Will omicron end the pandemic? Some say optimism is premature

After nearly two years and wave after wave of the deadliest outbreak in American history, the hopeful are ready to embrace the belief that the latest COVID-19 virus variant marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates tweeted this week that once omicron subsides, “the rest of the year should see far fewer cases so Covid can be treated more like seasonal flu.”

Closer to home, Ukiah emergency room physician Drew Colfax called omicron “a knight in shining armor” that will mark the end of the pandemic after a “sharp and potentially painful” surge in cases.

Omicron causes less severe illness, results in fewer hospitalizations, fewer patients on ventilators, and it simply comes and goes faster than the deadly delta mutation.

And while omicron transmission rates continue to reach unprecedented and nearly incomprehensible levels, the numbers seem to be telling a different story than with previous surges: They include what some are calling “incidental COVID-19” patients — people who test positive for the virus when they enter the hospital for other reasons.

But despite the optimism, infectious disease and public health experts say it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and it’s too early to say whether omicron represents the last gasp of COVID-19 and declare that we’re nearing the end of the pandemic.

The experts agree that with 2 million people across the globe becoming infected every day, omicron is not likely to be the last mutation, and the next one could be even more virulent.

What’s more, even though omicron reportedly causes less severe illness, a small sliver of omicron’s tidal wave of infections — nearly 1,000 a day in Sonoma County — has the potential to overwhelm local hospitals and health care providers.

“There’s a lot of hyperbole and conjecture that omicron is somehow not as deadly or disease causing,” said Dr. Michael Vollmer, an infectious disease specialist and regional epidemiologist for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.

“What remains is that we’re seeing a higher number of people coming into the hospital right now,” he said. “Our numbers are still going up. We’re at a level that’s getting closer to what we experienced over the summer with our delta surge.”

During press briefing Thursday, Carmela Coyle, president and CEO of the California Hospital Association, said that omicron poses a “math problem” when assessing its impact on the health care system.

Coyle said that last winter, the number of patients in hospitals across the state peaked at 54,000 on any given day, with about 40% or 22,000 being COVID-19 patients. Today — with the omicron surge yet to peak — there are about 51,000 patients in hospitals statewide, but only about 13,000 who have tested positive for the virus.

“Hospitals are just as full today as they were last year during our winter peak,” she said. “This is just as we are beginning to see the COVID hospitalization surge.”

The good and the bad of omicron

The obvious good news about omicron is that it apparently causes less severe illness than the previous delta strain. In South Africa, a mostly omicron-driven surge of cases plateaued after six weeks, the shortest-lived surge to date in the region, according to the World Health Organization.

Though deaths across the African continent did rise significantly in the seven days ending Jan. 9, the omicron surge caused fewer deaths than previous COVID-19 waves, and hospitalizations have remained low, the WHO said.

Scientists say omicron may also be peaking in Great Britain and in parts of the United States. Meanwhile, a study in South Africa also found that the immune response among people infected with omicron appeared to increase protection against delta.

With omicron seemingly causing less severe illness and offering protection against the deadlier delta strain, many have started to regard omicron as a sort of godsend, particularly those who are weary of public health measures.

But Dr. Lee Riley, infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, said it’s too early to make that call.

“I think people are giving too much credit to the Omicron variant,” Riley said in an email. “As we have seen throughout this pandemic, variants come and go.”

Riley said the omicron surge is beginning to flatten in places like New York, but he said omicron will not usher in “an endemic state” because not enough people in the United States have been infected with it.

“Omicron will gradually disappear regardless of vaccination status or infection rates, only to be replaced by a new variant,” he said. “It will take many more waves of variants for us to reach an endemic phase of this pandemic.”