The World Cup is back. The football mania is kicking off around the world. More good news for fans, Qatar has scrapped nearly all COVID rules since visitors are no longer mandated to show negative tests upon arrival. The local health authority also loosens the restriction to wear masks except for some health facilities and offices. Qatar seems like a brand new planet in the world.
However, since the opening of the World Cup, the daily confirmed COVID cases is around 264 on average in the gulf nation. It is quite worrying that passion for football will soon ignite another new COVID wave as the glamorous sporting event is going on amid fewer hygiene precautions.
As the World Cup eases control for the pandemic, people are constantly raising questions: Is the end of COVID-19 already in sight? Will we live in a world getting rid of COVID deaths and post-COVID syndromes? The answer is definitely no.
On October 22, U.S. health regulators estimated that BQ.1 and closely related BQ.1.1 accounted for 16.6% of coronavirus variants in the country, nearly doubling from the week before, while Europe expects them to become the dominant variants in a month.The two variants are descendants of Omicron’s BA.5 subvariant, which is the dominant form of the coronavirus in the United States. Gregory Poland, a virologist and vaccine researcher at Mayo Clinic, warned that these variants can quite possibly lead to a very bad surge of illness this winter in U.S. as it’s already starting to happen in Europe and the UK.
Some may also refute that the time span of COVID infections usually lasts for a week with similar symptoms of common cold or flu. But research from British Medical Journal and Nature pinpoint that COVID-19 is inclined to make other diseases worse or lead to new-onset kidney disease as well as other non-communicable diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurological disease, which are chronic conditions requiring lifelong care. Even mild COVID cases could still lead to long COVID, with lingering symptoms and debility.
Health professionals are not trying to exaggerate the details. The seven-time Ballon D’ Or winner, Lionel Messi, continued to struggle with respiratory issues when the initial symptoms of COVID-19 faded away. It remains unclear whether these problems will affect Messi’s performance in his legacy-defining World Cup.
Compared with Messi, Tanysha Dissanayake, a promising British tennis player, is quite unlucky. She once played at Wimbledon and had hopes of breaking top 100, but now struggles to get out of bed. What’s worse, she can’t even read more than half a page without getting a headache. These horrible experiences happened when she got infected with COVID-19.
Miserable stories of these household names only touch the tip of the iceberg. In twitter account @Not_Recovered and hashtag #LongCOVID, thousands of ordinary people share their sufferings after seemingly recovering from COVID-19. Long COVID has robbed their health, careers and even all they hold dear.
So next time, when we come across President Biden’s declaration that “the pandemic is over in the U.S.”, please take it as a joke. These are irresponsible words that politicians articulate out of their own purposes. Still, we continue to have thousands of new COVID-19 infections and hundreds of related deaths in this country each day.
COVID infections will likely climb during winter because of the highly transmissible omicron variant and other emerging subvariants. What indeed counts is not setting the firm end of the pandemic, but the number of ongoing infections, deaths and Long COVID symptoms as well as measures we take to avoid contagion. Multiple measures of infection control, such as vaccinating, making, ventilating, testing and quaranting, are of great significance in the coming winter.
