On 5 May 2023, the planet wellness Organization officially announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wuhan virus was expected to origin irreversible changes in human mentality. "Nothing will be the same" – promised media, politicians and medical authorities. Meanwhile, no “new normality” has happened, and the planet is going back to the way it was. What happened at the turn of 2019 and 2020? Was the fresh coronavirus truly a large threat and a lockdown necessity, or was the danger mainly in our heads? These questions present are even more urgent than during the pandemic.
After over a year since its formal completion, it is vain to look for meaningful analyses and settlements of covid policies. We rapidly moved on to the agenda, that we have late subjected almost all our social life to 1 issue – a dangerously rapidly spreading respiratory virus. Was there anything to be afraid of? This text is an effort to look from a distance at the most crucial and controversial issues related to the pandemic.
Does coronavirus even exist?
A popular bon-mot says the communicative consists of conspiracy theories that have proven to be true. This apt saying can be a perfect excuse for preaching the foolish without proving them. Of course, sometimes unusual and seemingly detached from reality concepts, post-factum, turned out to have support in reality. However, the specified reflection of the occasional occurrence of this phenomenon does not release an observer from seeking evidence of his claims. People who denied the existence of COVID-19 pandemics or even the virus itself frequently relied on conspiracy arguments. quite a few nonsense has been said about the fresh coronavirus and the social situation that resulted from its fast spread. Meanwhile, the fact is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus existed and inactive exists. Doctors and scientists first observed quite a few fresh respiratory illness and then isolated the virus responsible. The virus was carefully examined under the microscope and for a time became the most closely observed microorganism in the world.
Between fairy tales, all concepts of a planned pandemic, called a "plandemic", should be inserted. Coronavirus restrictions were not part of the coming of the fresh planet Order, as the authors of any films, articles, and sceptical books predicted for mainstream narrative.
But I'm done being mean. Absurd conspiracy theories, of course, are easy (and rather pleasant) to laugh, but besides much specified sloping leads to nothing good or constructive. COVID-19 is simply a illness that has killed over 7 million people worldwide. A illness that needs to be taken seriously and which requires serious discussion, not another tribal beating on the head. Excess emotion and the construction of a fresh social division axis on the illness did not aid to fight the pandemic effectively. 1 of the main sins of the political and media mainstream was to throw all the doubters into a single bag during the pandemic, which concreteized a rational discussion about covid policies. The fact that the virus exists, and the pandemic actually took place and collected its deadly harvest, are indisputable. However, this is not adequate justification for closing half of the state and subjecting social life to 1 of the many wellness risks. So let us ask ourselves: was the virus truly so dangerous as to take action on specified a large scale?
Specificity of the COVID-19 pandemic
No illness can be described with 1 numerical value. There is besides 1 number that gives us clear information about how dangerous the illness is. The universal determination of mortality due to COVID-19 is actually impossible. In the public sphere, statistic and concepts were recklessly cast, whose knowing transcends the ability of an uneducated person. Mortality, collapse, infectivity, mortality and many another equally abstract terms were compared to those who did not know for epidemiology. The problem of the difficulty in determining how serious a hazard a illness is is is not exclusive to COVID-19.
The establishment of a reliable, comparable mortality rate for different diseases is mostly a alternatively hard task, given the large number of variables affecting the disease. This is due, among another things, to the problem of inability to include statistic on all people who have fallen into the illness unit.
Thus, while people usually go to the infirmary in the case of sudden, severe illness, many people treat themselves at home in the case of diseases of a more diverse nature. Of course, access to a doctor and the quality of wellness care besides have a crucial impact on mortality. For example, the overall COVID-19 mortality rate (for identified cases) in Peru reached as much as 4.9%, while in Italy it was only 0.7%. And we're talking about precisely the same disease.
In Poland, a sober view of the situation was besides not facilitated by the fact that for years in our wellness strategy we have a major problem with a reliable study of deaths by doctors. This is simply a very advanced percent of the alleged "plenty codes", i.e. entering as causes of the death of passwords that talk small about the real reasons why the patient left this world, e.g. "circulatory arrest". In our country, almost 30% of the recorded causes of death are of this type, useless for statistical analysis, information.
Since I briefly explained to the reader that I would avoid oversizing with specialized concepts and hard data, let us return to the meritum of consideration. Detailed comparison of the fresh coronavirus with influenza or another commonly known perpetrators of seasonal diseases should be left to epidemiologists. Whatever the mortality of COVID-19, it is clear from the statistic that the virus was the most threatening to the aged and the sick. Globally, as many as 71% of those who died of this illness by May 2023 were over 65. These data were confirmed by the reflection of reality – covid branches were full of people with many another diseases and the elderly. If COVID primarily killed older people, did it mean that it was not a illness as dangerous as it was portrayed?
