Omicron: COVID-19’s great leap forward
NEVER has the course of the COVID-19 pandemic changed so dramatically as in the Omicron phase.
The world’s newest variant diverges heavily from all other forms of COVID-19, spreading so fast that scientists describe it as one of the most transmissible human pathogens known (rivaling measles), while also tending to make people it infects not as often seriously ill.
It illustrates the power of viral genetic evolution while the pandemic is still in play.
The coronavirus keeps getting better and better at driving the pandemic, so a vital question is how much it will change further.
There have to be limits to its capabilities, of course, just as there is constant pressure on predators and prey in the wild to evolve to run faster and yet, lions and gazelles have not actually kept getting faster and faster till reaching escape velocity and flying off Earth.
Still, Omicron is a great leap forward for COVID-19 and the virus’s genetic progress is unlikely to end here.
Learning what makes Omicron different and how it originated is needed to predict further developments in the pandemic.
Nearly three months in, a mountain of evidence about Omicron has been amassed, yet much uncertainty remains, such as whether Omicron affects children more seriously than COVID-19 used to, as cases suggest.
Omicron is apparently less of a lung virus and more of a nasal virus, explaining higher contagiousness and lower virulence, but children have narrow airways that infection can block easily, causing a condition called croup.
And Omicron’s ability to evade immunity remains a developing field.As for how Omicron’s characteristics emerged in the first place, its lower virulence is likely because people can spread the virus better if they are not too sick.
This is encouraging news in the long-run, because COVID-19 will likely settle down as a mild disease once it becomes endemic.
But the pandemic is currently in one of its most serious phases, with Omicron’s prodigious spread causing all-time high hospitalizations and deaths in many parts of the world.
Currently, a decline in COVID-19’s spread is happening, which may be because winter is ending.
The upcoming summer may suppress Omicron.Just how much remains to be seen.By now, COVID-19 is a vastly different situation than it was in the early days of 2020.But one thing remains familiar.
Every time a new, more threatening variant emerges on the scene, humanity relives the experience of when COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan and proliferated globally.
Again, we see closed borders and travel bans as countries desperately try to stave off the virus’s arrival and, again, the world has to deal with a threatening disease which it as yet knows very little about, therefore imposing a broad range of harsh precautions on people.
No variant has recreated this experience more than Omicron, with the enormous impact it started having immediately after first appearing.
Lessons of the pandemic’s beginning, therefore, continue to be relevant for the present and for each new variant and lineage that makes headway.
For example, some versions of COVID-19 may become particularly widespread not because of their inherent abilities but due to the founder effect, when one population happens to arrive first in an environment and so has a head start over others.
From the very beginning, three subtypes of Omicron were documented, BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3.BA.1 is what spread widely, but BA.2 is now catching up.Scientists say the latter is more contagious.If so, its delayed spread might be because BA.1 got access to the outside world first.
The delay in finding out a new variant’s characteristics is a serious liability given the need to make the right preparations prior to its arrival, so this ability must be approved.
When a new variant like Omicron appears, it will likely tend to take days before we can assess its transmissibility, weeks to assess its virulence, and months to assess its ability to evade immunity (whether to prior variants or itself).
Fortunately, at the very beginning, scientists correctly made broad forecasts about Omicron’s impact just by examining its molecular structure.
This shows the headway science is making on this issue.Many believe Omicron represents COVID-19’s final stage before becoming endemic.
If it quickly infects most people in the world, as its trajectory suggests, herd immunity should be achieved and COVID-19 will finally run out of steam.
However, Omicron’s extremely high prevalence also gives more opportunity than ever before for COVID-19 mutations to rise to new variants.
And while there is a worldly limit to how effective this virus can be at spreading, one thing that does not have any limit is how many times it can change its molecular structure to escape immune recognition (how the world’s entire diversity of viruses came toexist).
Immune evasion may from now on be the key factor.With so many people now having immunity, immense pressure exists on COVID-19 to adapt to this.
Every infection gives it a chance.Preventing infection via vaccination is, therefore, our only hope to hasten the end of this pandemic.
But vaccinating the world fast enough is a seemingly impossible challenge.How this may be achieved will be tackled in my next article.
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
