COVID-19: Is it the beginning of pandemic's end?

Dubai: A year ago, on this day, March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus a “pandemic”. For those of us fortunate enough to see through a world interrupted, the contagion has driven dramatic shifts.

Let’s backtrack: On January 10, 2020, the first death from what’s been dubbed as "novel coronavirus" (nCoV-19), a mysterious pathogen that first emerged in Wuhan, China, which has no known cure or vaccine, was reported. There were 41 clinically-confirmed infections caused by the virus. Ten days later, on January 20, 2020, the first cases outside China were confirmed — in Japan, Korea and Thailand.

The next day, January 21, 2020, the first coronavirus case in the US was confirmed. That’s viral spread for you in the time of transcontinental travel. It, therefore, took the World Health Organisation (WHO) 61 days, from the first reported COVID-19 death to the time it declared the viral contagion a "pandemic", after citing "alarming levels of inaction".

May we propose the following lessons, including the fact that transcontinental travel as we knew it, has become uncommon (at least for now). It's now a possibility that people can live simply, so that others can simply live. Another important point: viruses know no geographic borders... this unseen spikey blob has mocked globalisation like nothing has ever done before. Still more...

Others may have had important self-realisations, too. A year out, people have increasingly realised how far we’ve gone with our shared humanity:

It’s hard to say. Scientists are wont to state that, looking at ramped up inoculation numbers and a drop in COVID-19 cases, "correlation does not mean causation". It's an academic escape clause in scientific data interpretation.

Nature noted, however, the “good news” from Israel. “Researchers are seeing signs that COVID-19 vaccines are helping to curb infections and hospitalisations among older people, almost 6 weeks after shots were rolled out in that group,” the respected scientific journal notes. Israel was the first to release data showing vaccines working in such a large group of people (close to 90% of people aged 60 and older in Israel have received their first dose of Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine so far).

It cited data collected by Israel’s Ministry of Health which show that there was a 41% drop in confirmed COVID-19 infections in that age group, and a 31% drop in hospitalisations from mid-January to early February, Reuters reported. In comparison, for people aged 59 and younger — of which just more than 30% have been vaccinated — cases dropped by only 12% and hospitalisations by 5% over the same time. The figures are based on analysis of roughly a 250,000 COVID-19 infections. Consider some more facts:

[Data: NCEMA, Johns Hopkins University, Our World in Data]

Experts are careful not to declare victory over the virus, just yet.

“It takes about 40 per cent to 50 per cent vaccination to get any effect, so it is unlikely that you are seeing the effects outside of Israel and the UK. Even the USA is uneven,” Dr Nicanor Austriaco OP, a molecular biologist at Providence (US), who also runs Austriaco Laboratory, told Gulf News.

So far, as of March 11, 2021, 95.7 million doses have been administered in the US (population: 328.2 million), with an average vaccination rate of 2.17 million doses per day. Dr Austriaco, pointed out that there has been significant drops in cases even in places without vaccination. Mask mandates, social distancing and other non-vaccine interventions could play a role in this.

Chile is among the top countries globally in terms of vaccinations, with at least 4,948,483 doses of COVID vaccines administered so far, or about 13.1 per cent of the population.

On March 8, 2021, Chile rose to the top of daily COVID vaccine doses per 100 people at 1.08. During the last week reported, Chile averaged about 154,562 doses administered each day. At that rate, it will take a further 25 days to administer enough doses for another 10 per cent of the population.

Prof Paul Hunter, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of East Anglia in the UK, told Reuters the figures from Israel in the over 60s when compared to younger age groups were “a really clear signal” of “a fairly sustained decline in hospitalisations”. “At about four weeks after the start of the vaccination drive, when actually most people will only have had a single dose, they’re beginning to see an effect,” he said.

The drop in hospital admissions in Israel was happening, he said, “too soon” for it to have been the result only of people having had both the first and second doses

The UAE has also seen a gradual decrease in COVID-19 infection rate over the past two weeks. In its press briefing, the National Crisis and Emergency Management Authority (NCEMA) said, “this is a positive sign and a step to recovery and the resumption of normal life”.

Till date, the UAE has provided more than six million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to more than 3.7 million people. The provision of the vaccine to a total of 3,777,143 residents has increased the share of vaccine recipients to 48.71 per cent of the target group. Moreover, 64.52 per cent of older residents have already received the vaccine.

The Israeli study has stated its limits: a reliance on preliminary and aggregated data, a limited ability to account for effects and possible differences in adherence to mitigation measures (mask-wearing, social distancing) between the age groups examined.

But the results, even if preliminary, is hard to ignore. First, the data sets are huge, more than all the vaccine phase 3 trials globally put together. Since the implementation of the country’s vaccination program, the ratio of mechanical ventilation in adults aged 70 years and older compared with adults younger than age 50 years dropped from 5.8:1 to 1.9:1. — a decline of 67%.

The decline “began around the time of commencement of administration of the second vaccine dose. This might reflect the effects of the first dose, an observation that is consistent with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine phase 3 results, which demonstrated partial efficacy after the first dose,” the authors noted.

Yair E. Lewis, MD, PhD, of Maccabi Healthcare Services in Tel-Aviv, and colleagues said their findings reinforced the observation that COVID-19 vaccines can “help limit spread of disease and potentially reduce the occurrence of severe disease. The findings from this study provide preliminary but important evidence of the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing severe cases of COVID-19 at the national level.”