THE BEGINNING OF THE END?
WHEN JEREMY LUBAN FIRST SAW THE GENETIC SEQUENCE OF THE OMICRON VARIANT LAST NOVEMBER, HE KNEW RIGHT AWAY IT WOULD BE A SERIOUS PROBLEM.
There was the sheer number of new mutations—as many as 50, with 30 or so in the critical places that vaccines and drug treatments target—and the fact that this version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. “It’s like when you look at the first page of a comic book and all of the Marvel villains have gotten together,” says the University of Massachusetts virus expert. “How are we going to survive this?” he recalls thinking. “We can deal with one [mutation], but 10 or more of them all at once?”
Yet Omicron, like all villains, has an Achilles’ heel. While it can be dangerous for people who are unvaccinated or have pre-existing health conditions, for those vaccinated or previously infected, this variant seems to cause only relatively mild disease—a sore throat, some flu- or coldlike symptoms, or no noticeable symptoms at all.
Some have interpreted this as a sign that SARS-CoV-2 may be reaching the end
