Omicron could head for a rapid decline in the US and UK

Scientists are seeing signals that the alarming Omicron wave of COVID-19 has peaked in the UK and is trying to do the same in the United States. At that point, cases can begin to decline dramatically.

Reason: This variant is so contagious that there may be a shortage of infected people only one and a half months after it was first detected in South Africa.

“It will go down as fast as it goes up,” said Professor Ali Mokudad. health Chemometrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic will unfold. The stagnation and decline of both countries are not occurring everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And even if the drop-off passes, the misery of weeks or months is still ahead for patients and overwhelming hospitals.

“Many people are still infected when we go down the back slope,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, with reported cases peaking within a week. I expect to reach it.

According to the University of Washington’s own highly influential model, the number of cases reported daily in the United States reached 1.2 million by January 19, after which “everyone who could be infected will be infected.” “For just a reason,” Mokudad said, a sharp decline.

In fact, he said, according to complex calculations at the university, the true number of new daily infections in the United States (estimated including those who have never been tested) has already peaked at 600 on January 6th. He said he had reached 10,000.

Meanwhile, in the UK, government data show that the number of new COVID-19 cases surged to more than 200,000 earlier this month and then dropped to about 140,000 per day last week.

Kevin McConway, a former professor of applied statistics at the Open University in the UK, said the outbreak may have peaked in London, while incidents are still on the rise, such as in southwest England and the West Midlands. Said.

The numbers raise expectations that both countries are about to witness what happened in South Africa, where the waves culminated at record heights and fell sharply about a month later.

“Although the number of cases is definitely decreasing in the UK, we hope to reduce it further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine. At the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Differences between the UK and South Africa, such as older people in the UK and the tendency to spend more time indoors in the winter, can mean a bigger outbreak for this and other countries.

Meanwhile, the UK authorities’ decision to adopt minimal restrictions on Omicron is much faster than the Western European countries, where the virus preys on the population and imposes stricter COVID-19 controls, such as France. It may be possible to do so. Spain and Italy.

Shabir Mahdi, Dean health Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa said that European countries that impose blockades do not always pass through the less infected Omicron waves. The case can spread over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there were 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “regionally-wide tsunami.” WHO quoted modeling of Mokudad’s group, which predicts that half of the European population will be infected with Omicron within about eight weeks.

But by that time, hunters and others are hoping that the world will overcome the Omicron surge.

“There may be some ups and downs along the way, but we hope we’ll get out of it by Easter,” said Hunter.

Still, the vast number of infected people can be overwhelmed by vulnerable medical systems, said Dr. Prabert Jar, Global Health Research Center at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“In absolute numbers, so many people are infected that it will spread to the ICU and will be cruel in the coming weeks,” Jha said.

Mokudad also warned in the United States. “A couple of weeks will be tough. We have to make difficult decisions to keep working, knowing that certain important workers can be infectious. Must be. “

Myers of the University of Texas said Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in a pandemic. Immunity from all new infections, along with new drugs and continuous vaccination, has the potential to make coronavirus easier for us to coexist.

“At the end of this wave, far more people will be infected with some variants of COVID,” Myers said. “At some point we will be able to draw a line — and Omicron may be at that point — we are a much more manageable disease than what is a catastrophic global threat. Move to something. “

She said it was one of the plausible futures, but new varieties (much worse than Omicron) could emerge.

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The Associated Press’s Department of Health Sciences is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is solely responsible for all content.