IT’S a question asked every day for the past two years and is still as relevant today as yesterday or yesteryear, as the pandemic starts feeling like having established a permanent presence everywhere, even as it continues spreading invisibly and remains impossible to predict, at every turn throwing-up new challenges faster than older ones are understood.

So far in 2022, SARS-CoV-2 and the Delta and Omicron variants have changed life for all — and it’s just impossible to keep pace.
World Health Organisation (WHO) chief, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says COVID’s impact “will be felt for decades, even as the spread of the virus is slowing down globally,” with vulnerable groups hit worst — and the longer the pandemic drags on, the worse the impact will be.

He notes that only 42 per cent of ‘Commonwealth countries’ have received double-dose vaccinations, with ‘African Commonwealth’ nations at just 23 per cent, with a wide disparity between countries globally.

“Bridging that gap,” Dr Tedros says, “is an urgent priority for WHO, not only for bringing the pandemic under control and saving lives, but also for protecting livelihoods and supporting sustainable recovery”.

He has also warned that, as the virus evolves with more problematic challenges globally, vaccines may need to evolve as well, saying “Variants of SARS-CoV-2 may continue to escape neutralising antibodies induced by vaccines against prior variants…”

The Caribbean, like every other region, has had its similar and different experiences facing and fighting COVID-19 since 2020.

The Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) says that, since January 19, 2022, the wider region had almost 1.57 million deaths (28.2 per cent of deaths worldwide) and COVID-19 infections were increasing in most countries due to Omicron, which spreads easier and faster and can be lethal for the immunocompromised and the unvaccinated.

PAHO’s Director, Dr Clarissa Etienne, continues to express concern about the poor and other vulnerable groups at greatest risk, including those living in the Amazon Basin, particularly Indigenous Communities, Women (who comprise 70 per cent of the health workforce), People of African Descent, Migrants in Temporary Settlements and Prisoners in crowded jails.

As of January, too, more than 60 per cent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean had been fully vaccinated, but 10 regional countries had vaccination rates of less than 40 per cent, the lowest being Haiti (less than one per cent), Jamaica (20 per cent) and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (almost 24 per cent).

The United Nations’ COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility reaches 22 countries, through PAHO.

In addition, 10 countries — Bolivia, Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — are eligible to benefit from the related Vaccines Advance Market Commitment (COVAX AMC), launched by GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) to provide donor-funded vaccines for low-and middle-income economies.

As of January, over 96 million vaccine doses had been delivered or were in transit through COVAX, with over 26 million provided through country donations.

As for the economic impact of COVID-19, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported a seven per cent economic contraction for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020.

However, Caribbean nations dependent on tourism had deep economic recessions (several with estimated economic declines over 15 per cent in 2020) and several South American nations hard-hit by the pandemic registered economic contractions over 10 per cent.

In 2021, many of the region’s economies began modest recoveries, with the IMF estimating a regional growth rate of 6.3 per cent.

Nevertheless, many relying on global investment, trade and tourism — all of which have been negatively affected by the pandemic – will witness slow recovery.

The wider regional economic contraction in 2020 increased poverty and exacerbated income inequality.
Modest economic recoveries are projected by the World Bank for the Caribbean in 2022 and 2023, but the effects of Supply Chain problems and resulting increases in oil-and-gas prices and cost-of-living generally higher everywhere, growth sounds, for many CARICOM states, more like a dream than a likely possibility.

Like every global encounter, the COVID challenge has shocked the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the rest of the world into several realities, most unfortunate and negative, but many also positive from the standpoint of exposing vulnerabilities and drawing-out positive responses from those on the frontline of the war against what’s already the worst pandemic anyone alive has seen.

Most-exposed are the inefficiencies of national health services to handle such emergencies and the unpreparedness of too many governments to act early and quickly instead of slowly and overly cautious.

The regional private sector, which has borne the brunt of the COVID pressure for the past two years, is also understandably up-in-arms about the harmful effects of some protocols on their ability to revive earlier than later with hotels and travel industry groups complaining that people are being affected more by bad handling of protocols than by the virus.

But here again, the virus has brought governments, health, public and private sectors closer in the common fight and forced creation and/or activation of cooperation arrangements of a do-or-die nature that were hitherto ignored or underutilised.

The region’s economic recovery depends heavily on three elements: the course the pandemic takes, governments’ responses and the availability and distribution of vaccines.

CARICOM governments are, however, starting to accept having to ‘Live with COVID’, even while hoping it either dies a natural death, or scientists do eventually develop the All-in-One vaccine.

Or, that the virus becomes so much the dominant part of the New Normal it has created that its status is downgraded to the equivalent of a global Common Flu.

At any rate, affected sectors, like affected persons everywhere, are increasingly opting to take action where they have lagged up-to-now, private and public sectors engaging governments like never before, including the region’s hotels and other tourism operators deciding to go to the meat of the matter and directly engage with CARICOM leaders on how they see the next steps in the continuing war against the common invisible enemy.