It has been a difficult few years, but experts are finally looking past the vagaries of numbers which continue to rise and fall in pockets, and to start planning a return to normalcy in a post-pandemic world.
For well over two years, the coronavirus pandemic has colored our lives. Our work environments, vacations, schools and every social occasion have all had to take the most damaging global health crisis in more than a century into consideration.
Today, however, aggressive vaccine programs coupled with a majority of the public heeding common-sense precautions mean that the crisis appears to have peaked in most advanced economies. Here in Yokohama, that is visible in far larger crowds at Yokohama Stadium for DeNA Bay Stars baseball games, the bars in the backstreets of Noge being once again packed, and far more people looking forward to an overseas vacation this summer.
One of Japan’s leading epidemiologists says the next stage in the virus’ cycle is for it to “settle” into the human population and for the public to accept that while the coronavirus may never be eliminated entirely and that occasional flare-ups are likely, we need to be of the mindset that it is just another virus that is out there.
Taro Yamamoto, a professor of international health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine at Nagasaki University, said in a recent interview with the Mainichi newspaper that much of the world has already acquired herd immunity, coronavirus is fading into “just one of many infectious diseases”, and he points out that viruses can even disappear from human society in time.
Japan was reporting around 15,000 cases a day in late June, down significantly from a peak of slightly above 100,000 new infections a day in early February. And the “conclusion” to the crisis phase of the outbreak is on the horizon, he said.
“We are entering a process of recognizing that the disease and the virus that causes it is not something that can be eliminated but is ‘something that exists in society’,” he said. “I think that recognition is the ‘conclusion,’ because the coronavirus changes from being a special disease into a regular one.”
Yamamoto insists the stringent restrictions imposed in the very early stages of the health crisis were appropriate as not enough was known about the new virus and that failing to introduce measures could have led to medical facilities being overwhelmed. Japan recorded relatively fewer deaths than many other countries, although he admits there was a price to be paid in terms of economic and social activity.
And he predicts that in one generation’s time, people will be infected with the virus as infants and obtain immunity.
“And as those infants grow up and become adults, they will be infected several times,” he said. “And when they are adults, I think it will become an illness that doesn’t result in particularly severe symptoms.”