W.H.O. has scary prediction for 20 years from now for Washington.

Well, here we are. It's been a few years since COVID-19 brought a screeching halt to our society and changed the way we live. The virus is still out there, but we're not seeing it in the kinds of numbers that were so frightening when it first began. 

It seems like we've come to a point where we can step back and just relax for a little bit. Not so fast, the world health organization is out with another dire warning regarding the novel coronavirus that put us in a tailspin in 2020. 

here is what the report said.
this new report from the W.H.O. says that we're still living through a pandemic all around the world and we're not out of the woods yet. 

msn.com reported at a news briefing, 
“We don’t necessarily know how often we’re getting infected,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of W.H.O’s emerging diseases, “Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, pulmonary impairment, neurologic impairment? It’s year five in the pandemic, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about it.” 

Because so many people probably are carrying the virus, even if they aren't showing symptoms, there is still a chance that they can spread it to others. And that is why the international health community is concerned that large gatherings during the holiday season may have exposed a lot of people to the virus. 

According to health reports, the dominant strain, (JN.1), has been spreading through the US and the CDC backs this up. 
“The continued growth of JN.1 suggests that it is either more transmissible or better at evading our immune systems, the rapid growth of JN.1 compared with other variants raises the question of whether this variant might drive an incremental increase in infections." 

So, what about Washington State?
Like many states in our country, one of our problems is that there are a high number of people who are symptomatic and just aren't getting tested. It's all about COVID fatigue. Everybody is just tired of thinking about it. The whole idea of reinstituting COVID protocols and social distancing is just keeping people from taking it seriously. 

If symptomatic people don't get tested, there is little hope that asymptomatic people are aware that they even have it. And that's what really makes the spread possible. We run the risk of an increase in hospitalizations and death.