How does the pandemic end?Endgame Omicron Cloud Prediction

Even if Omicron complicates the question of when this will happen, the pandemic will eventually end. But it’s not like switching on a lamp. The world needs to learn to coexist with an indelible virus.

The hypercontagious Omicron variant is causing confusion as it pushes cases to the highest level ever and the exhausted world struggles to stop its spread again. But this time, we’re not starting from scratch.

Vaccines do not always prevent mild infections, but they provide strong protection from serious illnesses. Omicron does not appear to be as deadly as some previous variants. And those who survive it will gain some new protection against other forms of the virus that are still circulating, and perhaps the emergence of the next mutant.

The latest variant is a warning about what will continue to happen “unless we really take it seriously late in the game,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health.

“Surely COVID will be with us forever,” Ko added. “COVID can never be eradicated or eliminated, so we need to identify our goals.”

At some point, the World Health Organization will determine when enough countries have sufficient, or at least reduced hospitalization and death, of COVID-19 cases to declare that the pandemic has officially ended. It is not clear what exactly that threshold will be.

If that happens, some parts of the world, especially low-income countries that lack adequate vaccines and treatments, will still struggle, while others call it an “endemic” condition. Easily migrate to things.

Infectious disease expert Steven Kistler of Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health said these are vague distinctions. He defines the duration of endemic disease as reaching “a kind of acceptable steady state” to deal with COVID-19.

The Omicron crisis shows that we aren’t there yet, but “I think we’ll reach where the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is, just as the influenza epidemic is.” He said.

For comparison, COVID-19 killed more than 800,000 Americans in two years, while influenza typically kills 12,000 to 52,000 people annually.

How long the world will endure the ongoing illness and death of COVID-19 is not a scientific issue, but primarily a social issue.

Dr. Ameshua Dalha, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Health Security Center, said: “We need to get people to think about risk tolerance.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease expert in the United States, looks forward to controlling the virus in a way that “doesn’t disrupt society and the economy.”

Already, the United States has signaled that it is on the road to a new normal. The Biden administration says there are enough tools (vaccine boosters, new therapies, masking) to handle even the threat of Omicron without an initial shutdown of the pandemic. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reduced the amount of time COVID-19 people have to be isolated to prevent others from getting sick to five days.

India has a glimpse of what it would be like to reach stable levels of COVID-19. Until recently, cases reported daily remained less than 10,000 for 6 months, but only after “too traumatic to calculate” living expenses caused by previous delta variants, Christian Medical said. Dr. T. Jacob John, a former director of the College’s Department of Virology, said. Southern India.

Omicron is now again helping to increase the number of cases, and in January the country plans to deploy vaccine boosters for frontline workers. However, John said other endemic diseases such as influenza and measles will cause outbreaks on a regular basis, and the coronavirus will burn frequently even after Omicron has passed.

Omicron is so mutated that it bypasses some of the protection of vaccination and previous infections. However, Dr. William Moss of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hopes that “this virus will be maximal to some extent” in its ability to make such a major evolutionary jump. “I don’t think this is like an endless cycle of new variants.”

One of the future possibilities many experts see: During the post-pandemic period, the virus becomes a serious illness, depending on overall health, vaccine status, and previous infections. I have a cold. Mutations may continue and eventually require frequent boosters that are updated to better match new variants.

But the human immune system will continue to improve with cognition and counterattack. Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, finds hope in the body’s amazing ability to remember previously seen bacteria and create defense-in-depth.

Memory B cells are one of those layers that have lived in the bone marrow for years and are ready to take action as needed and produce more antibodies. But first those memory cells are trained in a boot camp of the immune system called germinal center and learn more than make a copy of the original antibody.

In a new study, Ellebedy’s team found that the Pfizer vaccine activates “T helper cells” that act as drill sergeants in these training camps, making them more diverse and powerful that may function even if the virus changes again. It was discovered to promote antibody production.

According to Ellebedy, baseline herd immunity has been significantly improved, which will reduce serious illness, hospitalization, and mortality, regardless of the next variant, even if breakthrough infections inevitably persist.

“We are not the same as the population in December 2019,” he said. “Now I’m in a different position.”

Think of a wildfire that cuts through the forest after a drought, he said. It was 2020. Now, even Omicron is “not a completely dry land”, but when it is sufficiently moist, “the fire has become difficult to spread”.

He foresaw a few days at home when someone was infected with the coronavirus. I hope it will be late. “