Nevertheless, scientists agree it’s too soon to assume the situation is under control.
In six months’ time, many richer countries will have made the transition from pandemic to endemic. But that doesn’t mean masks will be a thing of the past. We’ll need to grapple with our approach to booster shots, as well as the pandemic’s economic and political scars. There’s also the shadow of long Covid.
Is Covid-19 Here to Stay?
“There is a lot of happy talk that goes along the lines that omicron is a mild virus and it’s effectively functioning as an attenuated live vaccine that’s going to create massive herd immunity across the globe,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
“That’s flawed for a number of reasons.”
Experts now believe that the virus will never go away entirely, and instead will continue to evolve to create new waves of infection. Mutations are possible every time the pathogen replicates, so surging caseloads put everyone in danger.
The sheer size of the current outbreak means more hospitalizations, deaths and virus mutations are all but inevitable. Many people who are infected aren’t making it into the official statistics, either because a home test result isn’t formally recorded or because the infected person never gets tested at all.
Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle known for detecting early Covid cases and tracking the outbreak globally, estimates that only about 20% to 25% of omicron infections in the U.S. get reported.
With daily cases peaking at an average of more than 800,000 in mid-January, the number of underlying infections may have exceeded 3 million a day — or nearly 1% of the U.S. population, Bedford estimates. Since it takes five to 10 days to recover, as much as 10% of people in the country may have been infected at any one time.
He’s not alone in projecting astronomical numbers. At the current infection rate, computer modelling indicates more than half of Europe will have contracted omicron by mid-March, according to Hans Kluge, a regional director for the World Health Organization.