Whether or not the new strain is more dangerous, we’re still losing the battle to Covid-19’s leading product.

(Originally published Nov. 30 in “What in the World“) As the United States and other nations follow Omicron’s spread by slamming their borders shut, experts are busy playing a guessing game as to whether the virus will prove more contagious or as deadly as the Delta strain of Covid-19. The virus so far appears to be spreading as rapidly as travelers can carry it with them from South Africa, where it was first detected. And so the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now recommending all vaccinated adults get a booster shot, despite warnings they won’t work as well against Omicron.

In the latest blow to global confidence, the Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel reportedly told the Financial Times: “There is no world, I think, where (the effectiveness) is the same level . . . we had with Delta.” Australia’s latest case of Omicron infection is a fully vaccinated woman in her thirties.

But here’s the thing: Omicron doesn’t yet seem to have created a community outbreak of severe illness. As mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, one of the doctors who first encountered it, notes that confirmed patients—though all young and unlikely to fall ill from Covid anyway—had only mild symptoms. It’s the absence of serious illness that prompted experts there to look for and identify the new strain. Now experts are wondering if Omicron’s many mutations don’t render it less, not more, effective than Delta as a pathogen, a sort of Frankencovid. And normally when a new, more potent, strain evolves, scientists are tipped off because it first creates a large and concentrated group of very sick people. That doesn’t seem to have happened here.

This is all looking on the “bright” side, so here’s wood to touch and a grain of salt to take, caveat lector, to be sure, to be sure. The fact is we’ll be in the dark about Omicron’s potential impact and danger for at least a couple of weeks. As outlined yesterday, the best policy in the meantime is to assume the worst and behave as though we have a new strain that is deadly, very contagious and impervious to vaccines. If Omicron has been detected in the narrowest community producing reliable data around you (county, state, nation), it would be wise to assume it is already much more widespread than reported cases indicate and wind back your assumptions about how safe you are wandering out in the open. Behave, instead, as though you were unvaccinated.

If you’re not yet in a community like Sydney where Omicron has been detected, congratulations: you’re still in the middle of a very serious and expanding surge in global infections by the Delta strain. And the world was already under-responding to that threat by carrying on with re-openings that will now let Delta and Omicron bring their impending version of “Captain America: Civil War” to a community near you. And even if Omicron loses, guess what? We’re still stuck with Delta.

The world has long been setting itself up for a massive resurgence in Delta and the emergence of a new strain by reopening before infection rates were low enough. And that outcome can only be achieved by vaccinating the remaining 57% of the world’s population and limiting human gathering and travel until transmission is brought under control.

So the danger of allowing ourselves optimism about Omicron is that—if it fades like previous variants or turns out to no worse than Delta—people may be tempted to indulge in more relief re-opening, to get more careless about taking precautions against infection. But Delta is still with us. And the fact remains that we still don’t even know the full effects of it and earlier strains. Evidence continues to build that Covid can have long-term, chronic impact on health.

Yet there are still people unwilling to do their part in the fight against the virus. Healthcare workers, who ought to know better, are suing the U.S. government to block a federal vaccine mandate for them, like the one a court has already blocked for large employers. Yet educated folks through the ages—including Catherine the Great, apparently—have recognized that vaccines are essential to protecting society from periodic plagues.