COVID-19: A Sanguine Prediction of the 'New Normal'

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 “WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” These words were said by the WHO director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a media briefing on COVID-19 on March 11th 2020. “We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.” he added.

COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was identified vfrom an outbreak in Wuhan, China, a city with over 11 million people in December 2019 as a strange new pneumonia. On January 30th 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the WHO. Globally, as of 5:22pm CEST, 25th April 2022, there had been 507,501,771 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,220,390 deaths reported to WHO [All according to WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard].

The outpouring of global solidarity and support sparked by this shared challenge has been phenomenal. By putting societies and economies on hold, the world with WHO as the leading and coordinating organization has curtailed the ability of the virus to spread through our communities. The defensive measures such as movement restrictions, practicing good respiratory etiquette, testing and diagnosis, isolation, contact tracing, quarantine and vaccination have helped to limit some of the short-term impacts of the virus and bought us time to translate what we have learned about the virus into solutions so that we can get back to a more normal way of living: a new normal.

In late 2021 in South Africa, a new COVID-19 variant was discovered; the Omicron variant. People infected with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are almost 50% more likely to infect those they live with than are individuals infected with the Delta variant, a detailed analysis from one of the universities in England shows. Due to its fast spread, Omicron quickly overtook Delta as the dominant variant. Textbooks teach that viruses, being the relatively simple entities they are, have limited resources to devote to their one goal; survival. Every time they make copies of themselves, viruses can mutate to become more or less infectious, or more or less harmful to their hosts. Because a virus can’t reproduce on its own, and needs to borrow the reproductive machinery of cells from those it infects, it’s all about balance: finding the mutations that allow it to spread more effectively, while not causing its hosts to die. This is a more sanguine prediction of what 2022 might hold for SARS-CoV-2 according to the Time magazine (Feb 2022 Edition).

If the virus has indeed struck the perfect balance for reproducing in human hosts, it’s possible that this particular version is the one that will persist in the human population or form part of new variants (such as the current informally dubbed strain, Deltacron).If all this prediction suffices, then the virus has already accomplished its goal of establishing a balance with its host—humans. It can spread easily, but become even less and less lethal. The virus will then have mutated to the point where it will just choose to live among us without causing too much trouble. With even more and more people being vaccinated as well, controlling the disease becomes more and more imminent.

Shangxin Yang, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles says that there is evidence that Omicron’s high transmissibility may herald SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah. Whereas all previous variants preferred to infect cells deep in the human respiratory tract, nestling all the way into the lungs, Omicron tends to target the upper respiratory tract. That makes it more like the common cold virus and could explain why, at least among the immunized, Omicron tends to cause milder disease than previous variants. This has been the story of other respiratory pathogens as well. They spread like fire and then eventually most people either became vaccinated or infected, and when the population reached herd immunity, the pandemic ends. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of SARS-CoV-2, but rather the potential beginning of a more manageable COVID-19; the new normal.

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