Covid-19 will be one more disease among many, and life will be marginally worse, but by about April you shouldn’t act substantially differently than if it no longer existed.
This seems quite bold given our history of variants emerging. And if Omicron infects billions, then prima facie there’s great opportunity for mutation. I’d be interested to hear your credence in the following proposition:
From 1 May 2021 to 1 Jan 2030, Zvi won’t act substantially differently due to risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Additionally, “one more disease among many” suggests (to me) that it won’t cause 100K+ more deaths in the following few years, which also seems bold. [edit: American deaths, see replies for more]
Perhaps I should have explicitly put ‘barring another major variant that disrupts this’ there, but if Omicron infects most people on top of the vaccines, the damage a new variant does next time should be pretty low, and someone like me should be able to shrug it off and not care.
I don’t see the reasoning for this. Why would the damage be low, rather than simply lower than it would have been with less herd immunity (in the world where people hadn’t first gotten omicron)?
My guess is that it’s because previous infection seems to provide significant (rather than weak or moderate) protection, and there will be a lot more people who have been previously infected next time a new variant roles around.
It is absolutely certain that there will be more “variants of interest”.
This is basically the evolutionary modelling that pretty much all Governments have ignored, every time—Delta and Omicron were predicted by all eviolutionary biologists.
The open questions are:
Whether there will be a new variant of interest that is notably more infectious, and thus becomes dominant after Omicron. In the UK, Delta completely outcompeted all other variants in around 3-4 months (>95% of all sequenced cases were Delta). Omicron is expected to do the same by Feb if not earlier. USA is likely similar, albeit delayed by a few weeks.
Whether future variants cause more or less serious disease than Omicron.
When this will occur. To me, it seems most likely this will be Feb/March 2022 or Fall 2022
If the answer to the first question is Yes, and the second question is “far less serious”, then the pandemic is over When it occurs—it has become another ‘common cold’ and is unlikely to mutate further to produce more serious disease (because it didn’t).
However, if it is Yes and The Same Or More Serious, then we will certainly need further booster jabs in Fall/Winter 2022, perhaps tailored more closely.
“One more disease among many”—this Wikipedia graphic suggests that respiratory diseases already kill about 3.6M people/year, and pre-COVID I barely spent even a thought on them, nor did I expend extraordinary efforts avoiding them. We could add COVID to the mix and bump the number up to 3.7M people/year, and neither of the above would change.
I meant 100K+ deaths in America, which is 4% of the global population, so millions of deaths globally, and I was implicitly thinking of “disease” as contagious disease that exists in rich countries too. I haven’t looked for numbers but I suspect that COVID is a quite large fraction of American deaths from contagious disease, such that even in April it will not merely be one such disease among many.
But this number of deaths from covid won’t last, immunity from vaccines and past infections will get in equilibrium with some immune escape from perpetual new variants and declining immunity over time, just like it happens for flu strains. The finite number of very vulnerable old people will all die out, and over time the only people who will die of covid are the people who age into vulnerability, just like it happens with the flu.
This seems quite bold given our history of variants emerging. And if Omicron infects billions, then prima facie there’s great opportunity for mutation. I’d be interested to hear your credence in the following proposition:
Additionally, “one more disease among many” suggests (to me) that it won’t cause 100K+ more deaths in the following few years, which also seems bold. [edit: American deaths, see replies for more]
Perhaps I should have explicitly put ‘barring another major variant that disrupts this’ there, but if Omicron infects most people on top of the vaccines, the damage a new variant does next time should be pretty low, and someone like me should be able to shrug it off and not care.
I don’t see the reasoning for this. Why would the damage be low, rather than simply lower than it would have been with less herd immunity (in the world where people hadn’t first gotten omicron)?
My guess is that it’s because previous infection seems to provide significant (rather than weak or moderate) protection, and there will be a lot more people who have been previously infected next time a new variant roles around.
It is absolutely certain that there will be more “variants of interest”.
This is basically the evolutionary modelling that pretty much all Governments have ignored, every time—Delta and Omicron were predicted by all eviolutionary biologists.
The open questions are:
Whether there will be a new variant of interest that is notably more infectious, and thus becomes dominant after Omicron.
In the UK, Delta completely outcompeted all other variants in around 3-4 months (>95% of all sequenced cases were Delta). Omicron is expected to do the same by Feb if not earlier. USA is likely similar, albeit delayed by a few weeks.
Whether future variants cause more or less serious disease than Omicron.
When this will occur.
To me, it seems most likely this will be Feb/March 2022 or Fall 2022
If the answer to the first question is Yes, and the second question is “far less serious”, then the pandemic is over When it occurs—it has become another ‘common cold’ and is unlikely to mutate further to produce more serious disease (because it didn’t).
However, if it is Yes and The Same Or More Serious, then we will certainly need further booster jabs in Fall/Winter 2022, perhaps tailored more closely.
“One more disease among many”—this Wikipedia graphic suggests that respiratory diseases already kill about 3.6M people/year, and pre-COVID I barely spent even a thought on them, nor did I expend extraordinary efforts avoiding them. We could add COVID to the mix and bump the number up to 3.7M people/year, and neither of the above would change.
Good point; I was imprecise. Thanks.
I meant 100K+ deaths in America, which is 4% of the global population, so millions of deaths globally, and I was implicitly thinking of “disease” as contagious disease that exists in rich countries too. I haven’t looked for numbers but I suspect that COVID is a quite large fraction of American deaths from contagious disease, such that even in April it will not merely be one such disease among many.
But this number of deaths from covid won’t last, immunity from vaccines and past infections will get in equilibrium with some immune escape from perpetual new variants and declining immunity over time, just like it happens for flu strains. The finite number of very vulnerable old people will all die out, and over time the only people who will die of covid are the people who age into vulnerability, just like it happens with the flu.