhood and should be careful too.

Our own Department of Health (DOH) is not too sure. The OIC of DOH said the IATF is still considering whether they will take the cue from the WHO and declare an end to the pandemic or take into consideration the latest statistics on the COVID test positivity rate rising and hitting historic highs lately. Last week, DOH said COVID cases went up 112 percent from May 1 to 7 to 1,352 cases, higher than the 1,296 cases in the week of Nov. 7 to 13 last year.

Some local experts are saying that the virus will continue to circulate and will be with us for a long time regardless of any bureaucratic declaration of its end. We should understand our own risk and act accordingly. In other words, we decide for ourselves what is safe. If masking makes us feel safer, do so. Same with avoiding crowds, specially indoors.

Last week, my balikbayan sister-in-law tested positive on antigen after catching a cold and feeling a little tired. She booked  a PCR test, as required by the airline when she cancelled a flight to Bangkok, but the hospital could test her only after two days because of a surge of patients. COVID admissions, however, remain low.

Earlier in the year, my eldest sister was supposed to visit us from the US. Then she tested positive a week or so before her departure date and she tested positive for 27 days. At 84 years old, and a retired physician who worked most of her professional life with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), she is updated on the latest medical journal articles on COVID. So, she has taken precautions.

She wondered how she caught the infection, and remembered that some workers came to her apartment to fix a stuck window. She noticed they were not wearing masks only after they were done. One slip is all it takes.

We should never forget this virus is a guerilla fighter that is able to mutate as quickly as we are able to develop vaccines. This presents a problem to us because our DOH had not been proactive with COVID from the start.

The previous secretary of health prioritized not hurting China’s feelings by rejecting a proposal to test Chinese travelers to the country even after the outbreak in Wuhan. The first COVID death here was a Chinese traveler from Wuhan.

And today, we are all hardly protected because DOH failed to bring the bivalent vaccine into the country. The vaccines we got are of the ancestral virus and are no longer effective. It is the Omicron variants that are infecting people now, and the bivalent vaccine, which includes Omicron, could have provided some level of protection.

It took DOH and its vaccine committee too much time trying to decide if the bivalent vaccine should be brought here. By the time they grudgingly agreed to bring it in, the period of emergency had lapsed, and with it the legal cover sought by the vaccine makers.

If there is one big lesson learned, it is to require DOH and its vaccine committee to have some sense of urgency in an emergency like COVID. They caused some P9 billion worth of vaccines that could have been used as boosters to expire, again because they couldn’t decide if everyone should be boosted. The decisions of the US CDC should have been enough since they have all the data and we don’t have local data that warranted a long discussion.

Then again, the COVID pandemic was something totally new. During the first few months, the medical and scientific community were grasping at straws. As Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview with the New York Times, COVID-19 exposed the limits of public health and, in his telling, kept surprising him and his fellow scientists.

Lessons learned? There were mistakes and missteps, including describing the threat as “minuscule” in February 2020, for instance; or first advising against wearing masks and moving slowly on aerosol spread; or playing down the risk of what were first called “breakthrough infections” in the summer of 2021.

Fauci admitted that they were initially “not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so, it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.”

Then there is the asymptomatic spread, which Fauci said, was the game-changer. You didn’t know who was infectious. “If we knew that very early on, our strategy for dealing with the outbreak in those early weeks would have been different.”

As for herd immunity, a number of epidemiologists told the NYT writer that we should have never entertained herd immunity as a possibility, given the way SARS-CoV-2 replicates in the body. Fauci explained that “the classical definition of herd immunity has been completely turned upside down by COVID… Herd immunity is based on two premises: one, that the virus doesn’t change, and two, that when you get infected or vaccinated, the durability of protection is measured in decades, if not a lifetime.

“With SARS-CoV-2, we found out protection against infection, and against severe disease, is measured in months, not decades. No. 2, the virus that you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus that you’re going to get infected with in 2021 and 2022.”

The current COVID Omicron sub-variant Arcturus doesn’t seem deadly even if highly infectious. But it could quickly mutate to something deadly. Don’t expect our DOH to be ready. Our vaccines no longer protect. Wear a mask indoors. And avoid crowds. COVID is still around.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco