The Next Big COVID Variant Could Be a Triple Whammy Nightmare
Future variants could combine the most dangerous traits of older COVID lineagesto devastating effect.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-next-big-covid-19-variant-could-be-a-triple-whammy-nightmare
Even as daily new COVID cases set all-time records and hospitals fill up, epidemiologists have arrived at a perhaps surprising consensus. Yes, the
latest Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus is bad. But it could have been a lot worse. Even as cases have surged, deaths haventat least not to the same degree. Omicron is highly transmissible but generally
not as severe as some older variantslineages is the scientific term. We got lucky. But that luck might not hold. Many of the same epidemiologists who have breathed a sigh of relief over Omicrons relatively low death rate are anticipating that the next lineage might be much worse.
Fretting over a possible future lineage that combines Omicrons extreme transmissibility with the severity of, say, the previous Delta lineage, experts are beginning to embrace a new public health strategy thats getting an early test run in Israel: a four-shot regimen of messenger-RNA vaccine. I think this will be the strategy going forward, Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast.
Omicron raised alarms in health agencies all over the world in late November after officials
in South Africa reported the first cases. Compared to older lineages, Omicron features around 50 key mutations, some 30 of which are on the spike protein that helps the virus to grab onto our cells. Some of the mutations are associated with a viruss ability to dodge antibodies and thus partially
evade vaccines. Others are associated with higher transmissibility. The lineages genetic makeup pointed to a huge spike in infections in the unvaccinated as well as an increase in milder breakthrough infections in the vaccinated.
Thats exactly what happened.
Health officials registered more than 10 million new COVID cases the first week of January. Thats nearly double the previous worst week for new infections, back in May. Around 3 million of those infections were in the United States, where Omicron coincided with the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays and associated traveling and family gatherings. But mercifully, deaths havent increased as much as cases have. Worldwide, there were 43,000 COVID deaths the first week of Januaryfewer than 10,000 of them in the U.S. While deaths tend to lag infections by a couple weeks, Omicron has been dominant long enough that its increasingly evident theres been what statisticians call a decoupling of cases and fatalities.
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