These countries plan to live with Covid-19

A handful of countries, including the United States, are paving the way for a future where Covid-19 has taken a back seat.

Even as the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus propels new infections around the world, these governments hope their high vaccination rates will protect many of those most vulnerable to the disease, allowing a return to more normal lives.

It’s a future where officials hope they can treat the coronavirus like the flu, which causes tens of thousands of deaths in the United States each year without causing damaging economic lockdowns. Vaccines are the key: Covid-19 causes many more deaths from infection than the flu, but vaccines dramatically reduce people’s chances of catching the coronavirus and the severity of the disease if they do.

The virus will remain a reality, however. “It’s a virus we’re going to have to learn to live with, and we’re going to have to learn to manage and we’re going to have Covid-19 patients for the foreseeable future,” said Edward A. Stenehjem, infectious disease specialist at Intermountain Healthcare in Murray, Utah, where cases resulting from the Delta variant have increased in recent times.

These heavily vaccinated countries are exceptions in a world where most have largely unvaccinated populations. Their authorities’ appetite for risk varies, even across jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, but vaccinations break with a pattern seen earlier in the pandemic when rising rates of cases inevitably led to a tightening of cases. restrictions.