Covid-19 pandemic end in sight due to ‘Blade Runner effect’

Consensus is growing that, in part due to Omicron, we’re on the final lap of the Covid-19 pandemic.

University of Sydney infectious diseases expert Robert Booy.

It’s beginning to look a lot like the final lap.

Consensus is growing that Omicron has accelerated our progress towards the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in countries such as Australia with high rates of infection.

“I like quoting Blade Runner – ‘The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long’,” says University of Sydney infectious diseases expert Robert Booy.

“I don’t think even the best virologists can tell you for sure when this pandemic may end. There is a great deal of scientific uncertainty – but in the past, pandemics have lasted two or three years, and they tend to quieten down after that.

“Experience teaches us that we might be in a good position, especially because we have got the double advantage of vaccination immunity and wild virus-induced immunity, both at high levels.”

There are two main elements required for a virus to burn itself out and go from epidemic to endemic. The first is that it has infected sufficient numbers in the population for it to no longer be able to find susceptible hosts. The second is that high vaccination levels have made many people immune from catching the virus, so they’re not susceptible hosts either.

The virus simply has no more people left to infect.

A health worker is seen working at the Roselands drive thru Covid-19 testing site in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

It doesn’t take a brilliant mathematician to conclude that in NSW, a high level of immunity will be reached in the population due to the sheer numbers of people contracting Covid-19. Case numbers are probably at the least three times the officially reported figures, due to many people diagnosing themselves via rapid antigen tests rather than having PCR tests and thus being recorded in the ­official data. Many people are also likely to be asymptomatic and may not know they have the virus. Assuming that actual case numbers have been close to 100,000 a day in NSW for at least the past few days, and the peak of the Omicron wave is expected in perhaps three weeks, even if case numbers do not rise at all in NSW, at least two million people will have been infected by the time the Omicron wave subsides. That’s one in four residents of NSW.

“At some point, you are quickly going to exhaust the number of susceptibles at the same time as boosting with vaccination,” says University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely. “Both the rapid boosting and the rapid infection is going to see this thing not fizzle out, but crash out quite quickly. It’s like a Band-Aid being pulled off – it’s just painful at the moment.”

“My hope is that this Omicron wave is going to be the part of the pandemic that’s going to be most problematic, the most challenging for us in Australia, and then it’s going to be better going.”

Omicron’s high transmiss­ibility means that an astonishing three billion infections are expected globally over the next two months, as many as in the first two years of the pandemic, according to modelling by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

One in 10 Londoners is currently infected, and experts are ­already calling the approaching end of the pandemic there.

The World Health Organisation is also beginning to speak about the end of the pandemic. “The acute phase of the pandemic that has been associated with the tragedy of deaths and hospitalisations – that can end in 2022,” says Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program. However, Dr Ryan says if infections are to subside, most of the world will need to be vaccinated. “We hope that this is the endgame but we’re certainly not there yet. This is going to be a bumpy road on the way to low levels of Covid,” he says.

David Matthews, professor of virology at Britain’s Bristol University, said: “I think the pandemic for the UK will pretty much be over once we’ve got through the next month or so.”

Deakin University’s Catherine Bennett agrees Australia is on its way to endemicity of the virus. “As the proportion of the population that is unvaccinated decreases and as the number who are vaccinated but acquire an infection increases, it’s endemic basically,” she says.

“At the moment that’s exactly where we’re heading.”

But not all experts agree. Adelaide epidemiologist Adrian Esterman predicts the pandemic still has another year to run. He said if another variant came along, there would be further waves of disease.

“The virus is highly mutated, and there’s a very high probability that we’ll have further variants,” Professor Esterman said. “The trouble is that these variants are evading our immune system.”

Deakin University epidemiologist Hassan Vally believes Omicron has put us a step backward rather than on our way to endemicity. “I think the problem is the fact that it’s evading to a certain degree the immune response that’s caused by vaccines,” he said. “It has actually put us back a step in that instead of the boosters being a little bit of a top-up, now they have become absolutely essential. We’ve now gone back to the stage of needing to flatten the curve to give us time to get the boosters in.”