There are times when I feel rewarded for years of engagement to get reliable information and facts to the people. It is a long painful road to with naked feet, meaning I can neither rely on my longstanding expertise in my job nor on being a medical professional working with patients in a clinical environment. Nevertheless, I succeeded to gain tons of data, facts and studies in the past four years, and sometimes it actually happens that I’m able to convince the people to step forward into the right direction – taking precautionary measures to protect the people from dangerous viral diseases. Even more, protecting them from themselves, their own ignorance and stupidity to follow the herd into their own undoing.

Yesterday when the Austrian Government presented their final study of “working through the pandemic” (authors rather called it “muddling through”) entitled “After Corona – Reflections for future crises”, it rather felt like failure. It has been very clear what will happen afterwards in the entire media reports – whitewashing what happened not only during the active period of the countermeasures but also what does not happen now when record sick leaves are registered, a lack of antiviral drugs like Paxlovid are present and the vaccine uptake of the adapted booster against xbb.1.5 is well below 10% of the entire population. The denial is strong but it is bought by the vast majority population. I will dive into the reasons for denial later, probably in a german-speaking posting (here’s a good summary in english which I intend to translate).

So let’s make some facts clear for the public:

2020

A new virus enters the world. It has great similarities to SARS-CoV-1 causing almost a pandemic in 2003/2004 but has been eradicated fortunately. Most of the population has no immunity against the new virus which will be called SARS-CoV2 later (though the WHO refused initialy, claiming they didn’t want to cause a panic in China where the SARS-CoV1 vibes were still present). SARS-CoV2 turns out to be highly infectious and infecting even before first symptoms surface, which made it difficult to contain without strong social restrictions. Scientists quickly found out that the virus is airborne but their knowledge has been ignored for a long time by the WHO and public health authorities, in some countries until today. Testing offers are still short-handed and we mainly had to rely on hospitalisation numbers and deaths to know how good or bad the current situation was. Later on, during the second wave, enhanced capacities of testing and contact tracing could tell us if the infection numbers were skyrocketing and we could have taken precautionary measures but mostly didn’t do that or much too late.

2021

With the arrival of the vaccines, the pandemic could have well been finished within a year. To achieve this goal, we should have reached a high number of vaccinated people in all age groups. We failed to do that. Even worse, we gave up protection of the children and declared the pandemic as finished (Ex-chancellor Kurz, ÖVP in June 2021) as soon as once has gotten the basic immunization (2 vaccinations). The approval of vaccinating children below 12 years hasn’t been in place before end of November 2021. Now something happenend which isn’t fully understood neither by the government nor by the citizens until now. The virus didn’t remain static but continued to evolve. It became mainly more infectious in the second year of the pandemic, infecting more people in a short time. Reinfections of the same variant were still rare in 2021. The new virus variants destroyed the hope of a quick end of the pandemic. It also destroyed the role of the vaccines of a real game changer for all groups within the population, since immunocompromised and older people do not benefit as much as healthier people from vaccines. Vaccines didn’t become useless, they fulfil their purpose to prevent severe acute disease and deaths in most cases but to do so, it is necessary to get a booster on a regular basis.

2022 and 2023

Until Omicron arrived, our frame was it is a respiratory virus that infected and killed rapidly. Incidence rate, ICU capacity and deaths told us when things were better or worse. Not anymore. The entire body of scientific studies about long-term sequeles of SARS-CoV2 disease grew rapidly since late 2020. We even anticipated it on the basis of SARS-1 and common coronaviruses but victims of other viral infections now severely impared with ME/CFS have warned explicitely not to underestimated the consequences of the infections well after initial recovery.

Covid is a whole-body disease, affecting the vascular system, neurological functions and the immune system and causes endocrine harms. It causes much less “acute resporatory” stress now:

a) the most vulnerable people already died

b) we have some population immunity

c) Omicron variants are less severe than Delta

It isn’t helpful though to compare the current variants always with the most severe variant up to date. Remember that the wild type in the beginning of the pandemic has been deadly enough to kill millions of people worldwide. The current harms are much more diffused instead following even from mild disease.

By still focusing on hospitalisation and ICU capacities, COVID continues o get framed as a problem only for real vulnerable people. “Like the flu”: No masks, no precautions, low XBB vaccination and no mention in the great 177 pages study presented by the government.

Journalists fail to report on the rise of vascular diseases and excess mortality in younger ages, which happens months after the acute infection. Nobody reports about children or their parents being disabled by COVID. The media has to shift its focus on the long-term consequences especially to the productive age group (35-50) and urge not to ignore the ongoing situation of a mass disabling event.

It is still not too late, well it is too late for all the dead people and severely ill people whose disease cannot be fully reversed anymore, but it is not too late for all the people who managed to stay healthy until now, or try to stay as healthy as possible. But why bother about good indoor air quality when the media continues to talk jackshit about the real dangers of a SARS-CoV2 infections, solely forwarding the downplaying actions of the government which is successfully hiding its management failures in the pandemic. There is a lot of longcovid research coming out for several months now.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, British medical researcher and Chief Scientist at the WHO (22.12.23, Twitter)

“Increases in rates of infection in North and Southern hemispheres at the same time of year. COVID-19 has not yet, if it ever will, become a seasonal viral infection.”

So don’t get blinded. Corona has come to stay thanks to the world’s foolishness. There will not be a time we could call “after Corona” EVER. There won’t be a time of neglectance either. We have to stay up to date with the virus, with its variants and take the regular boosters as often as necessary. It’s significant waning of the population immunity which fueled this big wave, besides new immune escape variants. And of course no precautionary measures to lower the peak of the infection wave. We can’t live like that forever since the damage to the immune system is cumulative. We will get sicker and sicker over the time and not just from COVID but also other viruses wich are not contained or vaccinated against anymore, and opportunistic infections pose another danger, too.

Stay viligant and never give up to protect yourself and others.