Covid-19 has shown what modern biomedicine can do

THE NUMBER of deaths officially attributed to covid-19 now stands somewhere over 2.5m. It is a terrible toll, but hardly an unprecedented one. The ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic has killed between ten and 20 times as many worldwide. The death toll from the influenza pandemic of 1968 is believed to have been similar to that of covid-19, with a range of 1m to 4m, and until the past year you would have been hard put to find a mention of it outside a medical text. Similarly the flu of 1957. Yet covid-19 has had social, economic and political impacts beyond those of any other health crisis in modern history.