This problem is best illustrated by the example of northern Italy. Studies conducted in 1 of the Milan hospitals showed that hospitalization during the second and 3rd waves active little hazard of death than during the first wave ( 25% and 42%) respectively. The group of patients, among whom the top improvement in treatment was observed, were patients aged 46-60 years. The authors associate this change with the overall improvement of care quality and better preparation for subsequent coronavirus waves. Patients in a serious phase of illness needed oxygen- or respirator therapy, i.e. infirmary treatment, with qualified medical personnel and infrastructure facilities. The problem with coronavirus was not that it was a illness of danger beyond our erstwhile notions of dangerous diseases. Sudden, wave “addition” of patients to (and so overburdened on a regular basis) hospitals caused not all of them to receive adequate timely assistance. COVID-19 was not highly dangerous to the average person. But he was a very dangerous illness to public wellness due to the fact that his waves came violently and reaped large harvests. Having been sick during 1 of the coronavirus waves, the patient had little chance of receiving effective help. Not only hospitals were overloaded, but besides wellness units. The addition of covid beds and the allocation of additional resources to fight the pandemic did not origin more personnel to appear in the strategy to care for patients. beginning wards treating the fresh illness led to the failure of doctors and nurses elsewhere. In addition, many clinics and clinics did not work decently for fear of infection. The peculiar mode of operation of the wellness care strategy resulted in an increase in wellness debt, i.e. expanding the number of patients without timely diagnosis and hold during scheduled treatment. Subsequent waves of the coronavirus and associated restrictions deepened this problem.
Lockdowns and pandemic policies
The specified fact that the situation was hard and unprecedented does not justify the ineffectiveness of the State's actions. The pandemic, as real and as serious as possible, exposed many of the wellness problems and at the same time demonstrated at various levels the state's helplessness towards a fresh public wellness challenge. The awareness of the reality of the threat and the designation that the virus had to be combated at social level does not mean that irrational actions taken by governments around the planet should be defended (since Poland is no exception in the case of Covid absurds). Between the negation of the problem and the desire to focus all public attention solely on coronavirus, there is simply a broad spectrum of views in which rational analysis should move. Looking at post-factum, it should be noted that the final balance of the pandemic in Poland has not proven to be beneficial.
The most imaginative concept is "excess deaths", that is, the excess death in the population over projected on the basis of public wellness statistics. About 200,000 excess deaths show a very negative image of how we handled COVID-19. The image of quite a few things going wrong. The sharpening was oversaturated by many absurdities. The doctrine of closing down different branches of wellness care has led to situations where medical personnel have frequently failed to treat either ‘covid’ or ‘non-covid’ patients. Doctors and nurses who did not execute planned treatments were frequently not directed at treating patients infected with coronavirus, just having little work. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of patients were locked in their homes and were waiting to execute the diagnostics or surgery needed for their health. frightened doctors were locked in their offices, and suffering sick people were lying in their beds in their homes.
The first wave of coronavirus was expected to be a time to wait, to learn about a fresh illness and find the right way to deal with it. Meanwhile, the ruling organization lacked a different thought than that for the next autumn-spring waves of illness people would again lock up in their homes.
After spring 2020, there were no convincing ways to increase wellness care capacity sufficiently. However, it must be acknowledged that the abrupt increase in the productivity of hospitals was a very hard challenge. If the intent of the rulers was to increase it to a level adequate to take care of all the patients during the coronavirus waves, we could say that it was an impossible mission. Therefore, the pandemic could not be left “alone” and action had to be taken to mitigate the consequences of fast increases in disease.
Unfortunately, another failure was the deficiency of a appropriate culture and work in society, so the sharpening was frequently found to be dead regulations. Another wave of pandemic was accompanied by a large cognitive dissonance. What else can we call a situation where, at the minute of the emergence of the wave of fresh infections in October 2020, immense pro-abortion street protests cross Poland? As a consequence of state failure, fear was the main origin limiting the spillage of illness waves. This emotion must have been adequately fueled, hence frequently curiosity, causing serious ethical doubts, manipulating people through the media. This led to a situation in which the virus became the subject of serious social division. The aim of the full confusion was to keep the efficiency of the wellness care strategy and to aid as many people as possible. Media communications have spoken little and little about the request for solidarity to work on so that we can be able to aid all those in request professionally, and increasingly irrationally intimidated.
