San Francisco usually experiences an eerie change in January. The city’s casually dressed residents are suddenly infiltrated by thousands of suits, delegates at the annual JPMorgan healthcare conference. This year the conference was held online but the dissonance remained. In the real world, politicians assure us that vaccines herald the beginning of the end of the pandemic. We can hope to see relatives soon. Summer holiday bookings in Europe have surged.
Yet in the virtual world of the conference, the healthcare industry was preparing for an enduring war on Covid. “We do believe more so than we did, let’s say four to six months ago, that there will be a level of testing that will continue certainly through FY ’22,” said Tom Polen, chief executive of Becton Dickinson, the New Jerseybased manufacturer of syringes and tests.
Another two years of this? If anything, that is optimistic, according to Stephen Tang, chief executive of OraSure Technologies, a rival diagnostics company. “The need to have tests available to continue to test for Covid-19 will last well beyond 2022, certainly in the sophisticated economies,” said Mr Tang. “And then for the low- and middle-income countries, perhaps well into 2027 or 2030, unfortunately. But I think that’s the state of play for this virus and the world populations.”