• A man wearing a facemask in Dubai in April 2020, shortly after the first outbreak. Pawan Singh / The National
    A man wearing a facemask in Dubai in April 2020, shortly after the first outbreak. Pawan Singh / The National
  • Staff from the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team conduct searches on the closed Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, at the start of the outbreak on January 11, 2020. AFP
    Staff from the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team conduct searches on the closed Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, at the start of the outbreak on January 11, 2020. AFP
  • A security guard sits outside the closed Huanan market in Wuhan, Hubei province. Getty Images
    A security guard sits outside the closed Huanan market in Wuhan, Hubei province. Getty Images
  • A notice displayed near a quarantine control station at Narita Airport, Japan, in January 2020. EPA
    A notice displayed near a quarantine control station at Narita Airport, Japan, in January 2020. EPA
  • An empty Times Square after a coronavirus lockdown was ordered in New York City, March 18, 2020. Reuters
    An empty Times Square after a coronavirus lockdown was ordered in New York City, March 18, 2020. Reuters
  • A nurse wearing PPE comforts another as they change shifts on March 13, 2020 at Cremona Hospital, north-eastern Italy. AFP
    A nurse wearing PPE comforts another as they change shifts on March 13, 2020 at Cremona Hospital, north-eastern Italy. AFP
  • Sanitation workers from Tadweer on the first day of the UAE cleaning campaign in March 2020. Victor Besa / The National
    Sanitation workers from Tadweer on the first day of the UAE cleaning campaign in March 2020. Victor Besa / The National
  • The pedestrian crossing on Hamdan and Fatima Bint Mubarak Street is sprayed on March 27, 2020. Victor Besa / The National
    The pedestrian crossing on Hamdan and Fatima Bint Mubarak Street is sprayed on March 27, 2020. Victor Besa / The National
  • A commuter enters the sterilisation area at the entrance of the Abu Dhabi Central Bus Terminal in March 2020. Victor Besa / The National
    A commuter enters the sterilisation area at the entrance of the Abu Dhabi Central Bus Terminal in March 2020. Victor Besa / The National
  • Travellers returning to Kuwait from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon arrive to be re-tested at a containment and screening zone in Kuwait City on March 16, 2020. AFP
    Travellers returning to Kuwait from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon arrive to be re-tested at a containment and screening zone in Kuwait City on March 16, 2020. AFP
  • Al Wadha Mall in Abu Dhabi reopens in May 2020 with measures in place to protect shoppers. Victor Besa / The National
    Al Wadha Mall in Abu Dhabi reopens in May 2020 with measures in place to protect shoppers. Victor Besa / The National
  • Safety reminders at Dubai International Airport after the resumption of scheduled operations by Emirates on May 22, 2020. AFP
    Safety reminders at Dubai International Airport after the resumption of scheduled operations by Emirates on May 22, 2020. AFP
  • A delivery driver wearing a face mask in downtown Abu Dhabi. Victor Besa / The National
    A delivery driver wearing a face mask in downtown Abu Dhabi. Victor Besa / The National
  • Passengers of an Emirates flight prepare to board a plan to Sydney at Dubai International Airport. AFP
    Passengers of an Emirates flight prepare to board a plan to Sydney at Dubai International Airport. AFP
  • Systems put in place at a supermarket in Dubai to slow the spread of the coronavirus. AFP
    Systems put in place at a supermarket in Dubai to slow the spread of the coronavirus. AFP

Three years on, what is the legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic?


Daniel Bardsley
  • English
  • Arabic

January 9 will mark three years since the first death in China from Covid-19 — and since then millions more have died.

The coronavirus spread quickly across the globe after emerging in Wuhan and within a few months was causing tens of thousands of deaths each week.

The official toll stands at more than 6.6 million and the virus continues to kill thousands of people each week.

But current circumstances are much improved.

There are things we can take from the pandemic that will help us understand infectious diseases and reduce the risk of severe diseases in the future
Prof Paul Hunter,
University of East Anglia

Most societies that imposed lockdowns have opened up and, from around the second quarter of last year onwards, the global death rate has been stable and much lower than during most of the previous two years, even if Covid hospital admissions continue to put healthcare systems under strain.

China is a notable exception, with the country’s recent opening up after three years of tight restrictions causing cases, and possibly deaths, to surge.

Outside China, many populations are now less at risk than at the start of the pandemic.

Increased immunity

About 69.1 per cent of the world's population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to OurWorldinData, and 13.18 billion doses have been administered in total.

On top of that, the 657 million cases of Covid-19 to date — according to official figures, which are likely to heavily underestimate the real number — mean that much of the world’s population has immunity from prior infection.

