Omicron will bump up natural immunity
Dr. Adalja said though the numbers of unvaccinated in the United States appear to be stuck, Omicron’s sweep will make the difference, leaving behind more natural immunity in the population.
Currently, hospitals are struggling with staffing concerns as a “direct result” of too many unvaccinated people, he said.
Andrew Badley, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and director of the clinic’s COVID-19 Task Force, said the good news with Omicron is that nearly all people it infects will recover.
Over time, when the body sees foreign antigens repeatedly, the quantity and quality of the antibodies the immune system produces increase and the body becomes better at fighting disease.
So “a large amount of the population will have recovered and have a degree of immunity,” Dr. Badley said.
His optimism is tempered by his belief that “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
But Dr. Badley still predicts a turnaround. “We’ll see a downturn in COVID in late spring or early summer,” and well into the second quarter of 2022, “we’ll see a reemergence of control.”
Right now, with Omicron, one infected person is infecting three to five others, he said. The hope is that it will eventually reach one-to-one endemic levels.
As for the threat of new variants, Badley said, “it’s not predictable whether they will be stronger or weaker.”
Masks may be around for years
Many experts predict that masks will continue to be part of the national wardrobe for the foreseeable future.
“We will continue to see new cases for years and years to come. Some will respond to that with masks in public places for a very long time. I personally will do so,” Dr. Badley said.
Two mindsets: Inside/outside the hospital
Emily Landon, MD, an infectious disease doctor and the executive medical director of infection prevention and control at University of Chicago Medicine, told this news organization she views the pandemic from two different vantage points.
As a health care provider, she sees her hospital, like others worldwide, overwhelmed. Supplies of a major weapon to help prevent hospitalization, the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab, are running out. Dr. Landon said she has been calling other hospitals to see if they have supplies and, if so, whether Omicron patients can transfer there.
Bottom line: The things they relied on a month ago to keep people out of the hospital are no longer there, she said.
Meanwhile, “We have more COVID patients than we have ever had,” Dr. Landon said.
Last year, UChicago hit a high of 170 people hospitalized with COVID. This year, so far, the peak was 270.
Dr. Landon said she is frustrated when she leaves that overburdened world inside the hospital for the outside world, where people wear no masks or ineffective face coverings and gather unsafely. Although some of that behavior reflects an intention to flout the advice of medical experts, some is caused in part, she said, by the lack of a clear national health strategy and garbled communication from those in charge of public safety.
Americans are deciding for themselves, on an a la carte basis, whether to wear a mask or get tested or travel, and school districts decide individually when it’s time to go virtual.
“People are exhausted from having to do a risk-benefit analysis for every single activity they, their friends, their kids want to participate in,” she said.