I was interested in pandemics from a personal safety viewpoint before Covid became a problem and had actually taken a copy of Adam Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion with me as reading material on my Jan-Mar 2020 trip to Morocco. Since then I've taken the view that knowledge and understanding of Covid is the best counter to apprehension and anxiety.

It seems that most pandemics last between 2.5 and 3.5 years, and that over time the virus mutates to become less life threatening and it then becomes an endemic disease that continues to circulate at manageable levels. That's what happened with the 1918-1920 'Spanish' flu pandemic that killed more people than died in the Great War—protection against modern versions of this virus is included in the annual flu jab.

Part of the reason that death rates around Europe were so high in the early Covid waves is that the virus picked the 'low hanging fruit' of the elderly with co-morbidities, running riot in care homes, with many also becoming infected in hospitals. But even when you take these excess deaths into account there's no doubting the dramatic reduction in virulence of Omicron amongst a mostly vaccinated population, as the figures for France so eloquently demonstrate.

In the 22 months to 31 December 2021 there were 126,000 deaths resulting from just under 10 million recorded covid cases in France.

In the 23 days since 31 December there have been another 6.7 million !! cases with projected fatalities likely to be around 7,000.

World health Organisation Europe Director Hans Kluge stated yesterday that “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame.” Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity... so we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back”.

Other experts have also said there is likely to be other waves later in 2022 and possibly beyond, so yes, I believe the only viruses that mankind has managed to permanently eradicate from circulation are smallpox (last outbreak 1977) and rinderpest (2001), but we do manage to live with other coronaviruses and we will have to live with this one as well.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)