Elusive UN pandemic treaty points to dangerous Covid amnesia

Eagerness to move on from the death and destruction of the pandemic is understandable but also risks keeping us from learning necessary lessons

Failure to make urgently needed reforms would be a tragedy for which the world would pay a terrible price for a second time

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A woman walks through a door with a sign asking shoppers to wear masks in New York on February 9, 2022. The lengthy deliberations over a globally binding pandemic treaty and the watering down of the draft’s language suggests the lessons of Covid-19 are being ignored or forgotten. Photo: AP

David Dodwell

David Dodwell is a journalist focused on Hong Kong and China since the 1970s.

Published: 10:00pm, 15 Sep 2023Updated: 5:54am, 16 Sep 2023

When Johns Hopkins University stopped its Covid tracker in March, the toll of Covid-19 cases stood at 676,609,955. Reported global deaths were frozen at 6,881,955. The World Health Organization (WHO) tracker is still active and reporting on average 24,000 formally recorded cases a day, with total cases now at 770 million and deaths at just under 7 million.

In short, Covid-19 remains alive and well, killing thousands of people daily despite a sort of “Covid amnesia” setting in among many communities worldwide as we try to rebuild our lives. Many cases and deaths go unrecorded now that testing has stopped, but the silent threat has been great enough for health authorities in countries such as the UK to ask people in vulnerable groups to get a booster vaccine.

This amnesia is perhaps natural as we come to terms with the grief and the loss both in lives and livelihoods. But this amnesia is also dangerous because it makes it harder to focus on the lessons we need to learn and increases the likelihood we will suffer similar tragic losses when the inevitable next pandemic sneaks up on us.