The price of “living with COVID” in a free and open society is turning out to be much heftier than public health experts predicted.
Even with good vaccines and treatments, this year’s U.S. death toll is already many orders of magnitude higher than that of the other virus that circulates each year, the flu. A terrible flu season kills about 50,000 people, but already more than 226,000 have died from COVID in 2022 — and even if another wave is avoided and fatalities remain at their current “low” level, another 150,000 lives could be lost over the next 12 months.
Then there’s the ballooning price of long COVID. Ongoing transmission, even if more like a slow burn than a raging fire, will mean the ranks of long-haulers will continue to grow. Long COVID has already pushed as many as 4 million people out of the workforce, according to a recent Brookings Institution report. As public concern over COVID fades, and funding dries up, it will become even harder to stem this parallel pandemic.
