Now Omicron is sweeping across state after state—even highly vaccinated ones—and new cases are shooting up and up. The virus is still deadliest to the unvaccinated, but the sheer number of mostly mild infections in the vaccinated is shocking us out of that post-Delta stasis. To deal with this extremely transmissible but now milder variant, we are in the middle of a COVID reset.
Already, the CDC has shortened the isolation period for vaccinated people. Breakthrough infections are becoming routine. And Anthony Fauci is pointing to hospitalizations, rather than cases, as a measure of Omicron’s true impact because many infections are now mild breakthroughs.
Omicron is forcing us to reconsider how we deal with mild cases of COVID, which will never completely go away. It is doing so, unfortunately, in a chaotic and dangerous moment. For the next variant and for next winter, we need to plan in advance. The challenges ahead are already clear. Hospitals, which are stressed even in bad flu seasons, will have to deal with combined COVID and flu every winter. The coronavirus will also keep evolving, and new variants that keep eroding our immunity will emerge.
