Gradually it is also dawning on the last few escapees from the pandemic that the transition to the “endemic state” does not necessarily promise harmlessness and that so-called normality will not mean a return to complacency before the biggest global health crisis in recent history.

The sun is coming, but the virus stays.

No, it has long sensed the weakness of its victims - just as the tiger senses the open flank of its prey.

It feels like the pandemic is (once again) fading away.

And yet the spring wave, with new record incidences and a Covid-19 mortality rate that is still two to four times higher than in the severe flu waves that are all too often downplayed, only allows one conclusion: the looseness is still missing.

Contradictions everywhere: In the federal government, in which the relaxation advocates are now dropping their masks and have taken matters into their own hands, with Karl Lauterbach (“the situation is objectively worse than the mood”), who is fighting for compulsory vaccination as head of department accompanied by a rearguard action to adapt the Infection Protection Act, more precisely: with appeals and unclear assurances for "basic protection" without the obligation to wear a mask, and in the German health bureaucracy, which on the one hand knows the ongoing risks - dangerous virus variants, for example - but is trying to contain them by means of massive, attention-grabbing ( and not underground unimaginative) vaccination campaigns.

In short, the confusion isn't flattening any more than the curve.

What's the point of the envious look abroad, where maximum relaxation is achieved - despite the increasing number of cases and hospitalizations there too?

In Great Britain, the Covid-19 mortality has slipped statistically below the flu mortality for the first time.

But far more than ninety percent of the very old and vulnerable there are also vaccinated – and boosted.

The proportion of unvaccinated people is twice as high here, and the vital role of the booster in view of the more than a third of those who have not been boosted is apparently far from clear to everyone.

In fact, vaccination rates have been plummeting for the past two months.

The same in Asia: In South Korea, the more contagious omicron variant BA.2 is now raging, as is ours, and yet good immunity is keeping the Covid-19 victims low,

Perfect breeding ground for further developments

Displacement is not an option in the situation.

The virus doesn't go away by looking away.

It may not have exhausted its development potential by a long shot, high case numbers and a perforated immunity wall are a perfect breeding ground.

Lauterbach's lamentations about the current number of victims are by no means unfounded.

If you consider the effort that legislators, business and society have been making for decades to minimize the number of road deaths (currently around 3000 a year), the projected tens of thousands of Covid deaths and the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of chronically ill people - and to be quantified with the corresponding loss of work and productivity - long-Covid patients are tantamount to a health policy declaration of bankruptcy.

Mind you: all of this backed by highly effective vaccines and a research effort that is unparalleled in medical history.

A current “Lancet” specialist publication on global excess mortality comes to the conclusion that, from a global perspective, three times as many people have died prematurely from Covid-19 than the six million deaths reported in the official reporting statistics.

We've gotten to the scale of the "Spanish flu," and that was more than a hundred years ago.

Despite incredible medical advances, one problem runs through our pandemic: the systematic trivialization of the virus.

It not only permeates the narratives in the conspiracy guilds, it also comes through omissions and false persuasion.

For example, by dismissing “mild courses of infection” at Omikron (only applies with existing immunity) or claiming “vaccination is no longer of much use” (in fact, it protects the vast majority of people from severe courses and from long-Covid), many people are encouraged to be carefree , dampened the desire to vaccinate and unnecessarily increased the risk of infection.

Even the appearance of not doing everything possible to counteract this, as politicians are saying, can have fatal consequences.