The well-vaccinated are well-protected against severe disease, all things considered, but the U.S. as a whole is not. Which means that even without bad news on Omicron, the country could still be in for a dispiriting few months. dwallacewells writes
Photo: Jammy Yoon The news doesn’t seem great. Throughout the whole of the pandemic, the World Health Organization has only declared four “variants of concern”; Omicron is the fifth. It has been only a week since the variant was first identified, and the picture remains still murky on matters of transmissibility, virulence, and immune evasion — all the important questions.
The period ahead may well prove happier than forecast — again and again through this pandemic, the disease has surprised us, sometimes by retreating much more quickly than experts predicted. But at the moment many signs are pointing in the wrong direction, should we care to look at them.
But while the well-vaccinated may see that new phase clearly, the “endemic” endgame is not yet upon us as a country. When Trevor Bedford, a MacArthur “genius,” modeled that endemic future recently, he suggested an annual death toll between 40,000 and 100,000 American — at the low end, roughly the annual death toll of the flu, and, at the high end, nearly three times as high. Normalizing that might prove both difficult and necessary, eventually.
At the national level, vaccination didn’t really push back the pandemic at all. Instead, the two forces — the new vaccines and the new variant — basically fought to a draw. The big-picture result: many Americans have felt increasingly safe themselves, which they are, but in a country in which more other Americans were still dying than they had, on average, over the last two years.
There is some vulnerability among the vaccinated, too, though we know from state-level data that the vaccinated account for only perhaps a quarter of recent deaths. The Delta variant is probably more virulent, too, though much of the early messaging focused on its transmissibility rather than its pathogenicity.
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