“Few people will be naïve — completely naïve, no protection from either vaccination or natural infection — when the Omicron wave is over,” said Cecile Viboud, an infectious diseases epidemiologist and modeler at the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center.
That should lessen the spread of SARS-2 and take some of the heat out of the outbreak, said Scott Hensley, a vaccines researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Immunology.
Hensley is one of the people who believes Omicron is the final wave of the pandemic. If he’s correct, after this there will be so much immunity in many populations that transmission rates will drop and SARS-2 will transition into something more akin to the influenza-like illnesses that sicken people during the winter months, but are far less disruptive than the pandemic has been…
“None of us think the virus is going to go away, but the virus will have less opportunity to change because there will be fewer hosts that it can replicate in,” said Hensley. “And in an immune population, due to immunity, disease severity will be less.”
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