Shapeshifting virus threatens cycles of disease, blockages

The new variants pose two threats. First, the restrictions on activity could be tightened to counter the higher risk of infection, which will push some economies back into recession. Britain, where a fast-spreading variant is now widespread, was completely shut down again on January 5. The economy, which contracted by 10% last year, is now likely to contract. The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday said it would grow 4.5% this year, down from its October forecast of 5.9%.

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

If such a variant emerges, manufacturers think vaccines can be updated relatively quickly. Nevertheless, James Stock, an economist at Harvard University who has studied the virus and the economy, warned of a “scenario where this thing lingers much longer.”

“All economic adjustments were considered temporary: restaurants with a capacity of 25%, and so on,” he said. “If this were to become chronic, there would really have to be massive reorganisations” of the US economy.

Singapore’s Education Minister Lawrence Wong, who is co-chair of his government’s Covid ministerial task force, said Monday: “It could be four to five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-Covid see normal. “

Mutations are inherent in viruses – and in economies as well. Financial crises recur because financial innovation ultimately bypasses the regulations introduced after the last crisis. Likewise, viruses mutate all the time, and natural selection dictates that the variants that can best reproduce eventually prevail.

Viruses, however, mutate much faster than finance. According to a paper by Eduardo Costas, a professor of genetics at Complutense University of Madrid, and two colleagues, nearly 300,000 variants of Covid-19 have been discovered in the past year.

To gain a foothold, variants like the one in the UK must acquire very beneficial mutations – relatively rare in combination. But as more people in the world are infected, the more likely new highly contagious mutant strains will emerge, said Mr. Costas in an email.

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

The British variant, called B.1.1.7, spreads 30% to 70% faster and can be 30% to 40% more deadly than previous variants, according to scientists. This implies that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks and social distancing must be chosen significantly to keep the deaths unaltered. It also means more people will need to be infected or vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity” when the epidemic fades.

In Britain, JP Morgan’s David Mackie estimates, the new variant has increased the reproduction rate of the virus – how many people each infected person infects, in the absence of immunity or interventions – from 3.3 to 4.9. Masks, hygiene and social distance have brought the number of reproductions below one, the threshold at which cases are declining. This has entailed high costs: the British economy is almost certainly shrinking.

Indeed, as the importance of restrictions on life-saving activities could increase, public tolerance towards them is declining, as recent riots over a curfew in the Netherlands demonstrate. In the US, some states have refused to impose restrictions, and most others focus only on high-risk activities, such as indoor dining.

But if the cases increased again, the restrictions would likely increase – and even if they didn’t, more people would voluntarily distance themselves. Both would undermine the recovery. Goldman Sachs estimates that a delay in achieving herd immunity would delay the US recovery by two months and slow growth by 2 percentage points this year.

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

“This is one of the reasons why it’s important to think not just locally but globally,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a Northeastern University scientist who models pandemics. “We could have a perfectly rolled out vaccine campaign in the US and Europe. But if we let the virus run wild and have a lot of cases in other places, that could be a boomerang effect – there could be a variant that could escape our immune system protection. “

This puts extra pressure on the Biden government and governments of other rich countries to speed up vaccination not only at home but also in poor countries, in order to minimize the number of variants. The IMF expects a vaccine to be widely available in the most advanced and some emerging economies by this summer, but not in the rest of the world until the second half of 2022.

Mr Vespignani added, “We need an infrastructure so that whatever goes wrong, we are much better prepared than we were in March, April and even now.” That means more widespread genomic surveillance for dangerous variants; the ability to quickly update and deliver vaccines to the entire population; and widely available low-cost and rapid tests to control outbreaks.

Write to Greg Ip at [email protected]