Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic
https://time.com/6141679/omicron-end-covid-19/
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Even leading scientists have been tempted by the idea, admitting that of all the versions of SARS-CoV-2 that have hit humanity over the past two years, Omicron might be the preferable one to get infected with, since it doesn’t make the immunized that sick. And if more vaccinated people are infected with Omicron and develop immunity, that protection, combined with the protection that some people might have from being infected with previous variants, could reach the magical herd immunity threshold—which experts say could be anywhere between 70%-90% of people recovered from or vaccinated against COVID-19—that would finally make SARS-CoV-2 throw up its spike proteins in defeat.
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（好話說了）
According to some models, by the time Omicron works its way through the population, up to half of people around the globe will have been infected, and presumably immune to the variant. With fewer unprotected hosts to infect, viruses generally begin to peter out—epidemic influenza viruses are a good example—and optimistic models show that after a peak of cases by the end of January and beginning of February, SARS-CoV-2 may follow that path. Under that assumption, COVID-19 would begin its shift from being a pandemic disease to an endemic one, confined to pockets of outbreaks that erupt among immunocompromised populations or the unvaccinated, such as the youngest kids—but are manageable and containable because most people would be protected from the worst effects of the virus.
（壞話也講了）
But there’s also the possibility of a darker timeline, in which the unpredictable nature of SARS-CoV-2 to date drives the next year and beyond. If that occurs, it could mean the sobering possibility that Omicron is not the beginning of the end, but just the beginning of a more transmissible, more virulent virus that could do even more harm than it has already.
（莫謂言之不預也）
Scenario #1: The COVID-19 virus has achieved equilibrium with humans
………………老長了，很有趣的故事，自己去開眼
Scenario #2: The virus could keep changing in unpredictable and possibly deadly ways
（典型的英倫風格結尾，麵麵俱到、滴水不漏、無懈可擊）
Experts’ best guesses at what comes next
How likely is it that Omicron is indeed SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah? Farrar puts the odds at 40% to 50%.
One major reason the odds aren’t higher is that Omicron’s genetic changes make it more capable of evading capture by the antibodies the immune system makes, both after natural infection and vaccination. That helps the virus to spread more quickly—up to the tipping point at which if the virus is too good at spreading and causing disease, then it becomes self-defeating.
“The virus doesn’t want to kill its host,” says Dr. Warner Greene, former director of and current senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology. “That’s counterproductive.” That could explain why Omicron is so impressively transmissible, but, for those with some protection, especially from vaccines, not particularly dangerous—making it possible that this particular version of the virus is the one that will persist in the human population for years and years to come.
That’s the path public health experts hope SARS-CoV-2 will take, following the example of the other common coronaviruses. “The best scenario is for the virus to become so weakened it just becomes a vaccine itself,” says Greene. “It would spread but it wouldn’t cause severe disease. In that kind of setting, the virus would start to lose its foothold and become endemic in very small areas, replicating only when it finds people who are not previously infected or vaccinated.”
That’s assuming, of course, that most of the world’s population is vaccinated, or recovered from being naturally infected with Omicron. The fewer opportunities SARS-CoV-2 has to replicate and produce more copies of itself, the fewer people will become infected, and the fewer people will get sick. Every variant in the virus’s short two-year history is the direct result of unchecked viral replication, so the surest way to turn COVID-19 from a pandemic into an endemic disease is to shut down as many of those opportunities as possible. “If we have learned anything from the past year, it is that variants will continue to emerge,” says Ho. “What will be helpful is to establish growing immunity, either from vaccines or infections. That will help protect the population from the next one.”
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