Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic
. “The speed with which Omicron took over was really amazing,” says Shangxin Yang, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of California Los Angeles. “It’s almost magical. In two weeks, it went from accounting for 1% of COVID-19 cases around the world to 50% of cases, and in one month, to almost 100% of cases. That’s amazing speed; we could never have imagined any virus could do that.
“All of this comes together to make the perfect scenario to end the pandemic,” says Yang. “This is exactly how most other pandemics with respiratory pathogens had ended. They spread like fire and then eventually most people either became vaccinated or infected and when the population reached herd immunity, the pandemic ended.”