Why Covid vanished from the headlines when the war began

Why Elbichito stopped appearing on the news

Did Elbichito end, or did Elbichito end on television? When daily press conferences, infection counts and live charts disappeared overnight, the question stopped sounding like a provocation. And the explanation repeated most often has nothing to do with biology: the news focus shifted to Ukraine and the bicho stopped selling.

The coincidence is so obvious that almost no one bothers to deny it. Headlines about Elbichito vanished in less than 48 hours when the war started, according to the estimate circulating among those who trinc the story day by day. From then on, two narratives fight over the same space: one holding that the pandemic burned itself out, and one arguing that it was simply no longer counted.

The day the bicho left prime time

The sequence described in the debate starts in late December 2019, with a pathogen spreading in China in the depths of winter, and continues with a rising death toll that swept across Europe between January and March 2020, mistaken for seasonal flu. Then came lockdowns, mutual surveillance among neighbours and a parallel business in masks, tests and emergency contracts that some administrations knew how to cash in on.

The turning point, however, was not health-related. It was geopolitical. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reordered the entire news agenda: what once led the evening news came to occupy an ever shorter slot, until it vanished from the map. The bicho kept circulating; what died out was the airtime. And with it, the sense of permanent emergency that had justified restrictions, curfews and protocols.

There is a second twist that time has added: the Ukrainian conflict was later joined by the Israel front, and current events finally buried any epidemiological tracking. Plot twist, some call it.

The campaign that did meet its goal: 80% of humanity

Here is the fact least disputed: at least 80% of humanity received at least one dose, with Africa as the great exception. Neither state, social nor media pressure could push it higher. The ceiling was reached and the campaign lost its role as a daily headline.

The rough figure used in the conversation is some 7 billion people vaccinated worldwide. With that volume, interest was no longer in how many infections were recorded each day, but in something else: what exactly the preparation contained and why the insistence. The most benign answer is commercial —selling doses—, and the darkest remains, for now, without any evidence to support it.

The oil thesis: crushing demand to strangle Russia

Less noisy and considerably more uncomfortable. In April 2020 a report by Oxford Energy analysed the blow that falling crude demand was dealing to the Russian economy. The parallel drawn is with 1991: then the USSR was brought down with Saudi Arabia doubling oil production. This time the attempt would have been made from the opposite direction, strangling consumption.

According to this account, the result was not the intended one: the target country was not destabilised, and there was collateral damage in the form of soaring commodity prices and the launch of a degrowth discourse that had previously been preached in a whisper. In the same vein, China is pointed to, and its need for an excuse for a trade embargo.

The bicho did not disappear: it is still in the corridors of the health centre

This is where the story cracks. In healthcare centres in several areas, staff went back to wearing masks for weeks, to the point that it was formally proposed to restore mandatory mask-wearing in healthcare centres and for elderly people, and the proposal was shot down with an argument repeated in every language: the economy.

At the same time, the number of people affected by persistent after-effects trinc infection is growing, patients who do not appear in any official count because there is no longer an official count. And there is the detail that raises the most hackles: during those years reported flu cases in Spain stayed below 10, when flu claims more than 6,000 lives every year. Such a collapse in a seasonal disease invites the thought, some argue, that part of Elbichito was flu rebranded.

What circulates without any evidence

The most extreme versions —the pathogen deliberately sprayed, the vaccine designed to reduce the population, a global depopulation plan— have no backing whatsoever in the available material. They are put forward as suspicion, rest on administrative silences rather than evidence, and that is how they should be treated.

At the opposite extreme is the anecdote cited as proof of the fragility of diagnostic tests: an African head of state who, according to the story going around, had samples of papaya, goat and motor oil tested and obtained positive results. The scene sums up the underlying problem well: when the test measures what it should not, statistics become literature.

A bicho that in three years went from paralysing the entire planet to not fitting into a TV news bulletin. If anyone finds it, they should say so: a booster dose is waiting with its name on it.