Omicron, or something like it, is our way out of this.
In which I provide a theory for the COVID endgame.
All of last week’s panic about the Omicron variant, originally detected in South Africa (though we now find it’s much more widespread than that), led to renewed calls for restrictions, travel bans, mask mandates, and all the things that we’ve been doing off-and-on since March 2020. DiBlasio announced a vaccine mandate on private businesses and restaurant patrons down to age 5. Biden announced travel bans on eight African nations.
But I think it now looks like Omicron may be our savior.
Let’s recap a little bit on typical virology. A virus like SARS-CoV-2 has evolutionary pressure to proceed along a certain pathway. Because a virus can’t jump from host to host to replicate itself if it either kills its host or renders it bed-bound, it has pressure to become less symptomatic over time. So there are two simultaneous pressures: to become more contagious, and to become less virulent.
The ideally-replicating virus would be one that doesn’t show any symptoms at all, leaving its host to circulate as much as possible to spread it around. But the human body is likely to show some sort of symptoms when repelling a foreign invader. It would make sense then for a respiratory virus to have a certain set of symptoms — runny nose, sneezing, cough, etc. — that would increase potential spread via droplets/aerosols, but provide minimal discomfort for the host to spread it around to other targets.
So is that what we have with Omicron? I have reason to believe it is, or at least a significant step towards it.
Let’s consider the reports from the doctors on the ground in South Africa. Dr. Angelique Coetzee, who was on the team that discovered Omicron, described the symptoms as “mild” and able to be treated at home. Other reports state that patients experience less of a loss of taste and smell compared to previous iterations of the virus. And as of this writing, there has not been a single death linked to the variant anywhere in the world.
Here are some other interesting data points:
Then there’s this report that the actual structure of the virus seems to have much in common with existing coronaviruses that manifest in humans as the common cold, and may have even merged some of its code with existing coronaviruses.
So let me posit a theory.
The Theory of Viral Convergence
Let’s start from the point that viruses like SARS-CoV-2 pop up periodically throughout human history. Every so often there will be a bad flu mutation like 2009’s H1N1. Less often there will be a really bad mutation like the 1918 Spanish flu. But they obviously don’t remain as dangerous as their first appearance, as new mutations and strains will supersede the original. We’ve already seen that with Delta, which swept the world earlier this year.
So let’s presume that each of the existing coronaviruses in our environment started as a more dangerous version of themselves, then fell into the same evolutionary pathway. So I think we can infer that there’s something like a baseline existence for a coronavirus, where the infectivity is maximized, and bringing the symptoms down to a level where the host is still going about his or her everyday business.
I think that the existence of multiple viruses - coronaviruses, influenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses - that have roughly the same presentation is evidence for this theory. Even the strain of H1N1 that drove the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and killed somewhere between 17 and 100 million people eventually lost its strength and joined the panoply of viruses around us.
So what we can expect for an end state of this virus is something close to what we’re hearing about Omicron - much in common in presentation with the common cold, losing some of its signature symptoms, gaining in contagiousness but losing its power.
THIS IS WHAT WE WANT THIS VIRUS TO DO.
For all of the fear that the virus can be passed around so much easier, wouldn’t it be better for a person to be exposed to a virus that’s less likely to land them in a hospital bed? Under the presumption that every person alive is going to catch this virus at some point, probably multiple times, wouldn’t it be better for them to see a less dangerous version of it and build their natural immunity to that version? There’s nothing inherently bad about catching something called “COVID” if it’s considerably less likely to lay you up.
What I think this also means is that some of the fears about the virus being put under a different evolutionary pressure because of the vaccine have been allayed. In my mind, there was always a concern that we have never tried to vaccinate a population for a newly-circulating virus in the middle of a pandemic, and it may provide a different evolutionary pathway down which the virus could proceed. But for all the scare stories about “vaccine escape”, it may become a moot point, as this becomes a virus for which vaccination becomes largely unnecessary.
I think this is why Moderna’s stock took a hit on Monday morning, losing about 10% of its value. One of the predominant narratives since the vaccine came around was that it would require a booster every year (if not more), probably worked into a cocktail with the yearly flu shot. But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates to the point where it’s indistinguishable from the common cold, a yearly shot to prevent it becomes unnecessary, except perhaps for the very elderly. And Big Pharma loses its COVID cash cow.
As Omicron continues to spread we will know more, but I think this feels like the endgame for what we know as COVID. As Omicron out-competes existing strains and becomes the predominant version, much like Delta drove out previous versions, SARS-CoV-2 will lose its juice and its mystique. People will realize that the news reports of overfull hospitals have gone away, and slowly feel more comfortable with leaving their masks at home or going out to dinner.
Indeed, flu outbreaks are happening on college campuses around the country, where enough people have been exposed to drive COVID into the background. And in St. Louis County, the weekly flu report is showing a case count that hasn’t been seen since March 2020.
THIS IS A GOOD THING. It means we are about to get our lives back, at least as far as the virus is concerned. Panicking and weak politicians will be slower to realize this, and will likely have to be encouraged to realize it through the ballot box.
But it feels like we’re in the final chapter.