Grim resurgence of pandemic

The grim milestone the world has reached with more than 10 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 500,000 deaths is a sobering reminder that, with infections still surging, the battle against the pandemic is far from over. As the University of Minnesota’s Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy director Michael Osterholm said: “This is one big forest fire that keeps burning and looking for wood to burn, and that happens to be humans. We have months and months to go with this virus yet.”

As countries everywhere seek to find the right balance of preventive measures that will keep infections from reaching runaway levels while trying to emerge from painful lockdowns and restart their economies, the extent of the challenge could not be clearer.

This is being seen particularly in the US, which already accounts for 2.6 million cases, 25 per cent of the global total. On just Friday and Saturday last week the country recorded 45,255 and 42,000 new cases, part of big surges across Florida, Texas, California and Arizona — states that have been in the forefront of reopening their economies and trying to get life back to normal. After initially dismissing coronavirus as “flu”, the Trump administration can’t even take much comfort from the fact the 128,437 deaths so far recorded at a rate of 388 per million in the world’s richest and most well-resourced nation is behind Belgium’s record of 840 deaths per million, Britain’s 642 and Spain’s 606. Faced with the new surge, states across the US are reversing their reopenings.

Confirmed infection rates are accelerating across Latin America, too, especially in Brazil, with 1.3 million cases and 57,000 deaths so far. India similarly looms as an enormous challenge, with its vast population of 1.3 billion barely tested yet health authorities already reporting 549,000 cases and 17,000 deaths. Cases in South Africa and across the African continent also are surging, with limited medical resources and little certainty about the pandemic’s impact.

Former British prime minister David Cameron has suggested the need for a new global virus surveillance organisation to anticipate and help countries deal with future pandemics. It’s certainly true that COVID-19 and the World Health Organisation’s gross mishandling of the initial outbreak show how ill-prepared the world is for the next pandemic. Mr Cameron’s idea lacks convincing detail and it’s not clear how it could deal with awkward geopolitical realities, but at least it’s a useful reminder that surviving COVID-19 will by no means end the challenge of infectious diseases in a globalised age.