At some point, the virus will reach an evolutionary peak, Holmes said. “But is this now? Or next week? Or in a year? We don’t have the answer.”
Associate Professor Stuart Turville, the lead virologist in the Kirby Institute lab that is sequencing Omicron variants, echoed Holmes’ reluctance to second-guess the pandemic’s trajectory.
“We didn’t predict, and we never could have predicted Omicron,” Turville said.
But he laid out two likely scenarios for the next year of the pandemic. Most likely: Omicron subvariants would remain the dominant infections and the population’s hybrid immunity, protection afforded by a combination of previous COVID-19 infections and vaccinations, would be effective against any small changes in the virus.
The second scenario is a “wildcard event”: the appearance of a new variant that would be more transmissible than Omicron.
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Any new variant is likely to be “emerging and battle-hardened” in an immunocompromised person with a prolonged infection, offering little warning before spreading through the community, Turville said.
“But the good news is that the longer the virus is in the community, the more immunity we get,” he said. He was optimistic that this would be how the community begins to “corner” the pandemic.
Associate Professor Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, said all signs indicated the worst of the pandemic was behind us, “but we won’t know for sure until we can look back in a few months and say, ‘Oh, that was the pinnacle.'”
“We’re addicted to hope these days,” Mackay said. “We can’t invest money in the hope that the new variants will be milder or less severe.”
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ANU Medical School professor of infectious diseases Peter Collignon suspects the pandemic has peaked in line with the trajectory of the 1918 Spanish flu, which was extremely virulent for the first two to three years before persisting at significantly lower levels for decades.
The test will be next European and American winter, and whether they have waves of deaths and hospitalizations, Collignon said.
“I’ll be proven wrong very quickly if I’m wrong. We’ll probably have a good idea in December or January,” he said.
Kirby Institute epidemiology professor John Kaldor shared that optimism, but said: “We have to remain ready to respond if this prediction is wrong.
“Our COVID planning must continually adapt, optimize and be flexible to respond to whatever comes our way,” Kaldor said.
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“Our early warning system, which relies on global communication networks, worked quite well with COVID and again with monkeypox, but now the world is a tense place, and it may be harder to keep up of international cooperation under the circumstances.
“We don’t know how long the vaccines we have now will protect us. We will almost certainly need new vaccines and this process needs to be carefully considered,” he said.