Giving Up Too Soon

Experts fear that we will swing too far into the "living with the virus" camp, too soon.

Crushing the virus is no longer the strategy. Many countries are just hoping for a draw.

It’s a strategic retreat, signaled in overt and subtle ways from Washington to Madrid to Pretoria, South Africa, to Canberra, Australia. Notably, few countries today outside of China — which is still locking down cities — cling to a “zero-covid” strategy.

the virus has killed more than 5.5 million people, and the pandemic is ongoing. But the global health emergency has evolved — reshaped by the tools deployed to combat it, including vaccines. The virus itself and the disease it causes are now so familiar, they have lost some of their early spookiness.

Even officials in Australia, long a fortress nation that sought to suppress the virus at all costs, have chosen to ease some mandates in recent weeks.

“The decision to remove restrictions just as Omicron surged has cost us dearly,” declared a report from an independent group of experts called OzSAGE. “The ‘let it rip’ strategy and defeatist narrative that ‘we are all going to get it’ ignores the stark lived reality of the vulnerable of our society.”

In South Africa, where officials first sounded the alarm about omicron, the government in December eased protocols, betting that previous encounters with the virus have given the population enough immunity to prevent significant levels of severe illness. The omicron wave there subsided quickly with modest hospitalizations, and scientists think one reason is that so many people — close to 80 percent — had previously been infected by earlier variants.

Omicron also appears to be less virulent — less likely to cause disease. This heavily mutated coronavirus variant stiff-arms the front-line defense of antibodies generated by vaccines and previous infection but does not seem to be adept at invading the lungs or escaping the deeper defenses of the immune system.

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. 

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.

French President Emmanuel Macron is blunt about his desire to make life uncomfortable for the unvaccinated by limiting their ability to go into public places. In a newspaper interview, he used graphic language that has been translated into English as “I really want to piss them off.”

The vaccines do lower the risk of severe illness. What they do not do as well is stop transmission and mild infection. The speed of omicron’s spread is the key factor in the equation that determines how much pressure it will put on hospitals — which are currently seeing record numbers of covid patients in the United States.

“People think that means we just give up,” she said. “They think ‘endemic’ means that we’re all going to get covid eventually. I’m hearing people say, ‘Why not just get it over with now, and I’ll be bulletproof?’ None of this is what endemicity means.”