Increasing vaccinations and regular booster shots are enabling us to weather infection by Omicron without dying. This is our new normal?

(Originally published Jan. 4 in “What in the World“) Covid-19 infections in the United States continue to soar to new daily records. And while deaths from Covid continue to fall, more people are requiring hospitalization and intensive care, continuing to support the case that Omicron’s apparently lower lethality is due as much to higher vaccination levels as to the new strain’s reduced virulence.

People continue to misinterpret this as the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Let’s hope it really is. But Omicron has shattered the notion that we can achieve herd immunity against Covid’s rapidly evolving strains. The only countries that have managed to immunize and administer boosters rapidly enough to achieve anything resembling herd immunity are Chile and Iceland, and even there Omicron is spreading like wildfire—immunity to earlier strains hasn’t slowed transmission, only lowered severe illness. We may therefore require population-wide, seasonal vaccinations for Covid more frequently and more widely than we ever needed for influenza.

To wit, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved booster shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children 12 to 15 years of age just five months after receiving their initial two doses. Big companies—Starbucks is the latest—are increasingly complying with a federal mandate that their employees be vaccinated. And some people with immunological problems are rushing to get fourth doses, despite the fact that authorities haven’t yet approved them. Yet the sheer speed and scale with which Omicron is making more people ill is forcing flight cancellations, postponing the reopening of offices and schools after the Holidays and threatening the global supply chain with factory closures.