THE SHADOW STILL LOOMS

With the virus now sparing no one, Long Covid was a serious problem to deal with, which easily was the most important implication of how the pandemic had changed in its third year

- Binayak Dasgupta

-s the glass half full or half empty? This was the question posed in our special feature when we looked ahead to 2022, exactly a year ago. At the end of 2021, the Omicron variant had just arrived, bamboozling scientists with its large constellation of mutations and an unprecedented ability to infect more and more people, but causing far milder disease. Before governments could react, the Omicron variant was ripping through entire cities and states, triggering reinfections and leaving the last of the lucky ones - who never had symptomatic Covid in the first two years-unspared.

After a debilitating 2021, when the Delta variant caused immense suffering in mostly unvaccinated populations, 2022 became the year that 2020 could have been: people ditched masks, resumed travelling, and even got married in record numbers.

The year, therefore, panned out in the most optimistic of scenarios first thought out-or, the glass-half-full view.

Changing pandemic equation

The Omicron variant was a version of SarsCoV-2 that was so far removed from its predecessors that several assumptions about the virus became redundant in 2022.

The first of these was how long infected people had to isolate. Many countries shortened the mandatory period for people to stay isolated from 10 days to seven, with some even cutting it down to five. Several researchers found that two negative tests on days 6 and 7 were reliable determinants of whether an infected person was contagious.