  • New research shows that a patient's Covid-19 symptoms can depend on what vaccinations they have received. Getty
    New research shows that a patient's Covid-19 symptoms can depend on what vaccinations they have received. Getty
  • Fully vaccinated people most commonly reported a sore throat, persistent cough, runny or blocked nose and headaches. Getty
    Fully vaccinated people most commonly reported a sore throat, persistent cough, runny or blocked nose and headaches. Getty
  • The study also indicated a decline in reports of shortness of breath and loss of taste and smell. Those were two key symptoms in the early stage of the pandemic. Photo: Getty
    The study also indicated a decline in reports of shortness of breath and loss of taste and smell. Those were two key symptoms in the early stage of the pandemic. Photo: Getty
  • In the early stage of the pandemic, breathing difficulty was a common Covid symptom. Photo: UCL
    In the early stage of the pandemic, breathing difficulty was a common Covid symptom. Photo: UCL

In Europe, for example, people "still have some background immunity" that provides protection, according to Prof Eskild Petersen, of Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and chairman of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

"If you envisage an entirely different virus with higher pathogenicity, it would have to be very different not to be covered by the immunity now," he said.

"If you have high vaccine coverage — three or four doses — you are very, very well protected and you will have a certain number of people with further immunity from natural infection. That’s the difference from spring 2020, when nobody had any immunity."

Coupled with that, Covid-19 is widely seen to have become less virulent thanks to the easily transmitted but milder Omicron strain and related variants, which are responsible for most infections now.

"Gradually, since the appearance of Omicron, the severity has got a lot less than even a year ago," said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

"We’re not seeing nearly as many admissions to hospitals or people in intensive care beds. Now it’s less severe than flu. If you catch Covid, you’re less likely to die than with flu."

Better prepared

With the world emerging from what is often seen as the worst pandemic for a century, many researchers hope there will be better preparations for the next emergence of a new disease.

The last major pandemic of a scale comparable to Covid-19 involved Spanish flu and began in 1918, but it is unlikely, said John Oxford, emeritus professor of virology at the University of London, that it will be another century before the world faces something similar.

  • People stand outside a funeral home in Shanghai, as cases of Covid-19 surge in China. Reuters
    People stand outside a funeral home in Shanghai, as cases of Covid-19 surge in China. Reuters
  • Relatives burn paper offerings for a relative who died, at the Gaobeidian Funeral Home in northern China's Hebei province. AP
    Relatives burn paper offerings for a relative who died, at the Gaobeidian Funeral Home in northern China's Hebei province. AP
  • A worker disinfects a bed in the emergency department of a hospital in Baigou, Hebei province. AP
    A worker disinfects a bed in the emergency department of a hospital in Baigou, Hebei province. AP
  • Cities across the country have struggled to cope as the surge in cases has emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes. AP
    Cities across the country have struggled to cope as the surge in cases has emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes. AP
  • It comes after China dismantled key pillars of its zero-Covid strategy. AP
    It comes after China dismantled key pillars of its zero-Covid strategy. AP
  • Authorities have lifted snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a reversal of the country's hallmark containment strategy. Reuters
    Authorities have lifted snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a reversal of the country's hallmark containment strategy. Reuters
  • Relatives attend to a patient. AP
    Relatives attend to a patient. AP
  • People wait outside a fever clinic at a hospital in Shanghai. Reuters
    People wait outside a fever clinic at a hospital in Shanghai. Reuters

"It doesn’t have to be China, France or the US — it can happen anywhere," he said. "The key thing is to know it will happen again and to stockpile PPE [personal protective equipment].

"You have to have a plan and have someone guarding the plan. The plan must be updated and have a proper guardian to keep the finance coming in for it. It’s essential. It needs more than science to keep it marching along.

"All countries were begged by the World Health Organisation to get a plan. Some had three pages, some 150 pages."

The world is now, however, "biologically more sophisticated", with improved vaccination and monitoring capability, so is better able to react to pandemics, suggested David Taylor, emeritus professor of pharmaceutical and public health policy at University College London.

"We need to invest, but we don’t want to invest in old-style public health," he said. "We need intelligent biological surveillance … based on better understanding.

"We need leaner, sensible investment in high-level planning for pandemic possibilities, but remembering there are so many other things that could go wrong.

"We have global warming — unless we get energy and climate change sorted, that will almost certainly kill us in the next century … we have a real problem to sort."

Scientific advances

While the pandemic has left a legacy of suffering, death, societal upheaval and economic damage, it has helped accelerate scientific advancement.

There had been decades of work to develop messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, but it was not until Covid-19 that these were actually introduced to protect people from disease.

Writing in the journal Viruses last year, researchers said the pandemic had "opened the floodgates to mRNA vaccines’ potential in infectious disease prevention", with many animal as well as human diseases the focus of emerging vaccines.

