2022 Grey Swan #2: With a Magic Wand: COVID All But Disappears
- By Sam van de Schootbrugge
- 3 min read
Covid-19 has subsumed many of our traditional social pleasures, customs, habits and lifestyles. Arguably, it has also created a more unequal and divided society. Over the last two years, government-mandated restrictions have touched billions of lives, and still the pandemic has claimed more deaths than all but five other pandemics in history. Yet the nature of viruses, natural immunity, treatments and vaccines could mean 2022 is the year the pandemic ends.
Start with variants. Covid-19 has been uncharacteristically slow to mutate, but the latest concerning variant, Omicron, has 32 mutations in the spike protein – many more than past strains. Omicron could be the start of a new batch of variants vastly different from the one first identified in Wuhan. As the virus finds more ways to live inside us, it may also want to keep us alive. Take the 1918 Spanish flu for example. A mutation was probably why the pandemic ended after two years.
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