Editorial: End in sight to the pandemic?

The relaxation on COVID-19 curbs in various States has not come a moment too soon. Tamil Nadu has done away with its Sunday and night curfews, measures that many scientists felt were not particularly effective. The decision to reopen schools and colleges will restore a semblance of normalcy in everyday life. With other states such as Karnataka and West Bengal, and Union Territories such as Chandigarh and New Delhi also having decided to relax the curbs, the message coming from across the country is quite clear.

First, we now have adequate evidence – from home and from abroad – that Omicron, despite its contagiousness, generally results in very mild infections. The fact that there are a number of Omicron-infected people in hospitals is a result of their suffering from other serious co-morbidities; Omicron is rarely, if ever, the principal cause of their hospitalisation. The confidence we now have in the fact that the health infrastructure, inadequate though it is, will not be severely tested by Omicron is well-founded. While we may not be able to prevent its spread, the possibility that it becomes endemic is not especially worrying.

Over the past couple of years, the trajectory of COVID-19 has been frustratingly difficult to predict. The emergence of new variants meant that administrative responses have had to be constantly modified in the face of new information. This suggests that we cannot afford to be complacent about the virus, which may well continue to flourish and infect in the form of different variants. At the same time, our past experiences with viruses, which have traded in their deadliness in exchange for their contagiousness in order to spread, holds out the hope that the worst of COVID-19 could be behind us.

Being on guard is one thing. Being doom-laden is quite another. Our proclivity for alarmist and untruthful speculation was very much in play recently, after Chinese scientists reported on NeoCov, a coronavirus found in bats with the capacity to potentially infect human beings. The key qualifier is ‘potentially’, since infecting humans is possible only via a possible mutation. And there has been no such mutation despite this bat virus being known to humans for over a decade. The fact that the WHO said that this virus requires further study before one can prove it infects humans does not mean that the global health body considers it a serious threat. It is in the nature of good science not to rule anything out with absolute certainty – to admit a possibility theoretically is not to signal that there is a worrying chance of a real threat.

By summer this year, the world will be in a better place to assess where it stands vis-à-vis COVID. Already, Omicron has become the dominant strain in the US and in most parts of Europe, replacing the much more damaging Delta variants. We cannot conclude that Omicron will be the end of the pandemic, given that viruses do not work in entirely predictable ways. But given all the evidence we have at hand, we can certainly ask, and hopefully at that, whether this could be COVID-19’s endgame.