We need a definitive exit from our Covid-19 pandemic. Here’s the roadmap

The public perception that our vaccines are ‘leaky’ is true, but it’s off-base to assign the fault to the vaccines. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

As the virus accelerates its evolution, the humans capitulate. For two and a half years, Covid-19 has been outrunning our response, getting more and more transmissible, reaching a level of infectiousness that few pathogens have ever attained. Instead of taking a stance of getting ahead of the virus, and outsmarting it, people have succumbed.

In recent months, we experienced a striking jump in transmissibility when the Omicron (BA.1) variant became dominant, with at least a threefold increase in reproductive number beyond Delta. Despite the hope that this might be reaching the upper limit of the virus’s spreadability, we quickly transitioned to a BA.2 wave, with at least another jump of about 30% transmissibility, and now we are heading, in the United States, to a dominant subvariant known as BA.2.12.1, which is another 25% more transmissible than BA.2 and already accounting for close to 50% of new cases.