According to what criteria? Case counts seem to be going down in most parts of the world right now. And some parts never had a big problem. All of Africa has few cases, and countries like Vietnam, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand (to name a few) are doing great.
There is no need to have the world vaccinated in order to have a Worlds. If no cases develop out of the recent US Nationals that used ISU protocols, that makes Worlds even more likely.
Our vaccination program in Australia won't even start until mid-February at the earliest. Africa may be doing well overall, but South Africa has a very, very, very large number of cases, as a matter of fact, and their vaccination program is moving very slowly. France cannot seem to figure out how to get their vaccination program to gather speed. Germany is also taking longer than they thought they would. It's just come out that Switzerland, which has only just started doing enough to bring their case numbers down from 5,000 per day at last, won't get the majority of their vaccines until June/July. These are all fairly large countries, and with the exception of South Africa, have fairly large skating teams that might get sent to Worlds. And even South Africa has one or two skaters who might become eligible if the TES minimum criteria are revised enough.
And overall case counts are starting to come down at the moment, yes, which is good, but we need to remember that those numbers are a picture of what was happening two weeks ago, not what's going on right now. We also need to remember that within those overall case counts, numbers of variant strain cases (the UK variant, the South Africa variant, the Brazil variant and others) are rising, and to date it seems that these variants are all more communicable - it takes less contact for infection to occur and one infected person is likely to infect more people. At least one of them, the South Africa strain, is also an antibody-escape strain, meaning that people who've been sick recently and still have antibodies may be able to get sick all over again if they come into contact with it. These have been described as having the potential to be come 'a pandem!c within the pandem!c', because the current measures in most countries are designed to protect against the previously dominant strain, not against these more transmissible variants with higher R numbers. For example, a lot of countries are still trying to keep some schools open...and ski slopes,
Switzerland...but schools have been shown to be a big driver of b117 (UK variant) spread. If one or more variants become dominant in a country that hasn't yet moved to more stringent protective measures until their vaccination programs do become widespread enough to make an impact, we're likely to see the daily case numbers that are dropping now start to rise again - very fast - and not long after that the death counts rise with them.
This is not purely theoretical, by the way. The UK and South African variants are in community transmission in many European countries already. There are currently 5,000 people in quarantine in Belgium because one woman went on a ski trip to Switzerland and contracted the South African variant there, and then went home and infected others. It's estimated that as of two weeks ago approximately 20% of cases in the Geneva region were the UK variant. Both are established in France and I think Germany as well, and they'll be in plenty of other countries that I don't track so closely too by now.
We all want the situation to be simple, the vaccines to flow like water and the world to go back to how it was, skating competitions and all, but the truth is that it's a lot more complex than you're representing it as, with a lot more moving parts that can go very very wrong already when given the slightest chance to, and it's going to keep on bowling googlies at us for a long time yet. As Norman Swan has been saying since the whole thing kicked off: it's not viruses that cause pandem!cs, it's human behaviour, and by trying to run big international sporting events with as little disruption as possible just because it's what we're used to and want to do (or because it brings in money, thank you Tennis Australia), we are exemplifying the kind of human behaviour that not only causes pandem!cs but has the potential to keep them going on for longer than they otherwise might.
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