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.
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.