What Does the Omicron Variant Tell Us About the End of the Pandemic

Whether or not COVID can be completely eradicated from the planet, the pandemic will eventually come to an end. meaning, there will be a time when ICUs are no longer exceeding capacity, when social distancing and mask mandates are a thing of the past. 

Though with a new, highly contagious variant sweeping across the world, to many, the end seems far off. The ultra-contagious Omicron variant is pushing case numbers to all-time highs; however, the variant seems to be less severe than previous strains. 

Plus, this time, nearly 60 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Vaccines help to curve some of the more severe symptoms, even if they don’t always prevent mild infections.

“Certainly, COVID will be with us forever,” Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, tells Associated Press. “We’re never going to 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 tamped down their COVID-19 cases sufficiently—or at least, hospitalizations and deaths—to declare the pandemic officially over. Exactly what that threshold will be isn’t clear.

While countries with low infection and death rates will enter an “endemic” state, lower income countries with little access to vaccines will continue to struggle. 

They’re fuzzy distinctions, says infectious disease expert Stephen Kissler of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He defines the endemic period as reaching “some sort of acceptable steady state” to deal with COVID-19.

The Omicron crisis shows we’re not there yet but, he claims, “I do think we will reach a point where SARS-CoV-2 is endemic much like flu is endemic.” 

For instance, the flu kills anywhere from 12,000 to 52,000 Americans a year, while COVID has killed over 800,000 Americans in the last two years. 

“We’re not going to get to a point where it’s 2019 again,” says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Associated Press. “We’ve got to get people to think about risk tolerance.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, is looking ahead to controlling the virus in a way “that does not disrupt society, that does not disrupt the economy,” according to the associated press.

Exactly how much continuing COVID-19 illness and death the world will put up with is largely a social question, not a scientific one.

One potential future many experts see is the virus causing colds for some, and more serious infections to others, depending on vaccination status, previous infections, and their overall health. Human immune systems will continue to get better at recognizing COVID-19 and fighting back. 

Immunologist Ali Ellebedy at Washington University at St. Louis finds hope in the body’s amazing ability to remember germs it’s seen before and create multi-layer defenses. Ellebedy says baseline population immunity has improved so much that even as breakthrough infections inevitably continue, there will be a drop in severe illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths—regardless of the next variant.