The Pandemic isn't over, it is at the end of its beginning.
Incessant messaging that Omicron is "milder", that COVID is endemic, that there is some "normal" to return to are all wishful thinking at best, cynical propaganda at worst. In the face of an indifferent Nature that would just as soon see human extinction on the spikes of the COVID virus as it did that of the Buffalo in the trajectory of our rifles, we contend with the existential threat COVID represents with our all too human foibles. COVID has revealed a stark division in the worlds civilizations obscured by an apparent capitalist homogeneity as evidenced in the chart above.
The state of play is thus: the virus continues to mutate in the Neoliberal West, nations in the Far East experienced with SARS have contained and eliminated it, some repeatedly. There is no reason to believe it will mutate into something benign, the belief viruses evolve towards endemicity and that that's okay is self delusion. The "Shock Doctrine" approach of maximizing profit from disease deployed across the West with varying degrees of ideological intensity has ensured mutations will continue by maintaining immunocompromised populations at scale, such as that of South Africans with AIDS, where Omicron was bred. Those Far Eastern nations are at the point of recognizing themselves as peers of a particular sort: societies with functional States, the anathema of Neoliberalism. It is only a matter of time before they begin acting on it.