The consequence of all the confusion was the low effectiveness of lockdown policy, which is clearly seen in retrospective analyses. Studies show that the introduction of legal injunctions and prohibitions did not have much better effect than a advice and appeal-based approach. The loud work of 2022 by Jonas Herby and co-workers showed that the overall effect of lockdowns on mortality in the US and Europe was only 3.2%, which helped to avoid about 10,000 deaths due to this disease. This does not mean that maintaining social distance, limiting contact or wearing masks did not inhibit the increase in infections. It is simply that government does not in itself prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The bans were so ineffective that they frequently had the same effect as the unenforced public appeals of experts and politicians. At the end of the day, everyone realized that many warnings were fiction, and that following the recommendations is mostly a substance of individual attitude alternatively than of complying with the letter of law. Deputy Minister of wellness Waldemar Kraska publically shared this conviction by justifying himself to a mild government policy: “Poles approach specified warnings with a large deal of caution. We have a gene of opposition.” The question is: was it not so essential to trust on the intuition of the crowd and individual responsibility? With a advanced degree of probability, the wellness effect would be similar, and we would avoid many negative consequences of the pandemic.
It seems that the modern model of liberal democracy is simply not a strategy that allows specified far-reaching interference in the behaviour of citizens and in the future another methods of managing wellness crises must be sought.
Vaccines – success of the pharmaceutical lobby?
The biggest controversy of respective years of pandemics was the fast onset of vaccines and the question of coercion or voluntary admission. We have besides discussed whether vaccination is our work to the collective or the individual choice of each citizen. Let us yet unenchant this manipulatory and semitrusive debate and answer the question: were COVID-19 vaccines effective and safe?
Research shows that yes. Many people showed far-reaching scepticism towards prospective clinical trials whose affirmative results decided to release vaccines into circulation. present we can look at vaccinations from a distance. As a consequence of this, we know that while protection was decreasing with time from vaccination and the effectiveness of different types of vaccines was different, the studies carried out after the release of the preparations to the marketplace confirmed their effectiveness.
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination was the most rational behavior. This reduced the hazard of illness, hospitalisation, severe course or complications from the disease.
In all respect, it was more profitable to get vaccinated than to get COVID, which, even if many of us did not turn out to be dangerous, was a illness frequently unpleasant and requiring recovery. The benefits outweighed the risks, and yet we all either got sick or vaccinated (and frequently both).
However, quite a few untruths have been said about vaccinations during their promotion. Medical authorities in front of the cameras talked, among others, about the expected protection of "100% of people from severe illness" and the absence of any complications but very uncommon allergic reactions. The vaccinated were not to get sick or infect at all. The man who soaked with specified sayings could have believed that vaccination truly could completely defend him from all the evil of this world. However, specified categorical statements could besides produce skepticism. This skepticism was justified to any extent. Vaccines have proven to have more side effects than was given at first. Cases of thrombosis, uncommon neurological diseases or myocarditis have been confirmed. However, the side effects are comparatively low and the overall safety profile of the drug is inactive very affirmative – better than many commonly utilized drugs. Obviously, no of the vaccines proved to be 100% protection against infection. In fact, the effectiveness of the various preparations varied alternatively around 80% for illness prevention and about 90% for severe disease. It is hard for COVID vaccine to be the first drug in past without any side effects. It's hard to make certain it's the first to work for everyone. In order to mobilise people to inoculate themselves (which was a rational and just action), it was decided to "purify" reality. Protection at the level of 99% than 80% is much more crucial to the imagination of man, although both values are very high. Government agencies in their propaganda surpassed themselves in absurdities, showing values larger even than authoritative maker data. These, by the way, besides frequently seemed somewhat enhanced for marketing purposes. However, pharmaceutical companies cannot be denied that they have created an effective vaccine that most likely saved many lives.
What happened to the pandemic?
COVID-19 ceased to be a global wellness problem due to the fact that most of the population gained immunity against SARS-CoV-2. We are inactive ill, but this has become another seasonal infection, which does not origin much confusion in the social sphere. The virus exists among us, but it has ceased to be specified a large threat to ourselves and the wellness care system. The predictions have been confirmed that everyone will gotta either get sick or vaccinated against a fresh illness (and frequently both). Thus, a period of over 3 years of crisis over which developed societies around the planet have faced. In many things today, we can be smarter due to the fact that we look at them coolly. In addition to the end of coronavirus as a wellness hazard, coronavirus besides ended as a hot subject of public debate. It is present that we should put unnecessary emotions aside and engage in honest dialog on what should have been done better during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the media is dominated by low-cost emotions, and analytical centres and think-tanks are not willing to hold honest debates on the subject of which burden capacity has become very low. By entering this gap, in my next texts, I will effort to analyse the pandemic period in terms of communication between the expert and the politicians with the public and present my view of what the pandemic has told us about our country's resilience to the crisis.
