It All Crystalized When My Family Caught Covid-19

Many parts of the developing world continue to struggle to contain Covid-19, even as the West begins to open back up. I live in South Africa, and my family came down with Covid last week. Of course, it wasn’t such a great surprise, since almost everyone we know here has had one or more family member infected. But it became clear to me, as we continue to self-isolate at home, that in the face of the delta variant of the coronavirus, the West must realize that it is only if it abandons its vaccine selfishness can it truly provide security to its own population. We in the Global South must be vaccinated too if those in the Global North want to get back their normal life.

Here’s what happened to my family. With the onset of winter in the southern hemisphere, children of all ages are getting wintertime sniffles. When our two-and-a-half-year-old son came down with a fever and cough two weeks ago, we thought it was a run-of-the-mill toddler cold. Then, the cold spread to my wife and our son’s caregiver. The penny dropped when my wife lost her sense of taste and smell, and a subsequent test confirmed that she had contracted Covid.

From our experience, the most frightening thing about the delta variant is that it shows up in children like a typical winter cold. Our son was the likely vector of our family’s infection. There is no way to be…