Where Omicron is leading us
THE Omicron variant has pushed the pandemic into its most dramatic phase yet. Since it was discovered, it has overtaken Delta with lightning speed as the globally dominant variant.
For two years, the coronavirus kept mutating to become more transmissible and now Omicron is by far the most transmissible version of this virus. What we are experiencing might be near the limit of how spread able this virus can become.
While Omicron is kicking the pandemic into overdrive, this does not necessarily mean the global health crisis has worsened.
An epidemic is when a pathogen infects people en masse and a health crisis is when people sufferen masse from serious illness. Many bugs, like the common cold, widely infect people without burdening healthcare systems. The good news about Omicron is that it seems somewhat like that.
Compared to all other versions of COVID-19, especially Delta, Omicron infections for the last two months are producing a very low rate of severe illness and deaths. However, we haven’t had enough time yet to see how so-called “long COVID” manifests with Omicron.
Persistent health complications have been common in people with mild COVID-19 symptoms, so Omicron’s inherent mildness might not prevent that sort of long-term damage.
There is plenty of evidence that pathogens naturally evolve to become less dangerous for their hosts, likely because people who fall ill from a virus isolate themselves and, in case of fatalities, the virus also dies due to not having living cells to infect.
Compared to the other COVID-19 variants like Delta, the Omicron virus replicates less in the lungs, the source of severe illness, and more in the upper airways, where its impact is mild but is able to jump to other hosts.
This is what many preliminary studies have concluded while trying to account for the breakneck speed at which Omicron is spreading. Omicron probably represents COVID-19’s transition into an ordinary cold, like some other corona viruses.
Researchers also suggest that, while immunity gained from infection with Delta and other variants offers little protection against Omicron, after being infected with Omicron, people have very strong immunity against Delta.
Omicron is therefore probably pushing other COVID-19 variants into decline. When you get Omicron out of the picture, Delta is the main threat. So, by being less of a threat than Delta, Omicron could be providing relief from the health crisis.
Unfortunately, while a smaller proportion of people infected with Omicron might suffer a bad outcome, the fact that people are getting infected with Omicron in much bigger numbers than before in the pandemic might cancel that out, allowing a disastrous amount of deaths and illnesses to occur anyway.
If so, the global health crisis isn’t really dissipating at present. While inherent transmissibility might be allowing Omicron to spread faster than its predecessors ever did, what enables that spread is Omicron’s ability to infect people who already have COVID-19 immunity from both prior infection and vaccination.
That means the immunity the world’s population must have acquired after two years of the pandemic and one year of mass vaccination is no longer so protective anymore.
So, after all that we have endured, the health crisis might end up being extended further, with the total number of Omicron infections overwhelming healthcare systems and causing people to suffer and die in vast numbers.
If we try to fight Omicron by administering boosters or upgrading vaccines to make them effective against Omicron, the whole campaign to vaccinate the world will have to start all over again – and won’t be nearly fast enough for Omicron’s spread.
Whether or not Omicron is more good than bad is being debated. Some say we should let Omicron spread freely instead of mandating masking, social distancing and lockdowns again.
However, everyone’s hope is that Omicron wipes out Delta, ie, what matters is Omicron’s advantage over Delta.
The measures we take to keep Covid-19 at bay cover both Delta and Omicron. If we do everything we can to suppress the spread of COVID-19, Delta may still lose out to competition from Omicron, but the impact both virus strains have on us will be limited.
Still, in my opinion, governments are overreacting when they crack down on anti-lockdown protests. These dissenter’s demands now have some merit.
We may be in the darkest hour before dawn. Omicron’s fertility is causing a massive surge of the pandemic, but it will be short-lived as most of the world’s population quickly gains immunity from infection with Omicron.
And, if all the research scientists have managed to do so far is correct, this immunity will protect against all forms of COVID-19, bringing the pandemic to an end, assuming no further variant arises with ability to bypass this immunity. The challenge for us is to minimize the human toll while this natural procession of the virus plays itself out.
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
