Maybe someday Covid-19 will be just another common cold

This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a zombie invasion of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here.Today’s Agenda Let’s hope Covid keeps getti [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a zombie invasion of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Agenda - Let’s hope [Covid keeps getting milder](. - Nationalism is [undermining global democracy](. - This is [the Fed’s big chance](. - OPEC+ is [propping up oil prices](. Coronaviruses: Gotta Catch ’Em All? Just before the start of the 20th century, about a million people, out of a global population of just 1.5 billion, died in a pandemic that lasted from 1889 to about 1895. The first couple of years were the worst, but it kept flaring up for a few more years before it finally petered out. Sounds painfully familiar. Today the virus that caused that pandemic is still with us as a [common cold](, according to one popular theory. It’s mild and even helps young children build up resistance to other coronaviruses. It’s as if, 131 years after a zombie invasion, we ended up with little zombie house pets. The hope is that the Covid-19 coronavirus plaguing the world today will be similarly domesticated at some point. Could the omicron variant be the first sign of that happening? It’s far too early to tell. But Faye Flam points out that the early evidence is it [may share a couple of key characteristics with the common cold](: It spreads fast but generally doesn’t cause severe illness. But I am knocking on wood with one hand as I type that with the other. Even a relatively mild virus can swamp hospitals if it infects too many people. Though acquired immunity tamed the zombie bug of 1890, that was a lengthy process without vaccines. Today we have the luxury of many, many shots that could speed things up. We just need to get them in people’s arms as soon as possible, Faye writes. Of course, while we’re busy cooking up vaccines, the virus is using Waze to find routes around them. Omicron is likely one result, and [there are probably more to come](, pandemic expert Richard Hatchett tells Michael Lewis. The vaccinated will [likely need third and maybe fourth shots](, write Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli. But will fifth, sixth and 27th shots be necessary? Not if the virus turns into a common-cold-like bug. In that case, we’ll all be glad to catch ’em all, like Pokémon. Little zombie Pokémon. Bonus Health-Care Reading: It sure would be [nice to finally have an FDA chief]( in these trying times. — Bloomberg’s editorial board Democracy Has Its Own Pandemic The U.S. just got through hosting a “summit for democracy,” which is a bit like the crew of the Titanic hosting a “summit for staying afloat.” [Democracy’s]( about to [hit an iceberg]( here, is all I’m saying. The ideology has some problems specific to America, cough Donald Trump cough, but it has at least one common enemy throughout the world, writes Pankaj Mishra: a [virulent strain of nationalism]( that vilifies outsiders and encourages autocracy. That always ends well, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, if democracy-summit host President Joe Biden hopes to contain the world’s biggest nationalist threat at the moment, China, then he’ll have to [cozy up to some other less-than-democratic regimes](, writes Matthew Yglesias. Those include hyper-nationalistic India and still-autocratic Vietnam, among others. Sometimes when your boat’s sinking, you have to grab whatever is afloat. Further Democracy-in-Peril Reading: Devin Nunes [swapping Ways & Means for a job with Trump]( says a lot about today’s GOP. — Jonathan Bernstein Inflation Watch! Let Them Eat Cake Edition This summer, we had a little family get-together to celebrate my wife’s birthday. I had one job for this gala: procuring and presenting her birthday cake. It was a beautiful cake I had custom-made. I was very proud of the cake and also myself. When the time came, I lit the candles, carried it outside with a flourish, started leading assembled family members in singing “Happy Birthday,” and immediately dropped the cake on the deck. I had one job! Mohamed El-Erian thinks the Federal Reserve dropped the cake on inflation this year by insisting it was “transitory” when it was apparently not that. Now inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years, and Mohamed says the [Fed must clean up its mess]( by getting even tougher about inflation than markets expect. It should hurry up and stop buying bonds, to at least stop pumping more stimulus into the economy. John Authers is more forgiving of the Fed; everybody drops cakes sometimes, right? But he agrees the [Fed needs to attack inflation more vigorously](, as price increases are getting stickier. The bond market still seems unworried — though maybe it’s also baking in (get it?) an assumption the Fed will have to crush economic growth. Miraculously my wife’s birthday cake landed face-up. So we lifted it off the deck and ate it anyway. It was delicious and only modestly deformed. I am not yet divorced. The lesson for the Fed is that it’s never too late to make the best of a bad situation.  Further Inflation Reading: - Retailers have too much stock and too few workers. [We may get big discounts in January](. — Tara Lachapelle - Crypto is a [helpful but not perfect inflation hedge](. — Aaron Brown Telltale Charts Hooray, OPEC+, through inaction and vague menace, has [managed to keep oil prices from crashing](, writes Julian Lee. Harley-Davidson plans to [let its electric-motorcycle division run free]( by SPACing it, writes Brooke Sutherland. Further Reading Boris Johnson’s [escape artistry may finally have hit its limit](. — Martin Ivens Overturning Roe v. Wade would [cost the Supreme Court clout](, and that’s a good thing. — Ramesh Ponnuru Harvard is [stifling conservative voices](. — Naomi Schaefer Riley [New Zealand wants to ban tobacco](, which seems extreme but worth a try. — David Fickling Trump’s SPAC/PIPE deal basically [gives early investors free money](. — Matt Levine ICYMI The Northeast [struggles with another Covid surge](. OSHA is investigating [Amazon’s warehouse collapse](. Crypto’s nouveau riche are [moving to Puerto Rico](. Kickers Her Instagram handle was @metaverse. [Meta took it without warning](. Deep-sea robot catches rare [footage of a giant phantom jelly](. (h/t Ellen Kominers for the first two kickers) Scientists are [trying to hear dark matter](, because what we really need now are messages from eldritch abominations. [Lions get loose in a Chinese airport](, hilarity ensues. Notes:  Please send phantom jellies and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. 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