Amid the ultra-contagious omicron mutant that is pushing cases to all-time highs, string of new studies has confirmed that even as case numbers soar to records, the numbers of severe cases and hospitalizations have not. The data, some scientists say, signal a new, less worrying chapter of the pandemic.
Monica Gandhi, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said that “The virus is always going to be with us, but my hope is this variant causes so much immunity that it will quell the pandemic.”
“I hope this variant creates profound immunity in the population,” she said. “It will hopefully end the pandemic,” she added.
Data from the past week study out of South Africa suggests that a combination of widespread immunity and numerous mutations have resulted in a virus that causes far less severe disease than previous iterations.
The study mentioned that the patients that were admitted to the hospital during the omicron-dominated fourth wave of the virus were 73% less likely to have severe disease than patients admitted during the delta-dominated third wave.
Another separate study, released as an online pre-print by a large consortium of Japanese and American scientists, also shows that this Omicron variant does not infect the lungs as easily as previous variants.
They found similar outcomes in Hamsters and mice who were infected with omicron virus. They experienced far less lung damage and were less likely to die than those infected with previous variants.
Wendy Burgers, an immunologist at the University of Cape Town pointed out that the change in virulence likely has to do with how the virus’s anatomy changed.
“It used to use two different pathways to get into cells, and now because of all the changes to the spike protein, it’s preferring one of those pathways,” she said. “It seems to prefer to infect the upper respiratory tract rather than the lungs.”
Immunologist Ali Ellebedy at Washington University at St. Louis finds hope in the body’s amazing ability to remember germs it’s seen before and create multi-layer defences.
Ellebedy said baseline population immunity has improved so much that even as breakthrough infections inevitably continue, there will be a drop in severe illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths — regardless of the next variant.
