We can’t continue living under restrictions, we have to learn to live with Covid-19

Is there, finally, light at the end of the Covid tunnel, after two years in which the world was turned upside down by the coronavirus? That is a question increasingly being asked as the omicron variant rampages across the world.

This week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called on the European Union to debate the possibility of treating Covid as an endemic illness akin to flu. And top US scientist Anthony Fauci said that despite soaring cases and record-high Covid hospitalisations, the country is approaching the “threshold” of transitioning to living with the coronavirus as a manageable disease.

This debate is happening for a number of reasons. Firstly, the entire planet has had a gutful of restrictions on travel and commerce that were enacted to combat or slow the spread of the virus. Second, the omicron variant has been proved to be vastly more infectious than the ones which went before it.

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The World Health Organisation estimates that one in two Europeans will have contracted it within the next two months. At the same time, omicron is markedly less serious, in clinical terms, than previous variants like delta, which saw huge death tolls around the world.

In other words, we’re all going to get Covid, at some stage.

However, whether it will be as benign as the “ordinary” influenza or the common cold – in terms of severity of symptoms and risk of hospitalisation and death – is something which is not yet known. Another grey area is that of “long Covid”, where people continue to suffer for months and even years from debilitating conditions
caused by the disease.

What is certain is that the world cannot continue under the restrictions. While people should still exercise care and stick to social distancing, mask-wearing indoors and sanitising, we have to learn to live with this virus.