I feel terribly retro saying this, but in recent weeks I have started to worry about a horrible virus that is going around called Covid-19. Perhaps you remember it? If you have had the luxury of forgetting about the pandemic, I suspect you are due for a wake-up call. A new variant, BA.2.86 or “Pirola”, has emerged that is causing concern. There has also been a notable surge in Covid cases and hospitalisations. It is hard to calculate exactly how many people have Covid because a lot of the tracking has stopped, but the Arwa-anecdata-meter is off the charts: I know seven people based in the US who have tested positive in the last couple of weeks.
I am not saying this to fearmonger – none of my friends are seriously sick (although they were put out of commission for a while). I am just confused about what we are supposed to do amid this new surge. We keep getting told that, thanks to natural immunity and the vaccines, Covid is no longer a big deal and we need not panic about the fact that most of us will get reinfected multiple times. Yet, at the same time, there have been endless headlines about the dangers of long Covid and reinfections. Some of these warnings, it should be noted, must be viewed in context. There was a paper published in Nature Medicine last November, for example, which found that reinfected people are more than twice as likely to die and three times as likely to be hospitalised as a result of Covid than people who have been infected only once. While that sounds terrifying, the patients the study looked at were mostly men averaging 63 years of age, many of whom had existing health conditions.
So how serious are reinfections? No one seems to know. The science is nuanced and incomplete, and yet a lot of the mainstream conversation around Covid seems to veer between extremes: doomers who warn that you will be struck down with long Covid if you so much as leave the house, and minimisers who think that Covid is no more worrying than a bad cold.
Clearly, it’s not just me who is confused. In the absence of clear, centralised guidance, there has been a scattered and somewhat ad-hoc response to the current surge. Some employers in the US are now bringing back mask mandates: the Hollywood studio Lionsgate, for example, has implemented a “medical grade” face mask policy for about half of employees in its California office. A number of US healthcare facilities have also started requiring masks. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also recommended that high-risk Americans dig out their masks again. Masks are too late for some schools in Texas and Kentucky, which have had to cancel classes amid a surge of illnesses, including Covid.
There is a general sense of deja vu. Vaccines are a hot topic again: an updated version is expected to roll out in mid-September in the US. How many people will actually get that jab, however, is unclear. In the UK, it will be available only to those over 65, select vulnerable groups and frontline health and social care workers. In the US, it will be available to everyone but, unlike previous vaccines, it won’t automatically be free and costs will vary according to your health insurance status. A lot of people will probably not get a booster.
I know this is an evolving situation, and we are all still figuring out this virus, but a little clear guidance from the governments on either side of the Atlantic would be nice. “The pandemic is over,” Joe Biden declared during a television interview last September, so how come the World Health Organization still views it as a “global health risk”? This is its current status, having been downgraded in May from a “public health emergency”. Covid is still here, and will be for a very long time. Yet it seems we are just being told to keep coughing and carry on.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
