"Economic Endemicity" and Forever Omicron

An Easy Chair discussion synopsis

Today we discussed why Omicron is still the circulating variant despite 1) The ample time that has passed since we became awash in it and 2) The great evolutionary distance it has made from the original Omicron. We arrived to several possible reasons:

1. Omicron’s evolution and diversity is so rapid and vast that it is difficult to predict which variant deserves the designation which would create a sort of appreciation of it by the public

2. Political leadership has declared many times the Covid Pandemic over, for better or worse

3. Scientific leadership may find it difficult to “pin down” a variant of interest (similar to reason 1)

4. Omicron has been branded as mild, which plays into corporate and political desires of a decoupling between the burden of the problem and voter and consumer behavior.

I introduced the dark side of endemicity, which has been sold as a siren song to the public. I believe we are in a hyper-endemic state of SARS Cov 2 where the virus is able to behave with epidemic-like transmission waves, but there is a constant baseline. With Omicron’s poor immunogenicity, we can expect transmission among individuals to behave like a reentrant circuit. If the “hybrid dampening” is true, we will make less immune memory to the variant previously encountered. However, that does not mean the same variants would stick around. There is an evolutionary trajectory to SARS Cov 2 following thermodynamic favorability: Spike’s Ace2 affinity.

We had other topics of discussion and a few questions.