It's too soon to know whether the omicron variant will be the final phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday.
"It is an open question as to whether or not omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for," Fauci said, putting air quotes around the phrase "live virus vaccination."
There are two ways for a pandemic to end: the infectious disease is eradicated, or it becomes endemic, which means it still exists without being disruptive to society — chickenpox, for example.
"If you look at the history of infectious diseases, we’d only eradicated one infectious disease in man and that’s smallpox," Fauci said at the
World Economic Forum. "That’s not going to happen with this virus."
That means COVID-19 must evolve into a less dangerous disease for the pandemic to officially end.
And although the highly contagious omicron variant is spreading like wildfire — infecting about 782,000 Americans per day,
according to the CDC — some point to its low mortality rate as a sign that the virus may be becoming less severe.
It's possible that omicron could signal that the pandemic is ending, “but that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response,” Fauci said.
And omicron will likely not be the final variant of the coronavirus, said Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of infectious diseases research at the Lee Kong Chian School of medicine.
"Clearly with such high a virus circulation we’re seeing now, there’s a high probability that we’ll have another variant coming up," she said at the
World Economic Forum.
I hope the pandemic is ending soon, as another variant will be even worse than Delta and Omicron or not.