The coronavirus prognostications of Michael Osterholm, Minnesota's leading epidemiologist, have been mostly grim and then validated by events, so I perked up my ears when, interviewed recently on MPR, he offered a tentative, hopeful guess about how things might play out with the omicron variant:
"If a lot of people get [omicron] but it's not causing, on [the] whole, severe illness across the population, this would be incredibly good news," Osterholm said.
In an ideal world, omicron might even outcompete delta, infecting more people with a milder illness and leaving them with additional protection against SARS-CoV-2, Osterholm added.
"That could be Mother Nature's way of helping us out of this pandemic," Osterholm said. "But at this point, again, that's all just hypothetical."
He didn't spell it out, but the "Mother Nature" Osterholm refers to is essentially the mechanism described by Charles Darwin. The virus mutates and, happily for us, on the question of a strain's fitness for survival lethality to host is not a particularly desirable trait compared to ease of transmission to a new host. Thus a comparatively benign strain, such as omicron may prove to be, could, if it's also more contagious, "outcompete" a killer strain like delta. And the effect of this might be to boost the level of resistance to disease among the stubbornly unvaccinated. Omicron's high transmissibility would mean they'd get infected, though not in a way apt to cause them or their contacts to get dangerously sick, and after mild illness "resolved" they would have acquired resistance to the virus. In this way, the virus that had won the biological competition for survival would get squashed.
It's pretty to think so, but awful to contemplate how many lives have been lost by people declining to receive highly effective vaccines. The pandemic could have been squashed before omicron evolved. We're still losing more than a thousand people a day and are poised to surpass 800,000 deaths from COVID in the US. I have relatives who take the view that since before they were born God knew when they'd die and they trust in him, not vaccines. To me, this seems like an argument for not getting out of bed in the morning (or getting out of bed in order to drink a bottle of wine for breakfast). They reject evolution, too—though, if we're lucky, its implacable operations may be about to work in their favor.
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