COVID-19 and the Lindy Effect
As with most of my writings on this topic, speculation, of varying levels and quality of informedness.
Looking at the spread and rise of Covid cases once again, now driven by the Delta variant (with others emerging: Gamma and Lambda have been mentioned), the ongoing resistance of significant populations to vaccination, and the sheer unavailability of vaccines to much of the world, as we're looking at the third year of the epidemic (first cases having been traced to September/October 2019): My prediction is that COVID-19 will be a major health threat worldwide for at least the next two to three years, and quite possibly much longer.
The Lindy Effect is:
a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy. )*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
The applicability to epidemiology is indirect, though several basic mechanisms suggest at least a rough fit, including the number of outstanding cases, transmission rate, mutation rate(s), and the availability and adoption of countermeasures. All point to at least as much time ahead of us as behind, in my (again: very lay-person) view.
There's some evidence that this view is gaining adoption elsewhere:
"As delta surges, Bay Area reaches realization that COVID 'will be with us chronically'"
Eliminating the virus is probably not possible. This summer surge may simply be a bump on the rough path toward learning to coexist with COVID.
“We’re going to have to live with this for a while,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford. “And we are reaching the point where people have to just settle into that. We have to get back to some kind of a normal life. We can’t keep living like this. But normal life now may be different.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/As-delta-surges-Bay-Area-reaches-realization-16337576.php
Forgiving the article's parochialism, if the epidemic is chronic in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is chronic globally.
The good news is that we have vaccines, and the ability to create new ones virtually instantly. The mRNA techniques used to create the current set of Covid vaccines produced candidates within days of sequencing the virus, early in the pandemic. Delays in distribution have been on account of both testing to confirm both safety and efficacy, and scaling production to tens of billions of doses necessary. We also have more effective treatments, ongoing monitoring, detection, and reporting, and public health measures of simple but effective natures (masks, handwashing, quarantines). These work if they can be and will be deployed and adhered to.
The bad news is that there are idiots, and an entire industry and conspiracy of disinformation sowers, doing their damndest to defeat medical science, and to a large extent succeeding. We've also got a disease that's know to mutate, and will likely do so in directions that maximise its own propensity to spread more broadly, particularly among populations that have been less vulnerable previously (Africa is largely youthful, which at least to date has been a strength), and possibly in ways that breech our defences (masking, barriers, disinfection, vaccines). Severity is something of a wildcard --- diseases which kill their hosts are actually not great fits, but in the short run at least, there's little disadvantage in doing so, and Covid's mortality net net has been relatively high.
#covid19 #LindyEffect #Predictions
