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COVID ain't over
We're not done with the pandemic — yet.
In the US, infections are up five-fold from a year ago, although both hospitalizations are down.
Although COVID will likely become endemic sometime this year in some parts of the world, the virus will still rage on everywhere else.
China's zero-COVID strategy is having a tremendous cost, while barely 17.4% of Africans are vaccinated. That bodes well for new variants.
Meanwhile, rich countries keep hoarding jabs, now also against monkeypox. Did we not learn anything after more than two years?
Watch the GZERO World episode: How depoliticizing the US health response will save lives (COVID isn't over)
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Should China learn to live with COVID?
If omicron makes cases explode in China, the country's leaders will have to choose between weathering short-term or long-term pain.
Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicts that sticking to the zero-COVID approach at all costs will hurt the Chinese and global economy. In his view, learning to live with the virus is the way to go.
China can continue zero COVID until the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, but after the Games the best move for Xi Jinping is to change direction. But even then, Huang says, it won't be a major shift.
“They're just going to quietly abandon it, or replace it with a new policy.”
Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World: Omicron & the undoing of China's COVID strategy.
Did “complacency” cause India’s COVID explosion?
In January 2021, after India got its vaccination program underway, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory over "controlling corona" at the World Economic Forum. But within weeks, those words would come back to haunt him. Ian Bremmer asks Delhi-based journalist Barkha Dutt what she thinks went wrong. "I think the complacency set in because, as a percentage of infections, the fatalities seemed to be not as high as the rest of the world… but it doesn't explain to me why we should've got lulled into not needing contingencies." Their discussion about India's COVID crisis is featured on an episode of GZERO World, airing on US public television.
Watch the episode: India's COVID calamity
Does the arrival of Moderna’s vaccine mean we’re back to normal?
"I think we're going to live with the pandemic for much of 2021, but I don't think it's a binary thing where we have a pandemic and everything's awful, or the pandemic's gone and everything is great again." Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna, levels with Ian Bremmer that even with a vaccine the pandemic will not be gone in a matter of day, weeks, or even months. But that doesn't mean that everything will be as bleak as it may feel now. Their conversation was part of the latest episode of GZERO World.
Watch the GZERO World episode: A Shot in the Arm: Moderna's Co-Founder on the COVID-19 Vaccine
How pandemic fatigue is affecting global COVID response
It's spreading. Maybe even faster and wider than the virus itself: pandemic fatigue. As infection rates in the United States and Europe skyrocket, Ian Bremmer looks at how tired we've all become of the virus. And yet, the virus does not seem to get tired of us.
Watch the episode: Dr. Ashish Jha on COVID-19 and the dark winter to come