When Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun newspaper, fired the resident astrologer he began the letter of dismissal: “As you will already know …”. It seems the concept of professional stargazers has long been tempting to mock.
But the New York Times has recently cast its net much wider. In its compilation of the worst predictions made about 2021, economists, investors and journalists all came a cropper for their good faith but ultimately incorrect suggestions about the direction of the world: what might happen to Tesla? Is the Suez Canal fit for purpose? How will employment rates change?
Accused of making one of the very worst was Leo Varadkar, for saying in late 2020: "With the vaccine, with mass testing and with the knowledge of how to prevent and treat this virus, I think the pandemic will end in 2021."
He was wrong, obviously. But chalking this up as one of the most off-the-mark predictions about the year strikes me as a little harsh.
Is there an extent to which other concerns begin to loom so large over society that our priorities change?
Varadkar was working with perfectly decent evidence. Vaccines were on their way, supposedly with very high efficacy, our treatments had improved and our understanding of how the virus spreads developed in leaps and bounds. The major error in Varadkar’s thinking seems to have been in trying to reach for any kind of certainty at all: a crime of overconfidence rather than foolishness.
Because there is still huge academic debate about how pandemics of the past petered out. Smallpox was eradicated by a vaccine, but was it herd immunity or viral mutations that caused the 1918 Spanish flu to wane? Can we put a time stamp on the end of the Black Death?
Even with the advantage afforded by hindsight, there is no consensus on the history. So predicting how and when the pandemic we are currently living through might end is some seriously advanced calculus in comparison.
Nevertheless, Varadkar’s optimistic – or foolhardy – evaluation is a helpful prompt for considering a question facing everyone, not just epidemiologists. What does it actually mean for a pandemic to end? This is a different question from how and when Covid-19 infections may no longer be so prevalent. Answering that is staggeringly technical. Instead it is the philosophical consideration – though not totally separable from the epidemiological one – that is arguably more telling.
Maybe there is an element of the paradox of the heap here. The paradox goes like this: if we remove a single grain of sand from a heap it does not mean the heap stops being a heap. But if we keep removing one grain of sand at a time at some point, surely, our heap ceases to be. How many grains of sand is that? Can we put a precise figure on it? Perhaps there is a point at which new cases or hospitalisation – whatever metric deemed most appropriate at the time – falls to a level that the pandemic stops being a pandemic. Our task is simply pinpointing where that might be.
This is not right or helpful on its own. Because the existence of a pandemic is as much about our feelings about the pandemic as it is about the pressure on ICUs, or the number of positive antigen tests being returned every day. Erica Charters, associate professor of the history of medicine at Oxford University, told the Financial Times that pandemics end when they “change from something that we as a society deem unacceptable” into things that just exist in the background.
Varadkar's overzealous estimate was at least a welcome tonic to offset the mode of soapboxing so many love to adopt about how the pandemic will never be over
This is of course in no small part tied to the functioning of our healthcare systems. But is there an extent to which other concerns begin to loom so large over society that our priorities change? At some point that might be the children who have missed out on almost a year of proper schooling, or the young who have whiled away much of their university years in their childhood bedrooms, or the myriad job losses and business closures.
Varadkar was overzealous in his estimate. But it didn’t fail to tell us anything: the point at which most people feel that the pandemic is being overtaken in importance by other matters, or the point at which case rates are deemed acceptable by society is as much an end point as anything else.
And it was at least a welcome tonic to offset the mode of soapboxing so many love to adopt about how the pandemic will never be over, about how the worst is always somehow yet to come, about how continuing to be more worried and cautious about Covid than anyone else is a badge of superior moral fibre.
The stressed-out fatalism of many – such as the Atlantic publishing an essay titled “I’m starting to give up on post-pandemic life” – implies we are far off the societal shift required to get there now. Omicron and skyrocketing cases preclude that from happening at the moment anyway. But the vaccines work and our direction of travel is a good one.
We do not know what shape the end of the pandemic will come in. It will likely be with a whimper rather than a bang. And though making hard and fast predictions might be a fool’s game, we know that how we feel about something often can matter as much as anything else.