Subscribe
The year 2022 began by crashing all hopes of the two-year COVID-19 pandemic coming to an end. A new variant of the coronavirus, Omicron, started another wave of COVID-19 globally.
As we enter 2023, there is hope of the pandemic turning endemic, thus marking the widest public health emergency’s end. Here is a chronology of the pandemic’s run this year through a selection of Down To Earth’s articles:
The COVID-19 pandemic looks set to become endemic as it enters its fourth year. In becoming endemic, it could increase the disease burden of the world.
Read more: COVID-19 will now be an endemic pandemic
That increase in the disease burden will primarily be because of long COVID-19.
China, where the novel coronavirus originated, tread a COVID-19 path different from the rest of the world. The ruling Chinese Communist Party adopted a policy of ‘zero-tolerance’, with entire cities, provinces and regions on lockdown at the same time. This made the population immuno-compromised. With the result that even the slightest relaxing of norms resulted in new strains of the coronavirus.
Through 2022, new variants and sub-variants of SARS-CoV-2 kept popping up.
Measures taken around the world to curb COVID-19 had another positive effect: They curbed the circulation of influenza.
Throughout 2022, debate raged on as to whether the pandmic had actually ended and ‘normalcy’ had returned.
Shahid Jameel, former head of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium, spoke to DTE about how a virus mutates, the trajectory of COVID-19 and concerns regarding re-infection.
A Thrissur resident studying medicine at Wuhan University, who became the first case of COVID-19 in India, recounted her story to DTE.
In January this year, migrant workers returning to Jharkhand for the Christmas and year-end holidays caused cases of the novel coronavirus disease to spike, leading to a third wave.
In January, it was predicted that nearly 60 per cent of the global population was expected to be infected by the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by March.