Monthly Pandemic Task Force meeting focuses on Omicron variant
The Pine Island Pandemic Task Force held a monthly meeting Monday, Dec. 13, primarily to discuss the Omicron variant as a potential threat to the island. Doctor James Koopman said he has been intensely investigating the Omicron variant, since this is his area of research.
“I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to do some modeling studies that will help with understanding what’s going on with such an extreme variant, and what we ought to do about it with regard to vaccines,” Koopman said.
Many people are currently working on these decisions, he said. He went on to say that a possible hypothesis is that this variant emerged very early on, before the CoV-2 variants were even being named.
Africa, said Koopman, has had an explosion of this particular variant, although the extent of the Omicron variant on a global scale remains unknown.
“Right now it looks a little explosive because everybody’s doing sequencing in an effort to detect it so we’re seeing more cases, but it does look like it’s going to grow in Africa and it has been growing considerably in Denmark, the country that has best done the sequencing. It could really potentially take off and be an important problem. It’s still too early to tell if it’s going to be a milder disease or a more severe disease,” Koopman said.
Another possible hypothesis, said Koopman, is that the Omicron variant evolved, not from person to person, but because of people with prolonged infection, such as HIV. The theory is that people with HIV may continue to be infected for eight months to a year while the virus continues to evolve inside them, before transmission to another person occurs.
Koopman said this hypothesis is less likely because when a virus evolves within a host, it generally decreases the ability to transmit the disease. Another hypothesis, he said, is that in the early stages of the virus animals were infected, the virus evolved within them, and was then transmitted back to humans.
“I’m really hoping that we can all have face-to-face meetings sometime in the near future, but there’s a real chance that this one is going to hit us harder,” Koopman said.
Doctor Daniel Hanley of Ancuram Clinic said the “wait and see” approach is likely best.
“I’m not really worried about the severity of the illness. It is more transmissible based on the data so far, but it doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in hospitalizations and deaths. We should all be worried about it, of course. Right now I’m going with the flow and treating it as if it was Delta all over again and keeping an eye out for more sick people and taking it as they come,” Hanley said.
Hanley said more people seem to be concerned about getting boosters at this time then they are expressing concerns about the Omicron variant. In his opinion, those who do not want the vaccine are still not getting it and those who do, are.
Koopman said statistically, we are at a point where approximately 1 in 100 people over the age of 65 are dying from COVID, with the number of deaths dropping markedly as the age of those infected decreases.
“Overall, it’s about 1 out of every 450 people. That’s still very significant,” Koopman said.