Mixed

Reports of new world sightings are mixed.

For the first time in well over a year, a poster called Annie Laurie, at the group blog Balloon Juice, will take a three-day vacation from her daily COVID update.  Thorough and wide-ranging (every day!), the early-morning post is the basis for the day's understanding of the pandemic for thousands of us, including me.  Her notice, in bold up top of her post on Thursday:

Barring an unexpected spate of new discoveries, I’ll probably skip these updates over the holiday weekend (Saturday, Sunday & Monday nights). We can all use the break, IMO!

We sure can.  And the fact that AL feel we can live without updates for a few days suggests that things are winding down.

Next up is a tweet from Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher: 

Can't help but marvel at the incredible efficacy of the vaccines.

This time last year, our hospital was filled with Covid. Every patient I cared for had it. We converted pediatric floors to ICUs and psych units to Covid wards.

Today, I don't have a single patient with Covid.

Sounds great!  But wait...

Today, some rich countries are vaccinating children as young as 12 years old, who are at extremely low risk of developing severe COVID-19, while poorer countries don’t even have enough shots for health care workers. Nearly 85% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses administered to date have gone to people in high-income and upper middle–income countries. The countries with the lowest gross domestic product per capita only have 0.3%.

Here's what that actually looks like:

Here at "The New World" we've talked about COVAX and vaccine inequality a lot, all in the service of understanding global herd immunity, which looked, for a while, like it would be the new world, only to fade into fantasy.  The virus is still winning all over the world, and we really have to be careful about declaring victory* when vaccine hesitancy, variants and especially vaccine inequality will be lengthening the pandemic as we celebrate.

Enjoy your break, Annie - we're still a long way from home.

* - To be fair, Annie Laurie and Dr. Khullar are not celebrating the end of anything, but instead are describing a point in a long and continuing history.