On my long flight to the US a couple of weeks ago, I had plenty of time to think about the COVID pandemic and ponder how things were last year this time, how it is now and how would it be a year from now.
Last year this time, we were in the middle of one of the most fearsome and catastrophic Delta wave of coronavirus. There was death, destruction, devastation and sadness everywhere and we had literally become prisoners of this deadly virus.
There was turmoil all over. Hospitals, crematoriums and cemeteries were overflowing with patients and the dead. Travelling abroad was a distant dream and plans and venues for a family wedding had to be changed multiple times to accommodate the changing rules of COVID and even then immediate family members could not attend the event when it finally happened.
However, there were many silver linings too. Vaccination had started in the right earnest and today we are proud that we have one of the best track records for vaccination in the world. A robust healthcare infrastructure was built and allocation for healthcare was substantially upgraded in last year’s budget. All these measures helped us considerably in facing the third wave, which came on the back of the much milder form of COVID, the Omicron variant.
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To some extent, the extremely infectious nature of Omicron caused widespread infections with very little morbidity and mortality, which further helped our population attain herd immunity. Omicron fortunately was also short-lived and soon the number of infections across the country dropped drastically and many of the stringent COVID measures were lifted. Finally most of us, especially in the healthcare industry, heaved a sigh of relief and citizens could finally breathe easy.
This led to gradual improvement in the economic conditions, especially in the hospitality and travel industry. Travelling across the country and abroad became close to normal and here I was on my much delayed travel to the US without any of the stress that was part of any travel during the peak COVID days. Of course, life was almost back to normal in the US, in fact a little too normal as most people were not wearing masks in spite of the CDC recommendation on wearing masks.
Now back from the US after a very pleasant stay, I am gazing at the crystal ball to predict what the future will be this time next year.
Though many pundits have gone awfully wrong in their predictions about COVID and in spite of the fact that I too went awfully wrong in my prediction on the eve of the New Year of 2021 that nothing could be worse than 2020, I will still stick my neck out and hazard a prediction on what the world will be a year from now.
At the outset, before my predictions for tomorrow, I would like to make it clear that COVID is here to stay and how COVID would behave in the next few months or years would to a large extent depend on our behaviour of being COVID-appropriate by masking, distancing and openly accepting vaccination as a tool, if not to prevent the disease at least to mitigate the seriousness of the disease. With these caveats, I would say even if there is a fourth wave of COVID over the next few weeks or months, we would still be reasonably safe because almost the entire population is either immunised or has been infected and the government is still actively monitoring and conducting rigorous surveillance for COVID and actively pursuing vaccination for children as well as precautionary dose (booster dose) for all above 18.
All in all, while COVID is here to stay we have enough tools in our armamentarium to make sure that it doesn’t raise its ugly head to turn our world topsy-turvy like it did in 2020 and 2021.
My prediction for the future is that a milder form of endemic COVID is here to stay and so will masking, distancing and vaccination. The way forward for us is to learn to live with COVID and not let it get the better of us. We do hope that this prediction comes true for everyone’s sake.
Dr Sudarshan Ballal is Chairman, Manipal Hospitals. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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