Yes, everyone really is sick a lot more often after COVID

Yes, everyone really is sick a lot more often after COVID - Published June 14, 2024

Since February, Kathy Xiang and her entire family has been under siege.

Her 12-year-old daughter has had whooping cough, rhinovirus and parainfluenza: She’s missed more than five weeks of school in total. Xiang, a software developer in Shanghai, caught all three too. Her elderly parents, who were helping care for her 10-month-old, tested positive for COVID-19 in early March, and her father got shingles.

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Then the baby caught parainfluenza and pneumonia, necessitating five days on an IV drip. “I was literally numb after the baby boy got sick despite all our efforts to protect him,” Xiang said. “I was physically and mentally exhausted.”

Around the world, a post-COVID reality is beginning to sink in: Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often.

At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins, according to analysis by Bloomberg News and London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd.

The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least 10 times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.

The post-COVID global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way COVID lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.

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COVID-19 is the first major global pandemic in the era of modern medicine, so there’s little precedent for what comes after. “The last major devastating flu pandemic was in 1918. There was no vaccination, no diagnostics or treatments. So we are in a new territory here,” said Jeremy Farrar, World Health Organization’s chief scientist.