Thanks to Omicron, it’s a question of when, not if. The only question now is whether you’ll be sufficiently inoculated when it happens.

(Originally published Dec. 22 in “What in the World“) You will get infected by Omicron.

The question is not if but when and how sick you’ll get. This Time article reminds us of yesterday’s point: that Omicron is likely to create so many new infections—even among the vaccinated—that hospitalizations will rise, further straining a health system already at the breaking point. We don’t yet know for sure whether Omicron causes less severe illness than Delta, or whether it can create the lasting buzzing, tremors and other symptoms of “long Covid.”

Roughly 94% of the planet is now vulnerable to Covid’s new strain.

Yet even as the global economy feels Omicron’s bite, the market seems to have convinced itself the pandemic is over, and that Omicron is the kinder, gentler Covid we’ve all been waiting for, the virus we can live with, that renders Covid “like the flu.” Yesterday, stocks of vaccine makers fell sharply and those of airlines soared on news that new cases in South Africa, where Omicron was first discovered a month ago, are already receding.

Equally telling, Omicron has been spreading like wildfire for a month, but still hasn’t created a corresponding increase in fatalities. The death rate has been falling in Europe and the UK as the Delta surge abates, and while South Africa has seen a slight increase in its death toll, the blip in U.S. deaths is due to Delta, not Omicron. So far, there’s only been one American known to have died of Omicron, an unvaccinated Texan with existing health issues.

This may be wishful thinking, however. Back to the math point made in the first paragraph: even if Omicron doesn’t have the same mortality rate as Delta, its greater infectiousness is eventually likely to yield a higher death toll, particularly because it is largely impervious to vaccines (though they still appear to prevent severe illness) and existing antibody treatments. Only those with booster shots have any protection against Omicron infection. That means that roughly 94% of the planet is now vulnerable to Covid’s new strain.

Survival will now depend on remaining a step ahead of the virus’ mutations through repeated vaccination. The Israelis are already doling out a fourth dose to vulnerable seniors and the EU has decreed that a person’s vaccinated status will lapse after nine months. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reexamining its own definition of “fully vaccinated,” too.

Yet we humans continue to demonstrate a stubborn refusal to take the risk of infection seriously, giving priority instead to our own convenience and entertainment. In Europe, people are going to the trouble of faking vaccination certificates rather than simply get the jab. Americans are risking infection, illness and death to travel for the Holidays despite the pandemic’s resurgence around them.

U.S. President Joe Biden is enlisting the military to help dole out vaccines and rapid Covid tests, but that’s just putting a finger in the dyke. Vaccines won’t stop the spread of Omicron and there’s no guarantee Americans who self-test positive will do the responsible thing and self-isolate. Given how high the national infection rate remains and how fast Omicron is spreading, the U.S. should be in lockdown. No one should be traveling there at all unless lives depend on it. They don’t. On the contrary, lives depend on people not traveling. With 830,000 already dead, more than 1,000 Americans are still dying every day from Covid, enough to cut the U.S. population growth rate to a record low.

That’s where optimism about Omicron may be fatally short-sighted: even though Omicron hasn’t produced a surge in fatalities, it’s also helping to keep the death rate from Covid from falling. And it always bears repeating that, while we continue to hope that Omicron remains less virulent than Delta, the more people infected by Omciron the more chance the virus has to mutate into something even more dangerous.