“Omicron is likely to push Delta out,” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, who led the new study. “Maybe pushing Delta out is actually a good thing, and we’re looking at something we can live with more easily and that will disrupt us less than the previous variants.”
He posted the new study on the institute’s website on [December 27].
Even if Omicron does wipe out Delta, that doesn’t mean that Omicron will reign supreme for generations. Once people gain immunity to Omicron, natural selection may favor mutations that produce a new variant that can evade that immunity.
Depending on the particulars of the coronavirus, Dr. Pearson said he could foresee three different futures.
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In one, Covid mimics the flu, with one seasonal variant pushing out the previous one, year after year.
In a second, Covid mimics dengue fever, with several variants coexisting that evade different antibodies, leading people to get sick every few years from one of them.
The third possibility is the most desirable: One variant wins out and becomes an easily prevented pathogen. But [epidemiologist Carl] Pearson considers that the least likely scenario.
