On Wednesday, however, three separate teams of researchers, tracking Omicron’s advance through South Africa, Scotland, and England, reported new findings that suggest the variant was less likely than Delta to send people to hospitals. Whether these surges lead to equally calamitous casualties hinges hugely on that question of severity, an issue that has remained murky for weeks. “At a maximum we could see a surge in cases that is even higher than our January 2021 surge, which would make it the biggest national surge seen to date.” “Across all scenarios we expect to see cases that are at least as high as the Delta surge in September 2021, but that would be the minimum,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT Covid-19 Modeling Consortium. In the most optimistic outcome - which assumes high transmissibility relative to Delta, little ability to evade immunity, slightly elevated severity, and high booster uptake - the researchers project the Omicron spike to lead to 50% fewer deaths compared to last year. Combined with low booster uptake, this scenario resulted in cases peaking in early February, resulting in 342,000 deaths over the first six months of the year, a 20% spike over Covid-19 casualties in 2021. In the report, which has not been peer-reviewed, the worst outcome arose when the researchers assumed Omicron to be no more transmissible than Delta, but far better at evading immunity and more likely to cause severe disease - meaning requiring hospitalization. In one of the most comprehensive forecasts to date, researchers from the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas, Austin, played out 18 different scenarios for how the new variant might hit the U.S. That could be a recipe for the Omicron surge being the most devastating one yet. “However, we’re talking about large numbers, so we could imagine it’s going to be pretty potent at running by the immunity of people who’ve already been infected or vaccinated in most places it shows up.” “How much immune erosion we can expect here will be hard to say,” said Shaman. Different strains took off there, leading to an immunological history not as relevant to the Northern Hemisphere. “That’s not something that should apply directly to other countries, like the U.S., because it’s very specific to the South African context,” said Shaman. “I think we may be in for a longer road than we had hoped,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease forecaster at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. But though they differ in the details, all of them point to SARS-CoV-2 being here to stay. Further out, the models get fuzzier still. Which immediate future plays out will be a function of a few big unknowns - some already baked into Omicron’s biology and some that can be altered based on how people behave in the coming days and weeks. But even the most optimistic scenarios aren’t exactly pretty. Worst case - they could bring the deadliest phase of the pandemic yet. While many uncertainties remain, disease modelers have cranked out several potential visions for what the first months of 2022 may have in store. Since the Omicron variant was discovered four weeks ago, epidemiologists have been crunching data as fast as scientists on the front lines can produce it to scope out what the newest coronavirus variant means for the pandemic this winter and beyond. Exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences Learn More
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