Therapeutic mRNA vaccines for diseases such as cancer are also becoming a reality, with more clinical trials beginning.

The pandemic also led to the successful use of vaccines, such as the Oxford-AstraZeneca dose, that use a weakened chimpanzee adenovirus as a vector. This causes the cells of recipients to produce coronavirus spike proteins, leading to a protective immune response.

The pandemic has improved scientists’ wider understanding of viral illnesses, according to Prof Hunter, who said it has helped his own work on noroviruses which cause gastroenteritis.

"There are actually a lot of positive things that have come out of this pandemic in science," he said. "The downside is a lot of people have had to die for it. I would rather we had not had the pandemic and remained ignorant."

"But there are things we can take from the pandemic that will help us understand infectious diseases and help us reduce the risk of severe diseases in the future. And new vaccinations put together more quickly could have very wide implications.

"Because so much money and research has gone into it, we know things about Covid that we sort of knew about other infections, such as the duration of mucosal immunity [immunity in the moist inner lining of, for example, the nose and lungs] following infection and vaccination."

As to how the pandemic will continue to play out, Prof Hunter said he expected the coronavirus would continue to become less severe in its effects until it became another cause of the common cold. Other coronaviruses already cause about 10 to 15 per cent of colds.

That does not mean, however, that it will not carry on killing people, because, Prof Hunter noted, even the common cold can trigger chest infections, albeit less often than influenza does.

"I think over the next few years hospitalisations will become a lot less common and deaths a lot less common as well," he said.

Godzilla%20x%20Kong%3A%20The%20New%20Empire
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Dr Afridi's warning signs of digital addiction

Spending an excessive amount of time on the phone.

Neglecting personal, social, or academic responsibilities.

Losing interest in other activities or hobbies that were once enjoyed.

Having withdrawal symptoms like feeling anxious, restless, or upset when the technology is not available.

Experiencing sleep disturbances or changes in sleep patterns.

What are the guidelines?

Under 18 months: Avoid screen time altogether, except for video chatting with family.

Aged 18-24 months: If screens are introduced, it should be high-quality content watched with a caregiver to help the child understand what they are seeing.

Aged 2-5 years: Limit to one-hour per day of high-quality programming, with co-viewing whenever possible.

Aged 6-12 years: Set consistent limits on screen time to ensure it does not interfere with sleep, physical activity, or social interactions.

Teenagers: Encourage a balanced approach – screens should not replace sleep, exercise, or face-to-face socialisation.

Source: American Paediatric Association
How Alia's experiment will help humans get to Mars

Alia’s winning experiment examined how genes might change under the stresses caused by being in space, such as cosmic radiation and microgravity.

Her samples were placed in a machine on board the International Space Station. called a miniPCR thermal cycler, which can copy DNA multiple times.

After the samples were examined on return to Earth, scientists were able to successfully detect changes caused by being in space in the way DNA transmits instructions through proteins and other molecules in living organisms.

Although Alia’s samples were taken from nematode worms, the results have much bigger long term applications, especially for human space flight and long term missions, such as to Mars.

It also means that the first DNA experiments using human genomes can now be carried out on the ISS.

 

While you're here
if you go

Getting there

Etihad (Etihad.com), Emirates (emirates.com) and Air France (www.airfrance.com) fly to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, from Abu Dhabi and Dubai respectively. Return flights cost from around Dh3,785. It takes about 40 minutes to get from Paris to Compiègne by train, with return tickets costing €19. The Glade of the Armistice is 6.6km east of the railway station.

Staying there

On a handsome, tree-lined street near the Chateau’s park, La Parenthèse du Rond Royal (laparenthesedurondroyal.com) offers spacious b&b accommodation with thoughtful design touches. Lots of natural woods, old fashioned travelling trunks as decoration and multi-nozzle showers are part of the look, while there are free bikes for those who want to cycle to the glade. Prices start at €120 a night.

More information: musee-armistice-14-18.fr ; compiegne-tourisme.fr; uk.france.fr

MATCH INFO

Liverpool 3

Sadio Man 28'

Andrew Robertson 34'

Diogo Jota 88'

Arsenal 1

Lacazette 25'

Man of the match

Sadio Mane (Liverpool)

Pad Man

Dir: R Balki

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor, Radhika Apte

Three-and-a-half stars

Museum of the Future in numbers
  •  78 metres is the height of the museum
  •  30,000 square metres is its total area
  •  17,000 square metres is the length of the stainless steel facade
  •  14 kilometres is the length of LED lights used on the facade
  •  1,024 individual pieces make up the exterior 
  •  7 floors in all, with one for administrative offices
  •  2,400 diagonally intersecting steel members frame the torus shape
  •  100 species of trees and plants dot the gardens
  •  Dh145 is the price of a ticket
Ibrahim's play list

