The Modern Prometheus

This edition is going to be a bit of a news roundup, with short comments on a series of related topics, including follow-ups on some stories I flagged at the very end of last year.

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“Just the Flu”

One of the stories I asked you to look out for in the new year was the “tripledemic,” the forecasted winter surges of three infectious diseases: covid, another respiratory virus called RSV, and the plain old seasonal flu.

Well, the good news is that the tripledemic pretty much fizzled.

So many patients sick with RSV had inundated Connecticut Children’s Medical Center that they had to be treated in hallways and playrooms. Facing their busiest season in memory last fall, hospital leaders floated a plan to enlist the National Guard to set up tents outside. Doctors braced for a dire winter—a looming disaster some dubbed a “tripledemic”—with flu season revving up, coronavirus roaring back, and the holidays providing fuel for viruses to spread.

But no such surge materialized. The RSV wave has receded in Connecticut and across the country. Flu cases have rapidly dwindled. Covid hospitalizations rose briefly after Christmas, only to fall again.

Part of the reason is that the peaks for the three diseases didn’t end up coinciding. RSV and flu peaked in December, while covid reached its latest peak about a month later, in mid-January.

The other reason is that the population has finally been hardened by widespread covid vaccination and three years of previous infection.

The United States is better equipped now than earlier in the pandemic to weather coronavirus surges because most people have some degree of immunity, and early treatment keeps the most vulnerable people from becoming seriously ill.

“As awful as omicron was, it left in its wake a tremendous amount of immunity,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University School of Public Health.

Even though the omicron subvariants that are now circulating cause concern because of their ability to evade antibodies, the immune systems of those who have been vaccinated or previously infected are still effective at keeping the cases mild, especially if they have recently received booster shots, doctors say.

This raises the possibility that covid is finally becoming “just the flu.”

This is not quite as comforting a description as some people assume, because the disease that became our normal seasonal flu started out a hundred years ago as the devastating Spanish Flu that killed many millions of people across the world. Covid was always likely to follow the same trajectory: It never really goes away, but it evolves into new variants, our immune systems become hardened against it, it settles down into a seasonal pattern with a winter peak, and every year there is a new booster vaccine designed to offer enhanced protection against the latest variant. We might finally be reaching that point.

Of course, the other reason this is less than reassuring is that the seasonal flu, the old leftover of the Spanish Flu, usually kills tens of thousands of people in the US every year. If covid settles into the same pattern, it will add another seasonal flu on top of that, killing an additional tens of thousands of people. But those number are still far lower than covid at its peak, and this returns us into the realm of “normal life”—well after most people have already returned to normal, anyway.

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The Magna Carta in Reverse

Another story I’ve been following from last year is good idea that just never got off the ground: permitting reform.