The world will probably wind up living with the coronavirus, but that approach poses risks, some medical experts warn

By Al Cross Published January 18, 2022 CORONAVIRUS, FEATURED, HEALTH POLICY, YOUR HEALTH

“Nations around the planet are making a subtle but consequential pivot in their war against the coronavirus: Crushing the virus is no longer the strategy,” reports Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post. “The phrase often heard now in the United States and many other nations is “live with the virus.” That new stance is applauded by some officials and scientists, and welcomed by people exhausted with the hardships and disruptions of this global health emergency entering its third year.

“But there are also disease experts who fear the pendulum will swing too far the other way. They worry that many world leaders are gambling on a relatively benign outcome from this omicron variant surge, and sending messages that will lead people who are normally prudent to abandon the social distancing and mask-wearing known to limit the pathogen’s spread. Epidemiologists say the live-with-it strategy underestimates the dangers posed by omicron.”

The consensus among experts is that “Omicron is essentially unstoppable but of limited threat to individuals even as it causes societal chaos,” Achenbach reports. “Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said he believes that about half of the U.S. population will be infected with omicron during the next three months, with most cases asymptomatic.” But it will keep sickening and killing people.

The coronavirus has killed more than 5.5 million people, including 850,000 Americans and 13,500 Kentuckians, but the virus and the Covid-19 disease it causes “are now so familiar, they have lost some of their early spookiness,” Achenbach writes. “Many nations continue to impose mask requirements, vaccination mandates and travel restrictions, but few leaders in democratic societies have the political capital to take harsh measures to suppress transmission.”

So, in the absence of further prevention, what can we expect? “In the ideal scenario, omicron’s alarming wave of infections will spike quickly, leaving behind a residue of immunity that will keep a broad swath of the population less vulnerable to future infections,” Achenbach writes. “This would be the last major, globally disruptive wave of the pandemic. The virus would still be around but would no longer be in a special category apart from other routinely circulating and typically nonfatal viruses such as influenza.”

But ideal scenarios often involve wishful thinking. Scientists don’t know how long immunity from having omicron will lasts, and “The virus keeps mutating,” Achenbach notes. “Slippery variants packing a more powerful punch could yet emerge, and virologists say that, contrary to what has sometimes been conjectured, viruses do not inexorably evolve toward milder strains.”

Some of the doctors “who advised President Biden during the presidential transition have urged a reset of the strategy to recognize the ‘new normal’ of the virus, which has little chance of being eradicated and will probably continue to cause typically mild illness and require vaccination boosters at a frequency yet to be determined,” Achenbach reports.

But others say that approach has risks. James Lawler, co-director of the University of Nebraska’s Global Center for Health Security, told Achenbach, “If we just completely let everything go and allow the omicron epidemic to run its natural course, we’ll completely overrun our health system and be left in a situation potentially worse than what we experienced in early 2020.”

Lawler worries about the lack of precautions among the public. “Earlier this week, he went to a grocery store and was virtually alone in wearing a mask,” Achenbach reports. “That’s the norm, he said, in Omaha.” Lawler said, “We should have learned by now the only way to get high levels of compliance like this is to make it mandatory. That’s what happened with seat belts.”

Around the world, Achenbach writes, “There is fatalism mixing with pandemic fatigue and, in some countries, science denial or ideological rejection of the restrictions and mandates that many public-health experts consider to be common sense measures in a pandemic. And anecdotally, people may rationally feel the battle is lost, the virus has won.

“Public health officials warn that this is a dangerous attitude. It’s true that for an individual, risk might be low. But when a virus spreads as quickly as omicron does, the equation suddenly spits out alarming results — millions of people sick at once, many of them with underlying conditions that have already put them on the edge of a cliff and vulnerable to a shove.”