People should live not as if they are one variant or booster away from the end, but as if COVID-19 is here forever.
People should live not as if they are one variant or booster away from the end, but as if COVID-19 is here forever.
N ow that the Omicron variant has been confirmed to have made landfall in the United States, there’s been an all too familiar public debate over whether it should lead to a new wave of restrictions.
Already, the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration is considering more draconian rules for Americans returning from abroad, including additional testing and quarantine requirements — neither of which is enforceable. President Biden himself has claimed that more lockdowns were off the table “for now” — which means that they are not, in fact, off the table. Meanwhile, New York governor Kathy Hochul is not even waiting; she already declared a state of emergency and said that the state may limit non-urgent hospital procedures if necessary.
While there are some early signs that Omicron results in mild illness, there is currently not much to go on. Anthony Fauci has assured us that within two weeks, we’ll have a lot more information — specifically, on how transmissible it is, how fatal it is, and whether the current vaccines offer protection from the new variant.
Of course, it would be preferable if the variant turned out to be mild and blunted by our current vaccines. But this whole discussion rests on a fundamentally flawed premise: the idea that we need to be waiting with bated breath for the results of current Omicron studies to determine whether we can go on with our lives. In reality, the Omicron variant demonstrates that COVID-19 is not going to disappear anytime soon. We should recalibrate based on that assumption.
At the start of the pandemic, when we had no vaccines or treatments and very little understanding of the coronavirus, there was a ferocious debate about the tradeoffs between imposing widespread COVID-19 restrictions and risking more deaths. While I think the case for lockdowns has weakened over time (especially when it comes to school closures), it’s important to draw a distinction between the debate as it stood in March 2020 and the debate as it stands now.
In March 2020, the debate was over whether to impose restrictions and tell people to hunker down for a matter of weeks or maybe a few months. Whatever one’s opinion on the debate over restrictions back then, it’s different from the debate we now find ourselves in — the debate over how we want to live our lives, assuming that COVID-19 is here with us forever.
Sacrifices that may have been manageable or policies that may have been defensible for a short period of time are much more unrealistic when the time frame becomes indefinite. And the existence of Omicron suggests that “indefinite” is now the reality.
A year ago, vaccines were supposed to be the natural endpoint. But since vaccines have become widely available, we’ve learned that their ability to prevent infection wanes over time, even though they are safe and remain effective at reducing the chances of severe illness. This means that people require boosters to reestablish their immunity. But what if boosters, too, become less effective over time?
That brings us to the variants. The number of COVID-19 cases was winding down in the spring, before the Delta wave hit in the summer and fall and helped trigger another surge. Now Omicron is on the march. We have every reason to believe that there will be additional variants to follow.
What we’ve learned during a pandemic that is approaching the two-year mark is that health authorities are reluctant to ease restrictions or loosen guidance until they are very confident that a COVID-19 wave has subsided, and also that they begin to reimpose new restrictions once a new variant is on the loose. But we’re perpetually either coming off a surge from one variant or bracing for the spread of new one, so this is a recipe for never truly going back to normal.
The same goes for vaccines. Fauci claimed on Wednesday that the lesson from Omicron is that “if we had the overwhelming majority of the people in this country vaccinated and those who needed to be boosted, boosted, our vulnerability would be much less than it is now.” It’s an odd thing to say given that the one confirmed case of Omicron in the U.S. is somebody who was double vaccinated and, as Fauci notes, we have no solid evidence on whether the vaccines are effective against Omicron. It’s true that the more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities the virus has to pass from one person to another and mutate. But the fact that this variant arose in South Africa means that it probably still would have developed even if the U.S. were 100 percent vaccinated.
Fauci went on to say,
The endgame — which we hope and I think will occur — is that as we get more people vaccinated, not only in this country but globally, we will see a situation where viruses will not have the opportunity. What they have right now is to essentially freely distribute and freely circulate in society, both domestic society and global society.
But during the same press conference, Fauci reiterated that the definition of “fully vaccinated” could change so it would include only people who had received their boosters. If that’s the case, and we need boosters every six months, and on top of that there may be updated mRNA boosters aimed at specific variants, and new variants keep cropping up every few months, how could it possibly be realistic to expect that we’re going to keep a critical mass of the world fully vaccinated? We aren’t talking about something like the MMR vaccine, which creates lifetime immunity. We’re talking about a constantly moving target.
So there is not likely to be any sort of “endpoint” as Fauci would define it. COVID-19 is endemic and will likely be here for quite a long time. Making sacrifices for a few months to a year is a lot different from living a certain way for many years, or even decades. Policy-makers should get out of the way, and people should live their lives not as if they are one variant or one booster away from the end of COVID-19, but as if COVID-19 is here forever.