America Is Not Ready for Omicron

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The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.

By Ed Yong

America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.

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The real unknown is what an Omicron cross will do when it follows a Delta hook. Given what scientists have learned in the three weeks since Omicron’s discovery, “some of the absolute worst-case scenarios that were possible when we saw its genome are off the table, but so are some of the most hopeful scenarios,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. In any case, America is not prepared for Omicron. The variant’s threat is far greater at the societal level than at the personal one, and policy makers have already cut themselves off from the tools needed to protect the populations they serve. Like the variants that preceded it, Omicron requires individuals to think and act for the collective good—which is to say, it poses a heightened version of the same challenge that the U.S. has failed for two straight years, in bipartisan fashion.

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Omicron’s main threat is its shocking speed, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has reported. In South Africa, every infected person has been passing the virus on to 3–3.5 other people—at least twice the pace at which Delta spread in the summer. Similarly, British data suggest that Omicron is twice as good at spreading within households as Delta. That might be because the new variant is inherently more transmissible than its predecessors, or because it is specifically better at moving through vaccinated populations. Either way, it has already overtaken Delta as the dominant variant in South Africa. Soon, it will likely do the same in Scotland and Denmark. Even the U.S., which has much poorer genomic surveillance than those other countries, has detected Omicron in 35 states. “I think that a large Omicron wave is baked in,” Bedford told me. “That’s going to happen.”

More positively, Omicron cases have thus far been relatively mild. This pattern has fueled the widespread claim that the variant might be less severe, or even that its rapid spread could be a welcome development. “People are saying ‘Let it rip’ and ‘It’ll help us build more immunity,’ that this is the exit wave and everything’s going to be fine and rosy after,” Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease physician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, told me. “I have no confidence in that.”

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Full article

[radius777]

1. We need an omicron specific vaccine.

The problem is much of the world is still unvaxx'd so even if we defeat omicron more variants are on the way. We need to do a better job in getting as much vaccine to as many people across the globe who will take it. There are antivaxxers in every country but we have to get it into everyone else to give us a fighting chance. What we really need is a 'master' coronavirus vaccine that would be effective against any possible variant.

[Maru Kitteh]

6. Dipshits in this country won't take the safe effective ones we have now.

So here we are.

It's illegal to drive down I-90 in the left-hand lanes chugging Johnnie Walker Black Label because it endangers other people.

It should be illegal to endanger others by refusing to vaccinate. Full stop.

[regnaD kciN]

2. Frankly, I don't think anywhere in the world is...

[Downtown Hound]

3. Valid points, but the author can fuck of with his

"America has failed in a bi-partisan fashion bullshit." I'm beyond sick of the phony "both sides" bullshit. Republicans have failed, Democrats have not. Biden made the vaccine available for all to get. Republicans won't get it because they're stupid and selfish, so we're still dealing with this crap. It's that simple, and I'm done listening to anybody who tells me it's not. Over 90% of Democrats are fully vaxxed. Only 60% of Republicans are.

Failed in a bi-partisan fashion. Yeah, whatever, fuck off asshole.

[BradAllison]

4. Tired of fear mongering articles

Remember in the early days of Covid all the "We may never find a vaccine for Covid" articles? They existed.

I've done all I can.

[roamer65]

5. This virus isn't going down without a fight.

As a biologist, I’m impressed with its staying power.