Unfortunately, we have to declare winners - and losers

The pandemic is certainly not over, as BA.2 and rising case counts in South Korea and Hong Kong have demonstrated. But a two-year anniversary feels like an appropriate time to reflect. To be honest, I hate this exercise. After going through a global pandemic, it feels wrong to think about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. But we must.
If for no other reason than to remind ourselves of how far we have come. And if we’re being truthful: because learning from mistakes can be informative. So, here are my top three ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ from the last two years.

Science won. After all, science invented the vaccines that have saved countless lives. Science sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus in record time. Science conducted the clinical trials. Science continues to drive research into areas like long COVID and drive development of monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutics that may one day render COVID-19 a simple nuisance that can be managed.

Public health lost. Not because the epidemiologists, disease modellers and all the rest of the valiant public health community didn’t try their absolute darndest. But because public health forgot that providing guidance and making broad, sweeping decisions is not enough. You have to explain the guidance and the decisions. And you have to be vulnerable. You have to tell people that you might be wrong and that you are definitely going to make mistakes. And you have to tell people before you make the mistakes. Not after.

Healthcare and frontline workers won. They reminded us of true sacrifice. Many succumbed to this virus. They gave a new meaning to the word ‘essential worker’. In the early days of 2020, many of these heroes went to work without PPE and came home to sleep in basements or garages for months on end so that they would not end up infecting family members. They toiled for months without a day off and they witnessed unspeakable death. And, after the vaccines were made available, they endured harassment and vitriol for simply doing their jobs by trying to jab people who wanted to be protected.

Big tech lost. Yes, I’m looking at Google and Twitter and Facebook. And others too. The promise of contact tracing apps and virtual healthcare did not fully come to fruition. But the biggest reason that big tech lost is due to the rampant mis- and disinformation that its platforms all incubated and ultimately spewed forth into our lives. Yes, content moderation is hard. We get it. Too bad. Figure it out. Allowing people to claim that the government is injecting microchips into your skin or other such nonsense is beyond the pale. Leaning on free speech as your defence for horrible misdirection and blatant lying is inexcusable.

The elderly, the young and the vulnerable won. I know you may disagree and I know it doesn’t feel like it, but hear me out. Despite ongoing inequities between the healthy and the vulnerable, the catastrophic loss of life of those in nursing homes and the continued revelation of the damage that children and teens underwent over the last two years, these groups all became a bigger part of the societal conversation. This pandemic reminded us that we must consider the collective.  This pandemic forced us to think about all the 80-year-olds and the cancer survivors and the transplant recipients and the millions of grade school/high school kids in ways we never had before. This pandemic reminded us that contributing to society is not just about people having a job or running a business or paying taxes.
   
Public trust in each other, our institutions and government lost. You can argue that public trust was not that high to begin with. But that would be missing the point.  Between March 2020 and March 2022, it got worse. A lot worse. Challenging lawmakers and institutions is acceptable and even required for a well-functioning democracy. But violent protest, vehicle blockades and threats of bodily harm are all signs that our trust in each other and our institutions has eroded to a dangerous level.

There were many, many other winners and losers. Too many to mention, in fact. For those that follow economic game theory, you will recognise an unmistakable and depressing fact about zero-sum game scenarios: when the total gains of the winners and the total losses of the losers are added up, they sum to zero. In other words, we are just gaining and losing from the same ‘pie’. Advancement in one area is, by definition, offset with loss in another.
And, sadly, this is probably the most revealing fact about the COVID-19 pandemic.