Opinion – Atila Iamarino: The mediocrity of ‘good enough’ in Covid should still cost many lives

We followed on the second wave of the ômicron, still in the “let the wave take me” style. Since the beginning of July, we have recorded an average of over 200 deaths per day. Numbers that no longer generate mobilization. In April 2020, when we first reached this threshold, the feeling of fear and uncertainty kept many locked at home. Today those numbers are good enough that many don’t even consider wearing masks.

We have reached an impasse. Vaccines continue to prevent thousands of hospitalizations and save lives. They don’t save everyone, they don’t prevent all infections — nor are they designed for that — but they do enough for the resumption of a new normal with many more sick, dead and disabled.

Deaths are again concentrated among the elderly, who develop less immunity and lose it more quickly. Which seems like a good enough situation that people no longer want to give up their freedom to the virus. We circled back and gathered. And vaccines have become the only barrier against the virus. A barrier that still has the holes of those who think the immunity induced by the infection or by a dose or two of the vaccine is good enough.

Unlike 2020, we are now familiar and exhausted with the pandemic. Everyone wants their normal life back. But the coronavirus didn’t get tired or “want” to give in its infections. On the contrary, all it took was a few mutations that evade immunity, others that increase its affinity for our cells, and it now has a free pass to circulate as never before.

Until July, we registered in Brazil more than a third of all Covid cases diagnosed since the beginning of the pandemic. The first six months of 2022 saw more cases than the whole of 2020 and soon we should surpass the cases of 2021. This in records, the real proportion of cases is certainly higher. Worldwide, 2022 should already exceed the number of cases recorded in the previous two years combined.

Vaccines still work well enough to reduce mortality, but it still lags far above seasonal flu even among young people. Among those under 18 in the US, Covid is around six times more lethal than the flu. And in the difference between the normal we want and what is the viable normal are deaths.

As Covid kills more than the flu and seems to cause at least two waves a year, even if it becomes endemic, it will still be brutal without vaccination campaigns or the use of masks. In Brazil, we are reaching 60,000 deaths in 2022 and we can go from 80,000 by the end of the year. And this scenario should be repeated for the next few years, with numbers that surpass even the murders. With new less severe variants such as BA.2 and other more severe ones, such as BA.5 seems to be, according to studies in Portugal and Denmark.

The situation just doesn’t seem to be enough to mobilize the federal government to promote childhood vaccination. Covid has already killed more children under the age of 5 in Brazil than meningitis, polio, measles, rubella and ten other infectious diseases have killed in the last ten years combined.

Diseases against which Brazil was an example of vaccination. Now, even after the approval of Coronavac for children aged 3 to 5 years, the Minister of Health repeats the delay and the creation of obstacles that have already delayed vaccination from 5 to 11 years.

As far as the dire figures for childhood vaccinations in recent years are concerned, that gap is more likely to narrow as other infectious diseases return to kill more. Concern for children’s health is not good, let alone sufficient.