Once we could talk of nothing else. Now we barely speak of it at all. A leading Chinese epidemiologist has warned that there could be up to 65m cases of Covid-19 a week in his country by the end of June. Yet there appears to be little concern within China, and there is certainly little attention outside it. When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared earlier this month that the Covid pandemic was no longer a global health emergency, the announcement was greeted not with cheers or even muted celebration, but with what seemed to be utter indifference.
To some it may have seemed a statement of the obvious. Vaccines and treatments have made the disease far less dangerous and frightening to most. A disease that claimed millions of lives, ravaged economies and upended societies has become an afterthought – though as the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, pointed out, it is still killing someone every three minutes.
