2023-06-16 10:00:26
Lhe Covid-19 will have shown how vulnerable and fragile our world remains. To avoid a global health and economic disaster, linked to the outbreak of an infectious agent, negotiations on new international legal instruments took place at the end of May, within the World Health Organization (WHO), in Geneva, on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly.
SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China at the end of 2019, and in a few months will have infected almost the entire population of the planet, sometimes several times, and directly or indirectly caused more than 20 million deaths in three years. The world was at a standstill for several weeks in the spring of 2020, but in less than a year a dozen vaccines developed by Russia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States have changed the face of the pandemic.
These vaccines have been shown to be very effective in reducing serious forms of the disease, mortality, while avoiding further saturation of health systems. And yet, these vaccines did not stop the circulation of the virus which keeps changing, bypassing the immunity conferred by the vaccine and previous infections, causing new waves of reinfection. In 2022 alone, Europe recorded more than 450,000 deaths, including nearly 40,000 reported in France, which totaled, at the end of May 2023, more than 160,000 deaths associated with Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
Permanently turn the page?
The emergency phase having passed, no country in the world is experiencing confinements, quarantines or health passes, and the last countries are now lifting their border controls. Today, it is mainly the very elderly and immunocompromised people who develop complications related to Covid-19, and we still do not know the necessary rate of booster injections in the population so that it remains protected once morest its severe forms. In addition, SARS-CoV-2, which has the particularity of circulating throughout the year, can also lead, in approximately 10% of cases, to long Covids, these prolonged forms that are sometimes disabling and once morest which medicine remains very helpless.
So, if the state of health emergency has clearly passed, is it reasonable to turn the page definitively vis-à-vis a disease which continues to take away three times more lives than the seasonal flu? Can we be satisfied with a post-pandemic phase that would continue to threaten a high percentage of the population, weakening some and leading others to high absenteeism at school or at work?
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