How Bad Will This Winter Be?
The forecast is disappointing. I’m not talking about the weather (although climate change is a separate crisis). I mean COVID-19 case numbers.
When vaccination rates were high in June, it looked like we were nearing the end of this whole pandemic, but then Delta came. And now that Delta is starting to fade, we have to decide what to do with Omicron. This winter will be challenging, especially as the number of influenza viruses and other respiratory diseases is also on the rise .
Vaccines still work against Omicron
There is good news and bad news that a popular option has emerged in the city. First, the bad: Omicron seems to be more common than Delta , which was already significantly more common than previous variants.
But the good news is that there is emerging evidence that Omicron may cause less serious illness . Ironically, the best scenario would be if we were given an option that was incredibly infectious, so that it outperformed all other options, but it would also only cause mild or asymptomatic illness. That would put it on the level of a cold that we can live with. We don’t yet know if Omicron is soft enough to be the best option. But at least it’s not more dangerous, which is considered the good side at the moment.
Okay, but there is other bad news: vaccines (and previous infections) do not protect against Omicron as well as against previous strains. And more good news: The vaccine still work against Omicron, you may just need more of them. (Be sure to get a booster .)
Hospitals are already overcrowded and the situation is likely to get worse
If you don’t work in the healthcare industry and don’t know anyone else who does it, you may not realize that our healthcare systems have been on high alert for almost two years in a row. Workers burn out, intensive care units replenish, people who shouldn’t be dying.
Minnesota hospital executives just pulled a full-page newspaper ad that said, “We’re heartbroken. We are overwhelmed, ”we implore residents to be vaccinated and put on masks. This is a pretty universal opinion. In a recent press call about the state of hospital care, emergency room physician John Hick said “every shift I work these days is the worst shift of my career.”
If you need confirmation, quickly scroll through the r / nursing page under the reddit. People are dying, hospitals are constantly short of space and resources, and the people who provide care are exhausted and underpaid.
Research into how hospitals are doing is full of other bad news. For example, hospital funding under the CARES Act was distributed unfairly, exacerbating inequalities in black communities . One analysis of COVID deaths over the past year estimated that one in four deaths could be caused by overcrowding in hospitals .
What we can do
In that press conference on hospitals, I asked what we can do about the current state of health care. One important piece of advice from Hick was to stay on top of preventative measures and take care of minor issues before they escalate into serious ones.
With more breakouts seen with Omicron, we can no longer rely on vaccines as our only remedy. Remember, in the days before vaccinations, how protection against COVID was a question of the Swiss cheese model , where we stacked imperfect remedies on top of each other? If you’re wearing masks and avoiding crowded spaces and getting tested for illness, these protections add up. It’s the same these days, you can just think of the vaccine as a particularly thick slice of Hawarty. This is not a guarantee, so other layers of cheese will help you a lot.
This means that as we approach this winter, we need to think about risks in the same way we did last year. Masks will help, and crowded interiors are still not the best place to be. If you are vaccinated and have contracted COVID, you are reassured that you are less likely to become seriously ill and less likely to pass it on to others. But even statistically mild cases of COVID worry susceptible people (such as young children and immunocompromised people), and in large numbers, they are especially harmful to communities. So it’s worth taking extra precautions.