Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes:

In Gauteng, the urbanized Johannesburg-Pretoria region of South Africa where Omicron was first isolated, new cases are plummeting so fast that there are already only half as many as there were at the peak. It’s not a curve, it’s an icepick, and it lasted barely a month. That suggests that, as the former F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said on Sunday, it’s “going to blow its way through the population, probably very quickly.”

If that’s the case, New York, as the country’s most crowded metropolis, should set the pace. If our cases drop to near zero in January (as India’s did after their intense Delta wave last spring), we will know that the pandemic is nearing an end because everyone is immunized either by the vaccine or the virus. It will take longer for the virus to mop up less-crowded places like South Dakota and Idaho, but eventually, it will find all of us.

It’s possible that, once every 100 years or so, a new coronavirus makes the jump from animals to humans and causes a pandemic so big that resistance to it persists into future generations, said Benjamin tenOever, a virologist at NYU Langone medical school. The four coronaviruses that now cause common colds — known as 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1 — may all be “pandemic strains that burned out” centuries ago. [Continue reading…]