COVID-19 arrived in Perth earlier than expected via an unvaccinated
backpacker, but it is just the start as the hard border opens this month.
Dr Karl Gruber (PhD) reports
Life is about to change in WA. The average person on the street will have to get used to keeping a face mask handy, as well as their smart phone loaded with the recently-launched ServiceWA app containing their vaccination certificate and the SafeWA check-in.
Going out to hear live music or to catch a film might be a very different experience in 2022, and travellers will need to be on top of the latest requirements by airlines and other States and countries regarding pre-departure and post-arrival testing protocols.
Experts agree the best line of defence is still vaccines. Anyone who is not vaccinated has an increased risk of falling seriously ill or even dying from COVID-19. There is also a higher risk of transmitting the virus if not vaccinated.
But many people will need to be reminded that being fully vaccinated does not mean they cannot catch the COVID-19 virus because a breakthrough infection can happen – specially with the Omicron variant. And some people will develop serious conditions and long COVID, even when fully-vaccinated.
Doctors, particularly GPs, can expect to be busy managing the ongoing vaccination roll-out, as well – for the first time – significant numbers of sick patients with COVID or recovering from it.
No end in sight?
When will the COVID-19 pandemic will be over? This is a question most of us have been wondering for a long time. But, without a magic crystal ball, we can only speculate.
If you ask an historian, the answer will be that pandemics usually have two types of ending. There is a medical ending, when cases are driven to zero, which occurred with Ebola. But there is also a social ending, that’s when people grow tired of the whole situation, and just learn to live with the virus. According to Dr Allan Brandt, a historian from Harvard University, this is what is happening with COVID-19.
“As we have seen in the debate about opening up the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by socio-political processes,” Dr Brand said in a news report.
But “learning to live” with the virus is tricky and it is important for countries to ensure they are making the best decisions when it comes to COVID policies.
In a statement to the New York Times, Dr Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who helped devise New Zealand’s COVID elimination strategy, said that countries taking shortcuts on their way to reopening were putting unvaccinated people at risk and gambling with lives.
“At this point, I actually find it quite surprising that governments would necessarily decide they know enough about how this virus will behave in populations to choose, ‘Yes, we are going to live with it,’” Dr Baker said.
But the quick answer is that COVID-19 won’t go away, it won’t magically disappear from our lives. It will just blend in and be part of our everyday happenings, much like the flu or other diseases.
Except that COVID-19 is not just another flavour of the flu.
From birds to bats
As history goes, 1918 was a bad year. This was the year the Spanish influenza pandemic killed more than 50 million people. The influenza A virus, the culprit behind the 1918 influenza pandemic was, like SARS-CoV-2, a zoonotic disease. This one came from birds.
More than 100 years later, the influenza A virus is still around, popping up here and there, and affecting over 1 billion people and killing an estimated 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organisation.
Now, after all our efforts of eliminating the COVID-19 virus seems to have been insufficient, many experts think COVID-19 will follow a similar path to that of the seasonal influenza.
According to Dr Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University, we may eventually see a new baseline of virus transmission.
“Once we see a stable level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission indicating a new baseline, we will know the pandemic has ended and the virus is endemic. This will likely include minor seasonal trends as we see now with flu,” she said in an article for The Conversation.
However, COVID-19 is not exactly like seasonal influenza. Not only is it a different virus, it has a higher infection rate and a higher mortality rate, compared to the flu, and we don’t know much about what long-term effects it might have on those infected.
The WA bubble
So far, people in WA have been the luckiest people in the world. Throughout most of the COVID-19 pandemic, WA has experienced only a handful of cases. At the time of writing, life was mostly normal in Perth, with only a handful of cases and no major restrictions or lockdowns. Other than wearing masks and needing proof of vaccination in some venues, life is business as usual.
But now that our borders are open, everything will change. COVID-19 is already here, it arrived early in January, and now cases will continue to grow. The only question is whether WA will be ready to deal with all cases.
Will our hospitals be able to cope with the burden? How many people will get the virus? How many will get very sick or die?
In the meantime, WA is gearing up in the only way it makes sense to get ready: by ramping up on vaccination coverage, including boosters. The WA Government also recently announced that a $400 million package will be in place to increase the capacity of our health system to cope with the upcoming wave.
Only time, our commitment to getting vaccinated and a dash of luck will tell how we fare this year.
“The most important thing we can do to help reach a safe level of endemic COVID is to get vaccinated and continue to adhere to COVID-safe practices. By doing this we protect ourselves, those around us, and move together towards an endemic phase of the virus. If we don’t work together, things could turn for the worse very quickly and prolong the end of the pandemic,” Dr Herrero said.