Though Omicron is skyrocketing infections, the variant of concern could trigger an abrupt halt to the pandemic by 2022, or perhaps even transform it to endemic status, some experts suggested.
As the world entered the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, people began wondering how many variants, booster shots, and grieving loved ones it would take to get back to normal.
Researchers believe that perhaps the world is already experiencing the beginning of the end of the pandemic with the highly transmissible variant of Covid-19, Omicron. Recent studies from England, Japan, Canada, and South Africa all support this conclusion.
SARS-CoV-2 is one of the seven viruses in the coronavirus family. Another virus in the COVID-19 family that caused the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has been contained and had a far higher death rate than COVID-19. The last known infection of SARS was last detected in 2004.
Currently, four other viruses are known to cause the common cold, but they may have caused significantly more serious symptoms in their early stages of existence for their survival, according to the Japanese Society of Clinical Virology.
In epidemiology, as the virus increases its infectiousness, it naturally attenuates over time.
“Someday, the novel coronavirus will perhaps cause only a common cold, or it may disappear altogether like SARS,” according to the Japanese Society of Clinical Virology.
Experts in the University of Saskatchewan in Canada say that most likely Covid-19 will move out to the Endemicity, meaning the virus will keep circulating in parts of the global population for years, but its prevalence and impact will come down to relatively manageable levels, so it ends up more like the flu than a world-stopping virus.
For an infectious disease to be classed in the endemic phase, the rate of infections has to more or less stabilize across years, rather than showing big, unexpected spikes as Covid-19 has been doing.
However, the World health organization (WHO) cautioned against an overly optimistic viewpoint, saying the world needs to be braced for the possibility that the coronavirus is here to stay.
“I think we expect to see this virus enter a phase of transmission where it will be around for a long time, probably at lower levels with seasonal or intercurrent outbreaks that will occur from time to time in populations, particularly as the new variants can emerge,” Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s emergencies program, said during a briefing on Dec. 20.
Experts stress that no one can predict what the future of Covid-19 could look like, as the emergence of COVID-19 variants, like Delta and Omicron, has shifted its trajectory, leaving the million-dollar question of when the epidemic will end.
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