As Omicron Hits, COVID-19 Case Counts Don ’t Mean What They Used To

America has begun the gradual process of accepting that COVID-19 is going to be endemic—meaning it will always be present in the population to some degree—due to inherent properties of the virus (animal reservoirs, high transmissibility, long period of infectiousness, symptoms similar to other pathogens), and will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, the U.S. has an impressive suite of tools to deal with this reality. Vaccine eligibility is widening and boosters are available for all adults who want one. Two effective oral antiviral drugs that prevent hospitalizations and death in people newly infected with COVID-19 are about to be authorized. There are also monoclonal antibody treatments for people whose immune systems do not mount a robust response to infection. The CDC signaled this important and realistic shift by acknowledging that herd immunity is not achievable. With this admission from our most important public health agency, policy must shift also. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] We have reached a point in the pandemic where policy should no longer be based around the idea that we cannot resume normal life until case numbers are below a particular (arbitrary) level. One reason is that those levels were set before vaccination, and have not been adjusted accordingly, even though a large proportion of cases, in part due to the growing proportion of cases that are breakthrough cases, are now mild. Another reason is that these metrics we...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news