You’ve probably noticed that Omicron is everywhere right now, hammering the globe with yet another wave of COVID-19, filling our hospitals, depleting our healthcare system, and threatening lockdowns for the third year running. Vaccines are doing an excellent job at preventing serious illness and death, but it’s hard to feel much joy about that when Omicron can still make you ill, even if you’re fully vaccinated and boosted. But among some experts (and many non-experts) there’s a glimmer of hope that this variant may help put the pandemic behind us.
Long story short, the hypothesis goes like this: Though it’s still early in the game for the Omicron variant, experts have been watching its every move, and it’s now clear that the variant is decidedly milder and significantly more contagious than previous strains. If enough people, particularly unvaccinated people, come down with infections, we may have enough collective immunity to make person-to-person spread unlikely. If the virus can’t hop from host to host, it will eventually become a rare occurrence, like measles or ebola, only breaking out in small clusters from time to time. This phenomenon is called herd immunity, and it’s a seductive theory given how difficult mass vaccination has proven to be.
