OPINION: Covid, the state of two worlds, north and south

The Pandemic Is Following a Very Predictable and Depressing Pattern As with diseases such as malaria and HIV, rich countries are “moving on” from COVID while poor ones continue to get ravaged. Nadia A. Sam-Agudu, Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, Fredros Okumu, Madhukar Pai The Atlantic

Americans, by and large, are putting the pandemic behind them. Now that Omicron is in the rearview mirror and cases are plummeting, even many of those who have stayed cautious for two full years are spouting narratives about “going back to normal” and “living with COVID-19.”

This mentality has also translated into policy: The last pandemic restrictions are fading nationwide, and in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Joe Biden declared that “most Americans can remove their masks, return to work, stay in the classroom, and move forward safely.” Other rich, highly vaccinated countries are following much the same path. In the U.K., for example, those with COVID-19 no longer have to self-isolate. It helps that these countries have more vaccine doses than they know what to do with, and a stockpile of tools to test and treat their residents if and when they get sick.

ut in the global South, COVID-19 is much harder to ignore. More than a year after the start of the mass-vaccination campaign, nearly 3 billion people are still waiting for their first shot. While an average of 80 percent of people in high-income countries have gotten at least one dose, that figure stands at just 13 percent in low-income countries. In the poorest countries, virtually no booster shots have been administered. Such low vaccination rates are taking their toll. Although the official death count in India is about 500,000, for example, the reality might be closer to 5 million excess deaths—and most of those deaths happened after vaccines were introduced in the global North.

The rush in the rich countries to declare the pandemic “over” while it continues to ravage the global South is completely predictable—in fact, the same trend has played out again and again. Infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV that are now seen as “Third World diseases” were once serious threats in rich countries, but when incidence of these diseases began to decline there, the global North moved on and reduced investments in new tools and programs. Now, with COVID-19, the developing world has once again been left to fend for itself against an extremely transmissible virus without the necessary vaccine doses, tests, and treatment tools. Some pandemics never truly end—they just become invisible to people in the global North. ...