The changing virus threatens disease cycles, blockages

The new variants pose two threats. First, to counteract the higher risk of infection, restrictions on activity may be tightened, leading some economies to return to recession. Britain, where there is now a fast-spread variant, re-entered full closure on 5 January. Its economy, which shrank by 10% last year, is likely to shrink now. The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that it will grow 4.5% this year, below the October forecast of 5.9%.

The second threat is a possible new variant that is resistant to the immunity conferred by existing vaccines and past infections, which could trigger a new cycle of restrictions and require a new round of vaccinations.

If this variant appears, manufacturers think that vaccines can be updated relatively quickly. However, James Stock, an economist at Harvard University who has studied the virus and economics, warned of a “scenario of this thing lasting for a much longer period of time.”

“All the economic adaptations have been seen as temporary: restaurants with a capacity of 25%, etc.,” he said. “If this were to become chronic, there would have to be really massive reorganizations” of the American economy.

Singapore Education Minister Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs his government’s Covid ministerial working group, said on Monday: “It can take four to five years until we finally see the end of the pandemic and the beginning. of a post-Covid normalcy “.

Mutations are intrinsic to viruses and therefore to economies. Financial crises are repeated because financial innovation finally evades the regulations established after the last crisis. Similarly, viruses mutate all the time and natural selection dictates that the variants most capable of reproducing will eventually predominate.

Viruses, however, mutate much faster than funding. Nearly 300,000 variants of Covid-19 have been detected in the last year, according to a document by Eduardo Costas, professor of genetics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and two colleagues.

To achieve a foothold, variants such as the United Kingdom must acquire very advantageous mutations, relatively rare in combination. But as more people become infected in the world, the likelihood of new highly infectious mutant strains grows, Costas said in an email.

“It’s like playing the lottery with a lot more numbers,” he added.

The UK variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, stretches 30% to 70% faster and can be 30% to 40% more deadly than previous variants, according to scientists. This involves non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as masks and social distancing, which must be marked significantly to keep deaths unchanged. It also means that more people must be infected or vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity” when the epidemic ends.

In Britain, David Mackie, of JP Morgan, estimates that the new variant has raised the number of reproductions of the virus, the number of people that each infected person becomes infected, in the absence of immunity or interventions, to 4.9 of 3.3. Masks, hygiene and social distancing have meant that the number of reproductions is less than one, the threshold at which cases decrease. This has come at a high cost: the British economy is shrinking almost certainly.

In fact, as the importance of restrictions on life-saving activity could increase, public tolerance of them is declining, as recent riots in the Netherlands show. In the United States, some states have refused to impose restrictions and most others only focus on high-risk activities, such as eating out.

However, if the cases increased again, the restrictions would probably intensify and even if they did not, more people would voluntarily distance themselves socially. Any of them would slow recovery. Goldman Sachs estimates that a delay in achieving herd immunity would slow the U.S. recovery by two months and reduce growth this year by 2 percentage points.

Widespread administration of existing vaccines should quell epidemics related to current variants. But the likelihood of a vaccine-resistant variant increases with time and cases worldwide.

“This is one of the reasons why it’s important to think not only locally but globally,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a Northeastern University scientist who models pandemics. “We could have a vaccine campaign perfectly deployed in the United States and Europe. But if we let the virus go wild and have a lot of cases elsewhere, this could be a boomerang, maybe there would be a variant capable of escaping our immune system protection. “

This puts additional pressure on the Biden administration and the governments of other rich countries to speed up vaccination not only at home but also in poor countries, to minimize the number of variants. The IMF assumes the vaccine will be widely available this summer in the most advanced economies and in some of the developing countries, but not until the second half of 2022 in the rest of the world.

Vespignani added: “We need an infrastructure in place so that everything that goes wrong is much better prepared than in March, April and even now.” This means more widespread genomic surveillance for dangerous variants; the ability to rapidly update and administer vaccines to the entire population; and quick, cheap tests available to contain outbreaks.

Write to Greg Ip at [email protected]