Omicron Offers Hope Pandemic Could Stabilize, W.H.O. Official Says. - The New York Times

The rapid spread of the variant means far more people will have some immunity, at least for now, which might bode well this year for highly vaccinated countries in Europe.

The astonishing spread of the Omicron variant could help set the stage for the pandemic to transition from overwhelming to manageable in Europe this year, a top health official said on Monday, potentially offering the world a glimpse at how countries can ease restrictions while keeping the virus at bay.

In the United States, where vaccination rates are lower and death rates are considerably higher than in Western Europe, there are bigger hurdles on the path to taming the pandemic.

The Omicron variant will undoubtedly leave behind much higher levels of immunity in the population, scientists said.

Kluge said he believed that Europe could withstand new waves without resorting to lockdowns, countries there are still working to determine what other measures they may use.

New antiviral pills are more readily available in Europe than in other parts of the world, scientists said, but countries still need to administer them more quickly.

Last fall, with vaccination spreading and the Delta variant waning, there were predictions of a return to normal — only for the world to be blindsided by Omicron.

Even as those figures level off in much of Europe and the United States, in places where Omicron is just gaining a foothold, the known number of new infections is staggering.

Omicron is also just now spreading across Eastern and Central Europe, including in many countries with low vaccination rates.

And countries across Asia that have pursued a “zero-Covid” policy with stringent lockdowns will face steep challenges preventing outbreaks of Omicron.

But the very speed and breadth of the Omicron surge has also left some public health officials cautiously optimistic about how quickly countries can emerge from the latest wave.

“Unless, of course, a worse variant emerges, with the infectivity of Omicron and as deadly as Delta,” he added.

In the United States, Omicron cases appear to have crested in the Northeast, parts of the Upper Midwest and other areas where it first arrived, while nationally, new cases and hospital admissions have leveled off in recent days.

Devi Sridhar, the head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said that the number and concentration of unvaccinated people in parts of the United States put the country in a more dangerous position than well-vaccinated parts of Europe, where the return of normalcy was underway.

As research has emerged that Omicron causes less severe disease and vaccines remain protective against the worst outcomes, some public health experts have encouraged less focus on cases and more emphasis on hospitalizations amid record-breaking spikes.

Predicting the next variant may be as difficult as it had been to predict Omicron

Kluge, of the W.H.O., echoed those concerns on Monday, but said that Europe was in a much better place to deal with what might come