The ultra-infectious Omicron mutant is pushing cases to an all-time high and causing chaos as an exhausted world struggles, again, to stop the spread. But this time, we’re not starting from scratch.
Vaccines provide strong protection against serious disease, even though they do not always prevent a mild infection. Omicron doesn’t sound as deadly as some of the earlier variants. And those who survive it will have some refreshing protection against other forms of the virus that are still spreading – and perhaps the next mutant to emerge as well.
“Unless we get really serious about the endgame, the latest edition is a warning about what will happen,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health.
“Of course COVID will always be with us,” Ko said. “We will never be able to eradicate or eliminate COVID, so we have to identify our goals.”
At some point, the World Health Organization will determine when enough countries have reduced their COVID-19 cases enough – or at least, hospitalizations and deaths – to be officially declared a pandemic. For. Exactly what that limit will be is not clear.
Even if that happens, some parts of the world will still struggle – particularly low-income countries that lack adequate vaccines or treatments – while others more easily transition to what scientists call “endemic” states.
Those are vague distinctions, said Stephen Kistler, an infectious disease specialist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He defines endemic periods as reaching “some kind of acceptable steady state” for combating COVID-19.
The Omicron crisis shows that we are not there yet, but “I think we will get to the point where SARS-CoV-2 is endemic, like the flu is endemic,” he said.
For comparison, COVID-19 has killed more than 800,000 Americans in two years, while the flu typically kills between 12,000 and 52,000 per year.
Exactly how much of the COVID-19 disease and death the world will bear is largely a social question, not a scientific one.
“We’re not getting to the point where it is 2019 again,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We’ve got people to think about risk tolerance.”
America’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, looks forward to controlling the virus in a way “that doesn’t disrupt society, that doesn’t disrupt the economy.”
America is already sending signals that whatever will become the new normal is on the road. The Biden administration says it has enough equipment – vaccine boosters, new treatments and masking – to handle the Omicron threat even without the shutdown in the days before the pandemic. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reduced the amount of time people with COVID-19 must remain in isolation to just five days so they don’t make others sick, saying it has become clear that They are most contagious.
India offers a glimpse of how it wants to reach a stable level of COVID-19. Dr. T. Jacob John, former chief of virology at Christian Medical College, said that until recently, daily reported cases were less than 10,000 for six months, but “too painful to count” because of the earlier delta variant. Only after the cost of living. South India.
Omicron is now seeing a surge in cases again, and the country will prepare a vaccine booster for frontline workers in January. But John said other endemic diseases, such as the flu and measles, cause outbreaks from time to time and that the coronavirus will continue to flare up every now and then, even after Omicron passes away.
Omicron is so highly mutated that it outweighs some protection against vaccination or prior infection. But Dr William Moss of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health expects that “this virus will max out” in its ability to make such a huge evolutionary leap. “I don’t see it as an endless cycle of new forms.”
One possible future many experts see: in the post-pandemic period, the virus causes colds for some and more severe illness for others, depending on their overall health, vaccine status, and prior infection. Mutations will continue and eventually boosters may be needed each time they are updated to better match new variants.
But the human immune system will continue to get better at recognizing and fighting back. Ali Elebedy, immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, finds hope in the body’s amazing ability to remember previously seen germs and create multi-layer defenses.
Memory B cells are one of those layers, cells that live in the bone marrow for years, ready to swing into action and produce more antibodies when needed. But before those memory cells are trained in immune system boot camps called germinal centers, they learn to do more than make copies of their native antibodies.
In a new study, Elebedy’s team found that the Pfizer vaccination modifies the “T helper cells” that act as drill sergeants in those training camps, producing more diverse and stronger antibodies that can fight the virus again. Might work even when replaced.
Elebedi said baseline population immunity has improved so much that even if breakthrough infections inevitably continue, serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths will decline – regardless of the next version.
“We are not the same population we were in December of 2019,” he said. “It’s a different land now.”
He said that think of the forest fire after the drought. That was 2020. Now, even with Omicron, “it’s not completely dry land,” but so wet “that it made it harder for the fire to spread.”
He imagines a day when someone gets coronavirus infection, stays at home for two to three days” and then you move on. Hopefully this will be the endgame.”
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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