No thought can be presumptuous enough that it does not appear somewhere in the scenarios with which our pandemic future is already being scientifically negotiated.

Confidence may seem like such an intellectual venture to many, especially now that the Omikron wall is building up in front of us, and at such times the fixed point of public debate is always directed towards the worst-case scenario.

Christian Drosten himself, the recognized expert on the coronavirus calamities, has opened up the scope for the gullible in his most recent podcast with Korinna Hennig: We are, he said, “dealing with a perfect post-pandemic virus”.

What is meant is omicron.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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Drosten's post-pandemic story went largely unheard politically, the immediate danger lurking through Omikron seems too powerful to be able to deal with the time after the pandemic. In any case, it is downright disreputable to speak of a post-pandemic time, when fifty-two percent of the world's population have not even received a double vaccination, four fifths of Africa are still practically unprotected, and the vaccines (poor China!) Against the elemental force of the viral mutation are gradually falling Threatening to fall behind.

On the other hand, the stock market is already openly feasting on a post-pandemic mood.

The share prices have long been on track, especially the American ones, where the Nasdaq index, which is admittedly dominated by online companies, has already gained sixty-five percent since the beginning of the global health crisis until the end of this year and where it is now in the "post-Covid" era promises even more gains.

Post-Covid is something completely different

Terminology is probably less important to the happy trading platform than the numbers, but because the medical context is criminally played down here, the misleading description of a survived pandemic is corrected. Post-Covid refers to the medical syndrome that is characterized by symptoms after acute Covid-19 disease that last longer than three months and cannot be explained by diagnoses other than a Covid-related disease. In the post-Covid period, there are now millions and millions of people infected with corona; in this country, 110,000 post-Covid cases requiring long-term treatment were reported to the central institute for statutory health care by the second quarter of this year.

Which addresses a still neglected and admittedly depressing aspect of the post-pandemic period. In any case, the idea that the post-pandemic phase could enter and the old, carefree life without SARS-CoV-2 return overnight, as in August 10, 2010, when the World Health Organization declared the swine flu pandemic to be over, is currently not the subject of post-pandemic Projections. Not even in Drosten's. What he was trying to announce with the post-pandemic virus was rather a scenario that practically excludes a life without a virus. In this post-pandemic phase there is a coexistence on earth, a sort of routine - not a completely peaceful one! - Together. The virus is becoming endemic, so experts like Drosten talk about it,and that may sound no less disgusting to many than it is pandemic. In fact, however, and epidemiologically, it would be a huge step forward. Also mentally.

Omikron could change from being a vaccine fright to a general mood-enhancer. Maybe only after the government has made vaccination compulsory, but what the heck. The main thing is that a new horizon opens up. What came into the world as a highly dangerous, highly mutated and explosively spreading variant of evolution in the body of a suffering Covid victim somewhere in southern Africa, namely the omicron variant, could, according to this scenario, be in a row in the coming weeks and months Insert reasonably manageable cold viruses. A prerequisite for this is a bit of luck (that no more dangerous variant is created), as well as high vaccination rates and a minimally necessary "post-infection" - original sound Drosten. The contamination costs lives, do not vaccinate.

In the post-pandemic phase that is looming, people's immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will be upgraded to such an extent that every further wave of infection will be survived relatively lightly, even by the vulnerable part of the population. There will be infections, no question about it. And also acutely critically ill, because human immunity is, as everyone knows by now, a veritable miracle of life, but not perfect.

The acute victims of the endemic pathogen will be limited - of course only if the focus is solely on the statistics.

Many will feel the aftershock of the pandemic on their own bodies, in their families, with their grief.

How the virus occupies us in the long term - and not only medically a hardly quantifiable variable of the corona projections.

First of all it means: taming the omicron.