Omicron Is Our Past Pandemic Mistakes on Fast-Forward
With Omicron, everything is sped up. The new variant is spreading fast and far. At a time when Delta was already sprinting around the country, Omicron not only caught up but overtook it, jumping from an estimated 13 to 73 percent of U.S. cases in a single week. We have less time to make decisions and less room to course-correct when they are wrong. Whereas we had months to prepare for Delta in the U.S., we’ve had only weeks for Omicron. Every mistake gets amplified; every consequence hits us sooner. We should have learned after living through multiple waves and multiple variants of COVID, but we haven’t, at least not enough. We keep making the same pandemic mistakes over and over again.
This is not March 2020. We have masks. We have better treatments. Our immune systems are much more prepared to fight off the virus, thanks to vaccines. But as a society, we are still not prepared. Here are the six traps that we keep falling into, each consequence made all the more acute because of Omicron’s speed.
We rush to dismiss it as “mild.”
In February 2020, when the then-novel coronavirus still seemed far away, a reassuring statistic emerged: 82 percent of cases were mild—milder than SARS, certainly milder than Ebola. This notion would haunt our response: What’s the big deal? Worry about the flu! Since then, we’ve learned what mild in “most” people can mean when the virus spreads to infect hundreds of millions: 5.4 million dead around the world, with 800,000 in just the U.S.
This coronavirus. A milder but more transmissible virus can spread so aggressively that it ultimately causes more hospitalizations and deaths. Mild initial infections can also lead to persistent, debilitating symptoms, as have learned. became entrenched so rapidly that the experience of many long-haulers . We’ve seen how such , and still the idea of Omicron as an intrinsically mild variant has already taken hold.
