Because of Omicron, for a century in the world there have never been so many sick people as today: to find similar percentages you have to go back to 1918, the year in which the Spanish flu began. In the United States, the new variant of Covid is now responsible for 98.3% of infections and is spreading with similar percentages in all countries. “Omicron – confirmed Sara Murray of the University of California – has become the second most contagious disease in the world, second only to measles”.
The new Covid mutation is not as serious as Delta was, but it is putting a strain on health services due to the high number of infected people. Even if symptoms are mild or nonexistent, those infected must remain in quarantine and this is reducing the number of nurses and doctors on duty. In the United States, nearly 20,000 people enter hospital with Covid every day and many others are diagnosed with the tests they undergo while being hospitalized for something else. Even if symptoms are mild or nonexistent, the hospital must apply additional safety protocols and isolate the patient, increasing the cost of his hospitalization. The number of hospitalized children is also growing, with significant peaks among those under the age of 5. They have mild cases of bronchitis or throat swelling, and the number of hospitalizations in this age group is the highest since the pandemic began.
People suffering from Covid in the world are currently 395 million and according to the calculations of the experts quoted by the “Wall Street Journal” it was not since 1918 that there was such a high number of sick people among human beings. The last major pandemic, the one caused by the H1N1 influenza virus, which occurred between 1918 and 1920, killed 50 million people out of a world population of 2 billion. Covid has so far caused the death of 5.7 million people out of a population of 7 billion. Before 1980, when measles vaccination spread globally, the disease killed an average of 2.5 million children each year and affected nine out of ten people who came into contact with a sick person.
A study by the Global Burden of Disease had already shown years ago that the number of people with something sick in the world is increasing every year. In 2013, only 4% of Earth’s human inhabitants had no health problems, while a third of the population had more than five. The number of years that each individual is marred by some disease has increased from 21% in 1990 to 31% in 2013, and has grown further in the following years. It is also to blame for the lengthening of life expectancy and prolonged old age, marked by a myriad of ailments that the elderly endure, because the alternative is still worse.
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