Friendly reminder: Covid-19 is still with us
A colleague recently got sick and, after staying home a few days, sent me a voice message with a raspy voice and said: “It’s Covid, yo.”

And I indeed felt her pain.

As everyone in the entire world knows, Covid-19 is definitely no fun. It has a myriad of different symptoms, including losing your sense of smell and taste, and a lingering headache that persists even after you’re testing negative. Covid-19 sucks.

But at this point, the virus has become a normal part of life. The days of the pandemic are behind us and so are the (hopefully) deadliest days of Covid-19.

So why has it got less deadly?

It’s a combination of a few things. The first and foremost is that we’re better equipped to deal with it. In the early days doctors didn’t know exactly what they were dealing with. But the advent of the vaccines – honestly, a miracle of medical science (we’ll never know how many people would have died if not for the fast development of the vaccines) and international cooperation – helped control the spread and severity of Covid-19.

Then, as we began to understand more about the virus, our treatments got better. It’s also the nature of Covid-19 to get less deadly over time. A virus that kills its host (us) quickly doesn’t have time to replicate, while a less deadly virus can replicate over and over without killing.

After all, the virus is designed to spread. How do we know this? This has happened before.

Influenza in 1918 became the flu pandemic and about 500 million people – or 33% of the global population – was infected. About 50 million people died worldwide. Influenza was terrible and deadly, and the same exact sequence played out back then that played out in 2020. The virus infected, the virus killed, we responded with safety measures – mask wearing was one of them – and sure enough anti-maskers appeared back then too. It seems human nature doesn’t change.

But eventually influenza became less deadly as we were able to treat it more effectively and because it adapted to us, meaning it became less deadly.

From 2002 to 2011, it is estimated between 294,000 and 518,000 people died of influenza, most of them people with weakened immune systems.

Children under two, adults over 65, and people with chronic health problems. For the majority of the public the flu is just something that happens every once in a while, we take our sick days, veg out streaming TV in bed and then we go back to work.

That’s what Covid-19 has become.

(Though again, a reminder: Children under two, adults over 65, and people with chronic health problems are more at risk for severe symptoms and death.)

It’s kind of crazy to think that all of us have grown up with “The Flu”. And for children today, Covid-19 will be exactly like that. Just another thing that makes us sick. “Mum, I got the C,” they might say.

But we’re not quite at this point yet. The risk of death from Covid-19 is still high.

One way to measure Covid deaths in this early transition period is to look at excess mortality to get an idea of the actual death toll. The World Health Organisation estimates that between Jan 1, 2020, and Dec 31, 2021, 14.9 million people died because of Covid-19. In 2023, up to earlier this year, roughly seven million people died. Yes, the number has been cut in half since 2021 but it’s still a staggering amount. One of the reasons is that global vaccination rates vary. There are still people that don’t want to get vaccinated even though the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention – and most other health institutes – says that unvaccinated people over 12 years old have 17 times the rate of Covid-associated deaths. Maybe these people don’t understand maths because if something gives me an added chance to survive, I’m doing it every single time. Of course, the vaccine is not 100% effective – very few things are. But we have to go with what gives us the best chance to be safe.

I was beginning to take it easy thinking about Covid-19 but finding out millions still died last year, I’m ready to schedule my next vaccination.

Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
Big Smile No Teeth,Healthcare,Covid-19,influenza,vaccines,pandemic
Millions still died from it last year. It’s not as bad as the height of the pandemic but that’s still notable.