2022 update to “The start of the Austrian response to the COVID-19 crisis: a personal account”

Excerpt

Two years after my first personal account in this journal [1], Austria faces the fading of the 7th COVID wave. As of October 2022, since the beginning of the pandemic 21,000 Austrian patients had died from COVID and more than 90% of Austrians have developed immunity by infection or vaccination. The availability of highly protective mRNA vaccines and antiviral drugs and the evolution of various, increasingly infectious subtypes of the original Wuhan SARS-CoV‑2 strain, in particular alpha, delta and omicron, have led to a markedly different situation as compared to the beginnings of the pandemic. The overall estimations from February 2020 remain essentially valid today and the drastic response measures from March 2020, which were implemented in the absence of vaccines and therapeutic options, are hardly a matter of dispute. The early enthusiasm about the “Swedish approach” which led to “ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway and elderly people being administered morphine instead of oxygen” is mainly discussed in an ethical context [2]. Overall, immunity has developed in most countries worldwide by infection or vaccination, probably except for China where a zero COVID strategy is pursued, which still leads to lockdowns and severe interruption of supply chains worldwide. The public attention has moved on to the Ukrainian-Russian war and despite high case numbers, with few exceptions, only few mandatory public measures are effectively in place. The burden of disease in terms of intensive care unit (ICU) patients and hospital admission remains relatively low due to a decoupling of cases and morbidity. …