Completed an electrical diploma at the Adnoc Technical Institute

Works as a public relations officer with Adnoc

Apart from the piano, he plays the accordion, oud and guitar

His favourite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach

Also enjoys listening to Mozart

Likes all genres of music including Arabic music and jazz

Enjoys rock groups Scorpions and Metallica 

Other musicians he likes are Syrian-American pianist Malek Jandali and Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou Khalil

SM Town Live is on Friday, April 6 at Autism Rocks Arena, Dubai. Tickets are Dh375 at www.platinumlist.net

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Common OCD symptoms and how they manifest

Checking: the obsession or thoughts focus on some harm coming from things not being as they should, which usually centre around the theme of safety. For example, the obsession is “the building will burn down”, therefore the compulsion is checking that the oven is switched off.

Contamination: the obsession is focused on the presence of germs, dirt or harmful bacteria and how this will impact the person and/or their loved ones. For example, the obsession is “the floor is dirty; me and my family will get sick and die”, the compulsion is repetitive cleaning.

Orderliness: the obsession is a fear of sitting with uncomfortable feelings, or to prevent harm coming to oneself or others. Objectively there appears to be no logical link between the obsession and compulsion. For example,” I won’t feel right if the jars aren’t lined up” or “harm will come to my family if I don’t line up all the jars”, so the compulsion is therefore lining up the jars.

Intrusive thoughts: the intrusive thought is usually highly distressing and repetitive. Common examples may include thoughts of perpetrating violence towards others, harming others, or questions over one’s character or deeds, usually in conflict with the person’s true values. An example would be: “I think I might hurt my family”, which in turn leads to the compulsion of avoiding social gatherings.

Hoarding: the intrusive thought is the overvaluing of objects or possessions, while the compulsion is stashing or hoarding these items and refusing to let them go. For example, “this newspaper may come in useful one day”, therefore, the compulsion is hoarding newspapers instead of discarding them the next day.

Source: Dr Robert Chandler, clinical psychologist at Lighthouse Arabia

 

 

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%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EPayal%20Kapadia%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarring%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Kani%20Kusruti%2C%20Divya%20Prabha%2C%20Chhaya%20Kadam%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%204%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Gulf Under 19s final

Dubai College A 50-12 Dubai College B

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The President's Cake

Director: Hasan Hadi

Starring: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem 

Rating: 4/5

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Pathaan
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Explainer: Tanween Design Programme

Non-profit arts studio Tashkeel launched this annual initiative with the intention of supporting budding designers in the UAE. This year, three talents were chosen from hundreds of applicants to be a part of the sixth creative development programme. These are architect Abdulla Al Mulla, interior designer Lana El Samman and graphic designer Yara Habib.

The trio have been guided by experts from the industry over the course of nine months, as they developed their own products that merge their unique styles with traditional elements of Emirati design. This includes laboratory sessions, experimental and collaborative practice, investigation of new business models and evaluation.

It is led by British contemporary design project specialist Helen Voce and mentor Kevin Badni, and offers participants access to experts from across the world, including the likes of UK designer Gareth Neal and multidisciplinary designer and entrepreneur, Sheikh Salem Al Qassimi.

The final pieces are being revealed in a worldwide limited-edition release on the first day of Downtown Designs at Dubai Design Week 2019. Tashkeel will be at stand E31 at the exhibition.

Lisa Ball-Lechgar, deputy director of Tashkeel, said: “The diversity and calibre of the applicants this year … is reflective of the dynamic change that the UAE art and design industry is witnessing, with young creators resolute in making their bold design ideas a reality.”

Defined benefit and defined contribution schemes explained

Defined Benefit Plan (DB)

A defined benefit plan is where the benefit is defined by a formula, typically length of service to and salary at date of leaving.

Defined Contribution Plan (DC) 

A defined contribution plan is where the benefit depends on the amount of money put into the plan for an employee, and how much investment return is earned on those contributions.

French Touch

Carla Bruni

(Verve)

Director: Laxman Utekar

Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Akshaye Khanna, Diana Penty, Vineet Kumar Singh, Rashmika Mandanna

Rating: 1/5

The biog:

Languages: Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, basic Russian 

Favourite food: Pizza 

Best food on the road: rice

Favourite colour: silver 

Favourite bike: Gold Wing, Honda

Favourite biking destination: Canada 

In numbers

1,000 tonnes of waste collected daily:

  • 800 tonnes converted into alternative fuel
  • 150 tonnes to landfill
  • 50 tonnes sold as scrap metal

800 tonnes of RDF replaces 500 tonnes of coal

Two conveyor lines treat more than 350,000 tonnes of waste per year

25 staff on site

 

Updated: January 09, 2023, 3:00 AM