Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: CDC As the world awaits more data on Omicron, early reports out of South Africa — where the coronavirus variant was first reported and is driving a massive spike in new cases — have consistently characterized symptoms from most cases as either nonexistent or relatively mild. On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci described Omicron as “almost certainly” not as severe as Delta, based on the preliminary data.
What should we make of very early data, or Dr. Fauci’s comments today, that suggest Omicron may be less deadly than Delta? Let’s say that Omicron turns out to be less severe — either because it is less virulent or because there is more immunity — but more transmissible than Delta, what would it mean for the course of the pandemic going forward?
That is a theoretical possibility. We don’t actually know how the 1918 influenza pandemic ended after 16 months. We didn’t do seroprevalence studies. It burned through the population in a really terrible and devastating way with at least 50 million deaths. But even now, we don’t have enough data to know if enough of the population got immunity because the disease became more transmissible. Or did the influenza virus evolve to become less virulent? We don’t know that either.
Again, we don’t know all of the reasons, but there is no doubt that this is different than Delta. To me, that means something really meaningful, which is that if we have a 70 percent vaccination rate here, we should be more protected than when we had a 52 percent vaccination rate with Delta. That’s one good thing. Also, older people here are being boosted.
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