By Pepper Fisher
OLYMPIA – A University of Washington professor says he believes the Omicron variant of coronavirus has peaked in our state, will drop as precipitously as it rose and, most importantly, that this will mark the end of the pandemic.
Dr. Christopher Murray is the Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who’s research has been used worldwide since the pandemic began. Murray told a state Senate committee on January 12 that he and his team believe that 80-90% of those who become infected with Omicron are asymptomatic and they are infected probably no more than 8 days. This week, his agency’s website predicts that the infection rate for Washington state peaked on Martin Luther King Day, will fall very quickly, and will bottom out in March.
“In my personal view, essentially the Omicron wave is the end of the pandemic. It’s not the end of covid, it’s the end of the pandemic. Because we will, by March, have low numbers, we will have a wave that has infected 50% of the state, and we will have continued vaccination, use of boosters and the availability later this year, hopefully, of Paxlovid and other antivirals as they become available, such that we should be transitioning to a point, even if other variants come along, that we think of it and manage it like we do flu.”
Murray says that, like influenza, Covid-19 will continue to put pressure on our healthcare systems, it will sometimes cause death, but will no longer require extraordinary efforts in policy intervention.
“So if that’s true, what’s our best strategy to manage this in the future? Well, you know, push vaccinations as hard as we can, provide boosters on some regular schedule. I don’t think we have enough data yet to know what that schedule is. And then, most importantly, I think is we really need to have a reset on the pandemic. We need to stop thinking about our go-to strategies of controlling infection and realize that, at least in the case of Omicron and potentially in future variants, that we aren’t going to be successful at dampening transmission through the strategies we’ve been using through the pandemic to date.”
Murray says his team is less concerned about Omicron causing death, and more concerned about the disruption it’s causing on our community because so many people are testing positive and being asked to quarantine. He says we should not be testing asymptomatics.
“We run models and there is nothing you can do. Mask use, vaccination boosters, can’t act fast enough to stop the Omicron wave. So, we have done lots and lots of policy simulations and the impact of them on the Omicron wave is minimal because it’s so fast and so transmissible. So basically, our old strategies that worked well for Delta, for Alpha, for the ancestral variant, are just not going to work for Omicron, in our view.”