“By some estimates, about 40 percent of the population of the United States will have been infected with the omicron variant of Covid-19 by the time the current wave fully subsides. The WHO estimates that half of Europe will have been infected as well. And nearly all of those infections will have occurred between mid-December and the beginning of February.
It’s hard to say for sure, but there’s good reason to think that never before have so many people been infected with an emerging virus in such a short timespan. For most of history, diseases traveled much slower, carried by travelers on boats or horses.”
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“We are incredibly lucky that omicron seems to be milder than previous strains of Covid-19 and that both vaccinations and previous exposure have built up immune resistance. The massive spike in cases around the world — while badly taxing health care systems — hasn’t been matched by an equal spike in hospitalizations and deaths.
I think it’s hard to appreciate what a massive bullet we dodged: If omicron had been substantially more deadly, there is very little we could have done to stop the death toll.”
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“Earlier strains of the virus were successfully contained in some countries by maintaining strong border controls, aggressively quarantining people, and using traditional epidemiological tools like contact tracing.
China quashed a large initial outbreak with unprecedented measures, including surveillance, sealing off cities, locking people in their homes, and other policies more extreme than those employed even in other countries that successfully suppressed the virus, like New Zealand.
Nothing the world has tried works as effectively against a variant as contagious as omicron.”
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“Forty percent of the US in two months. That would have been apocalyptic if the viral variant were a deadly one. If we press the snooze button on this wake-up call, we might not get another one.”