Column | We successfully immunized ourselves

We sang extra loud around the piano last weekend: hear, who’s knocking there kids. Innocent fun that still gives me flashbacks. How choir members worldwide unknowingly killed each other in March 2020 because when singing all those long vowels loudly, they filled the space with a deadly virus. A short prayer is in order: thank God that we were allowed to experience this day. That we will all still be here December 2022. And that we are together.

It’s only been a year since we corona volente said to then sadly cancel our holidays again. December 18, 2021: Rutte and Van Dissel announce at an inserted press conference that the Netherlands is going into a hard lockdown again. It seems like ten years ago, but we were still in the middle of it last January. I have to look it up, because I have a hard time remembering details like that, however recent and however intense. Maybe it’s because since the end of the crisis nobody seems to want to talk about it anymore. You were not allowed to drop the C-word in the media for months because the public would zap away en masse.

Would it have been the same in 1946? A traumatized society, entire families killed, but we’re not going to talk about the war for a while. Done with the capital K. Don’t dwell on the past. One must and will look ahead.

Behind the facades, people silently mourn the loved ones they miss and to whom they never had the opportunity to say goodbye. A whole group of Dutch people are still housebound, never recovered from their infection, still unable to lead a meaningful existence. There is hardly any attention for it anymore. Come on, we have to go ahead.

And yet those flashbacks keep appearing. With songs, with new Omikron variants that can bypass immunity even better and always end with a fizzle. Even when I see all the Christmas decorations I think of that deep hopelessness of this time over the past two years.

We don’t talk much about it yet, but we should. Not only for national trauma processing, but also simply for our memory. I don’t know what story you are telling yourself about how this pandemic came to an end in the Netherlands. It just stopped, it seems. At a certain point, the hospitals were no longer so full and the autumn wave passed without too much misery this year.

How does China fare under Omikron? Expectation: bad

I think in our collective memory that Omikron variant plays a leading role. Do you remember? On November 25, 2021 it suddenly says a Boeing 747 from Cape Town at Schiphol; of the 600 passengers, 60 appear to have Omikron among their members. Omikron washes over us. It is reason for the government to lock down the country one last time. But behind the scenes hope is growing. Because this variant circulated freely among the South African population without resulting in full hospitals. We followed with suspicion the feared increase in deaths in South Africa, England and Denmark and it failed to materialize. Corona was over.

Read also: China risks a million deaths by suddenly panicking corona strategy

That’s the story. First the virus was a wolf and then it evolved into a lap dog, a home, garden and kitchen flu. But it’s the wrong story. Omikron is not a lap dog. At the beginning of this year, that variant caused one of the deadliest corona waves in Hong Kong. Unlike others Zero Covidcountries, such as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, which relatively successfully reopened their well-vaccinated societies, Hong Kong had failed to achieve a decent vaccination rate with all the consequences that entailed.

Now China is going, with as low a vaccinated population as one of the latter Zero Covidcountries swallow the bitter pill. I am amazed at how such a surveillance state with a dictatorial testing, tracing and isolation regime and extensive control over the provision of information still fails to properly vaccinate its elderly for two years. We are now going to see how 1.4 billion Chinese bodies hold up under Omikron.

The expectation is: bad. When in ten years’ time we are ready for an in-depth reconstruction of the end of the pandemic in the Netherlands, we will learn that it was not the virus that evolved, but that we evolved. We managed to successfully immunize ourselves and thus remove the sharp edges of a corona infection. Just think about that the next time you celebrate the holidays together again this year. It is thanks to the vaccines that we can be together again.

Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.