Source: Calculated from the William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard
The new COVID-19 case rate at William and Mary finally appears to have peaked. This week saw less than half the number of newly-diagnosed cases compared to last week. The rate is still about 4.5 times higher than the rate observed in the 18-24 population of Virginia.
Based on the most recent email from the W&M administration, they are no longer going to do contact tracing. (That is, identifying the close contacts of known new COVID-19 cases, and checking those close contacts for infection.) This means that the new case counts moving forward will not be strictly comparable to the data so far, because they will no longer contain (e.g.) asymptomatic individuals who were only found via contact tracing.
That said, at this point, I don’t think anyone cares. Almost everyone on campus is immunized, case counts are falling, and as far as I know there have been no reports of severe illness from Omicron. As of yesterday, W&M lifted their mask mandate for indoor spaces other than classrooms.
What will the new normal be?
All of that seems consistent with the slow return to normalcy. Let’s all be glad that Omicron is substantially less virulent than Delta, and that vaccines (and particularly, the third or booster shot) remain reasonably effective at preventing severe illness. All told, those changes bring COVID a lot closer to being “flu-like” in terms of health risks.
Elsewhere, I’ve made the case that in most parts of the country now, a boostered adult faces no more risk of hospitalization or death from Omicron than from flu, in a typical flu season. As Omicron case counts continue to fall, I think that an increasing share of the population will come to more-or-less the same judgment.
My best guess for endemic COVID is that it will be accepted the same way that flu is, unless a more virulent strain arises. Those who care will get a flu shot and a COVID shot every year. Those who don’t, won’t. Maybe wearing masks in flu season will become socially acceptable, as it is in much of Asia. (I, for one, hope that’s true, now that we’ve woken up to the realities of aerosol spread of disease.)
As with flu, we’ll probably see a wintertime peak in COVID-19 activity in the Northern Hemisphere, because that’s the pattern for coronaviruses in general, and (so far) COVID-19 in particular.
Here’s flu, from the CDC:
Here’s a collection of coronaviruses other than COVID-19, from the source cited below:
All of that would make sense, I think.
Blitz-demics. The only thing that doesn’t quite make sense in this COVID-as-flu scenario is the effect of the extremely high contagiousness of COVID-19 relative to flu. Typical seasonal flu has an R-nought of about 1.3 (per this scholarly reference). Pandemic flu outbreaks such as the 1918 flu have an R-nought of perhaps 1.8 (same reference). But Omicron (B.1.1.529) has an R-nought of about 15, and son-of-Omicron (BA.2) is about a 22.
In other words, where the average person with flu might go on to infect 1.3 to 1.8 others, absent any interventions, the average person with Omicron would infect 15 others, absent any interventions.
The upshot of that is that if immunity fades over time (and it does), when there is an outbreak of Omicron, it’s going to spread far faster than flu. In round numbers, you’d have to guess about 10 times as fast, given that the R-nought is about 10 times as high.
This is a particular issue for “congregate living situations”, such as prisons, nursing homes, ships, barracks, and dorms.
You may or may not recall that early in the pandemic, COVID-19 swept through many U.S. prisons before anybody even thought to do anything about it. It disabled the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, again before anyone even considered any effective means to contain it.
I suspect that will become part of the new normal with endemic COVID-19. As population immunity wanes, we’ll end up with “blitz-demics”, for want of a better term. An outbreak of Omicron (or its successor) will run though a prison, campus, ship or workplace before anybody’s even really aware that there’s an issue.
But all of that — if it comes to pass — is a problem for the future. Right now, things look better in the U.S. than in much of the rest of the world. All we can do is hope that current U.S. trends continue.
Source: Johns Hopkins data, via Google search.
