Ottar, who is a Pennsylvania State University professor and researcher on diseases outbreaks says the idea of natural herd immunity that does not require vaccination is false. He said that although omicron has become a common disease, people who were vaccinated have less exposure to the virus than those who didn’t get their shot. The vaccines are still effective in preventing serious disease and death. This is critical to normalizing life.

As effectiveness decreases for the first two doses of vaccine, booster shots become crucial to fighting the pandemic. Pfizer and BioNTech have shown that their booster shot is effective in treating symptoms of illness or infection. According to data from U.K. Health Security Agency.

“If everybody who was eligible for a third dose got a third dose, and eventually we’ll probably need to start giving fourth doses, if we were able to do that we’d be done — pandemic emergency over,” Lawler said.

The U.S. has a far lower rate of booster vaccinations. According to the CDC, only 64% of Americans are fully vaccinated. Only 42% have had a third dose. Tens of million Americans remain unvaccinated.

However, it is possible to increase the immunity of the populace through vaccinations or mass exposure to Omicron. This will make the risk of falling ill faster, says Dr. Kelly Cawcutt of the University of Nebraska.

People’s immune systems were not equipped to fight the virus when Covid was first discovered in December 2019. This is what has made the outbreak so severe. Particularly the elderly were unable to build a sufficient defense and are more vulnerable to death and severe illness than others.

Jennie Lavine is a biotech company Karius’ computational investigational biologist. She says that as immunity increases in the wider community through vaccinations and infection over time, children from new generation will be the only ones left uninfected.

Although the risk for severe Covid disease is not negligible, it’s generally more common in children than in adults. According to the CDC. According to Lavine, this means that over time the virus could cause milder diseases, possibly resembling common cold, once the children have been left unaffected.

The question of immunity can be separated from the possibility that the pandemic will end. If the virus evolves into a less serious form, this could happen. Omicron doesn’t generally make people as sick or as severe as delta. However, this does not necessarily mean that future versions will become more mild.

“The whole idea that viruses by definition always evolve to be less pathogenic and less severe — that’s the stuff of fairy tales,” Lawler said.

In large part, how risk-averse individuals and society are, will determine if a person’s return to normal life is possible.

Fauci stated that once immunity is sufficient, Covid would look like seasonal respiratory viruses, such as flu. This is something the U.S. healthcare system has become accustomed to handling every year without having to respond in a national crisis. Although the U.S. appears to be on the right path to contain the pandemic, he cautioned, however, that new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths remain too high.

From the fall 2017 to the winter 2018 flu seasons, the United States suffered the worst influenza season in ten years. The CDC reports that 52,000 people died and 710,000 were treated. By comparison, Covid has killed more than 236,000 people and hospitals have reported nearly 1.5 million admissions of people with Covid since last fall, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Lawler suggested that in certain ways, the virus might be considered an endemic because it is circulating among people all over the globe for the past two years. It doesn’t matter if society decides it is endemic, but it does not change the reality of how many lives it has claimed to have taken.

“It’s a synonym for surrender is what it is — it’s a convenient way to just give up,” Lawler said about the conversation on the virus becoming endemic. He said, “We are going to lose more people during this combined wave of the delta and omicron wave potential than we lost last year in peak wave.”

In the six weeks since omicron became the dominant variant in the U.S., more than 26 million people have caught the virus, according to Hopkins data. Infections hit an all-time pandemic high of more than 803,000 daily new cases as a seven-day average on Jan. 15. They have since declined about 75% to an average of 207,000 new cases a day as of Thursday, according to the data.

Also, hospitalizations are falling. There were 103,000 patients in U.S. hospitals with Covid as of Monday, according to a seven-day average of data from HHS, down 20% over the past week and 35% from peak levels on Jan. 20.

Although new infections can be a good indicator of the pathology of the pandemic, it is not the only way to determine if hospitals will succumb to the demands of Covid patients. Michael Osterholm is director at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, Minnesota.

Osterholm explained that “when they break, it’s the unacceptable thing for everyone to do.” Osterholm stated, “That is when you don’t want your heart attack. That’s when you don’t want your stroke.”

Osterholm says that the problem is that the pandemic only exacerbated hospital burnout, leaving little space for the country to maneuver in the event of an outbreak.

In terms of vaccinations, the society might be more prepared for managing Covid once it has become endemic. The CDC states that vaccination against flu decreases illness risk by between 40% and 60%, depending on the match of vaccine to the specific strain. The booster shot from Pfizer is effective in preventing illnesses up to 75%. Moderna and Pfizer can adjust their shots faster because they are based on messengerRNA technology which is less time-consuming than conventional vaccines.

Cawcutt explained that adjustments are made for flu vaccine variants depending on how the season was last year. This is to ensure flu shots remain as effective as possible. We know that Covid vaccines work better than the historical flu shots.

Lawler explained that he sees people die every day at the hospital due to staph, strep and other infections, even though they’ve been using great antibiotics for them for over 80 years.

Cawcutt explained that while society may return to some normalcy, not all public health measures will disappear. Cawcutt explained that while states are beginning to relax indoor mask mandates some individuals will opt to wear masks in larger gatherings during peak periods of transmission. They also have an increased awareness about social distance.

Cawcutt explained that some of the measures taken by the government to prevent the spread and mitigate other viruses in the lungs will be remembered with some long-lasting change.

Many people hope that Omicron signals the end to the pandemic. However, Fauci cast doubts on whether omicron is mother nature’s mass vaccination event. He warned that there could be a new type of vaccine that can evade the immunity conferred by Omicron.

Lawler expressed surprise that there wasn’t a second variant from a place with sufficient immune escape, and other epidemic waves. There is no evidence to suggest that the virus has not exhausted its possibilities of mutating and creating new infections.