With three out of four Europeans planning on travelling over the summer, the era of border closures, mandatory testing and vaccine certificates seems a half-remembered nightmare to many. But with more than 1,700 people still dying every week across the world from Covid-19 and vaccine coverage declining among at-risk populations, according to the WHO, the pandemic isn't something that can just be spoken about in the past tense.
As European countries prepare for the summer holidays, lockdown seems like a very long time ago. Three out of four Europeans are planning on travelling between June and November this year, according to the European Travel Commission, with most respondents saying they were planning on taking multiple trips over the summer. It’s a six percent rise compared with the same period last year – a sign that the world’s beleaguered tourism industry has found a firmer footing after its brush with obliteration during the worst years of the Covid-19 pandemic. More than half of those travellers will be making the trip by plane.
Whether or not they’ll be wearing masks on those flights is another question entirely. Following – or in some cases before – the WHO’s decision to declare the end of Covid-19 as a public health emergency in May last year, almost every country in the world has lifted travel restrictions requiring travellers to show proof of vaccination before boarding a flight, undergo Covid-19 testing on arrival and sometimes spend weeks in mandatory quarantine to reduce the risk of bringing the plague across their borders. Airlines have similarly loosened their once-stringent restrictions, largely leaving the wearing of masks up to passengers’ individual consciences.
No one reading this article needs to be told why the world seems so keen to return to a time when people can – depending, still, on where they were born – move freely across borders without worrying about being stranded far from their families or left languishing at the mercy of vast and clinical medical bureaucracies. But while the world is set on moving on, the WHO is still calling on countries not to forget the lessons learned throughout the pandemic.
On Thursday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that more than 1,700 people across the world are still dying every week from Covid-19, warning that vaccine coverage was dangerously declining among people aged over 60 and in frontline health workers – two of the groups most at risk of dying due to Covid-19 infection.
The virus is still making headlines. The Tour de France has reinstated protective measures to “limit health risks” after several riders, including the UK’s Tom Pidcock and Spain's Juan Ayuso, were forced to abandon the race after testing positive for Covid-19. Masks are now mandatory for anyone coming into contact with the competitors or their teams. With millions of people expected to travel to Paris for the Olympics and Paralympics in the coming weeks, it could be a worrying precedent.
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A WHO report published in June 2024 found that 4.9 million older adults across 60 countries had received a vaccine dose in the first quarter of the year, corresponding to a 0.42 percent uptake rate. Among healthcare workers, this figure was just 234,000 people across 40 reporting countries – an uptake rate of 0.17 percent.
"WHO recommends that people in the highest-risk groups receive a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of their last dose," Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva.
Dr Nilufar Ahmed, a psychologist and senior lecturer in social sciences at the University of Bristol, said that declining media coverage of the virus and limited public health messaging had likely played a part in the drop in vaccinations.
“I think from a psychological point of view it just hasn’t been in the news as much,” she said. “That’s partly because of the effectiveness of the first vaccination campaign, which was so successful that it made people feel they are fully vaccinated.”
Ahmed said that beyond vaccination levels, other public health measures that had been recommended – if not mandatory – throughout the earliest years of the pandemic were also struggling to find public support.
“It’s very low in public communications,” she said. “We see very few people masking, and the response if you see someone wearing a mask is that you assume they must have Covid – not that they’re wearing it as a preventative measure.”
But these measures could still save lives. A study published in May 2024 strongly suggested that wearing masks on long-haul flights played a significant role in stopping the spread of Covid-19. On flights without enforced masking, long-haul flights saw a 25.93-fold increase in Covid-19 transmission rates compared with short flights. On flights with strict masking policies, though, no transmission was detected.
“Our findings … suggest that aircraft-acquired transmission is not inevitable if masking is strictly enforced,” the study read, stressing that the data analysed was taken from before the outbreak of the more contagious Delta and Omicron variants and mass vaccination campaigns. “On long haul-type flights where enforced masking took place and meals were served, there were no reported aircraft-acquired cases during contact tracing and follow-up.”
The true death toll of those early years of the pandemic remains stubbornly out of reach. The WHO reported earlier this year that as of May 26, 2024, there had been more than 775 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and more than 7 million deaths across the world since the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019. That figure likely hides a grimmer reality – the same report says that, judging by viral loads found through wastewater surveillance, the real case load could be anything from two to almost 20 times higher.
“Covid-19 remains a major threat, and WHO urges Member States to maintain, not dismantle, their established Covid-19 infrastructure,” the report concluded.
For Ahmed, the disconnect between these WHO warnings and the public messaging around the virus across many countries reflected a “real reduction” in the messaging around how deadly Covid-19 could be.
“It needs exceptional care because we still don’t know the long-term effects, and what we do know is it has a number of associated illnesses, and we still don’t know the implications of that,” she said. “So treating it as exceptional feels like the most appropriate way forward.”
“Otherwise it becomes something like the flu, which is deadly, but we think of it as something that is only deadly for certain populations, and which we start to talk about as though it’s just a bad cold – when it fact the flu kills thousands of people.”
For its part, the WHO is still recommending that travellers wear a well-fitting mask, clean their hands regularly, get tested prior to travelling if they show Covid-19 symptoms and, if sick, consider staying home. And while being fully vaccinated is no longer a pre-requisite to most international travel, it still comes first on the WHO’s list of travel advice.
Ahmed said that pushing for more stringent public health measures around Covid-19 was a hard sell for governments desperate to distance themselves from the darkest days of the pandemic.
“It’s been difficult to keep that message because it’s always felt like an imposition on people. It’s something that people felt restricted their freedom – the messaging was not, ‘let’s manage the illness’,” she said.
“It’s very difficult for people at this time of year to think about the pandemic and the lockdowns – it still weighs heavily on people,” she said. “For some people, the avoidance of it is almost the avoidance of getting back to those days of lockdown.”
