The impact of Omicron will be determined over the next few weeks by two competing forces. The ability of the new variant to evade immunity will be a factor in the fight against Covid-19. Our festive season will be decided by the outcome.
If enough arms are jabbed with booster vaccines, then there is hope that hospital cases will be contained, and the NHS will be protected. There could be avoided severe restrictions in the new year.
If Omicron is found to be able to evade existing immunity, the country will face a very grim winter with strict restrictions needed for some time.
A wave of infections that could lead to 175,000 hospital admissions and 24,700 deaths by the end of April could be triggered by poor Omicron escape from immunity matched by effective booster jab protection, according to a study by scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. It would be possible to control case numbers by closing some entertainment venues.
The most pessimistic scenario would see 74,800 deaths and 492,000 hospital admissions, which is twice as high as the peak seen in January 2021. It would have to be considered that there would be far stricter restrictions.
The results suggest that Omicron has the potential to cause substantial surge in cases, hospital admissions and deaths in populations with high levels of immunity, including England. Nicholas Wright described Omicron's threat to the UK as worrying.
Many scientists have warned that urgent action should be taken to hold back infections while booster campaigns are accelerated and given time to take effect. The vaccine expert Peter English said that the curve is going to get very steep around Christmas and New Year because of the doubling of cases every two to three days.
panic measures could be brought in at the last minute to disrupt people's festive plans. I am sad for my colleagues in clinical practice who will face a January that is worse than anything we have seen so far and at a time when they are exhausted.
The epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University advised caution. It is true that lockdown interventions buy time, but they also cause harm. More sustainable measures, such as wider use of self-testing, may prove to be more viable.
The point of making strict interventions was not to prevent the population from getting Covid, but to avoid it at the same time. I don't expect to live out my years without getting Covid at least once or twice in the future, and that applies to the rest of the population. Individual risks have not changed. It looks like a lot of us are going to encounter it in the next few weeks.
Some scientists said they were a bit more hopeful. Prof Ian Jones said that the grimmest scenarios did not take into account the availability of new drugs that have been shown to reduce the impact of the virus. If this better clinical picture is taken into account, the link between infections and severe disease may not be as high as thought.
Prof Paul Hunter, an infectious diseases expert at the University of East Anglia, said that there was evidence that Omicron was associated with less severe disease and that models overestimation of hospital admissions. The worst case scenarios are not likely to be seen.
If the dangers of Omicron turn out to be overstated, the prospects of further variant disrupting society cannot be ignored, according to the global health researcher Michael Head. We don't know how often this coronaviruses can change its clothes and emerge with a new look, but the risks of new variants emerging are higher in under-vaccinated populations. The coronaviruses is still with us.
