"In North America, I think we'll probably have two to four weeks of major activity yet, and then I think it will start to decrease substantially," said Osterholm.
So if Omicron isn't possible to eliminate and is already spreading like wildfire, threatening to overwhelm our health-care system, what does that mean for the end of the pandemic? And how will the next few weeks and months play out? "Whether you have 1,000 people get infected and come to hospital today or 1,000 people get infected and come to the hospital in the next 10 to 15 weeks can make all the difference in the world," he said. The reason strict public health measures are being reinstated around the world is because attempting to spread out the sheer number of Omicron cases at a given time is an important step in trying to avoid overwhelming the health-care system, Osterholm said. Think you may have Omicron? Here are things you can do.
WATCH | Hospital staff levels to drop as Omicron causes hospitalizations surge: "It's not about stopping this, we cannot stop Omicron … but what we can do is slow it down and try and keep it away from those who are most at risk and try to mitigate the impact on hospitals." "So what that leads to is rapidly explosive outbreaks that are relatively less severe, but when you have that number of people infected, you're still going to have a strain on your health-care system," she said. Henry said one of the biggest challenges with Omicron is that the incubation period has become so much shorter - meaning if it took five to seven days for symptoms to emerge with previous variants, it now takes just two or three days for people to get sick. "If this had been the initial virus that came ripping through before we had people vaccinated, especially older people, I mean it would have been the plague." Omicron may be less severe than Delta, WHO says, but don't call it 'mild'.Omicron has fundamentally changed the virus at almost every level - from the rate at which it spreads, to the time it takes to infect, to the severity of symptoms it causes. This is a fire hose in terms of transmission." "As bad as Delta was, that was more of a garden hose. "It's kind of the difference between a garden hose and a fire hose," said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. The highly contagious variant is now spreading at a rate unlike anything we've ever seen before, completely overwhelming our testing capacity and infecting more Canadians than at any other point in the pandemic as hospitalizations reach record highs. Omicron has completely changed what we thought we knew about COVID-19 - given how quickly it develops in the body, causes symptoms to emerge and infects others - meaning the tools we have to try to contain it are no longer as effective. Subscribe to Second Opinion for a weekly roundup of health and medical science news.
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