The COVID-19 pandemic will end, but the short term will be tough: experts

While the spread of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 could soon have serious effects on the healthcare system, from a long-term view it is just a bump in the road in the pandemic, physician experts told a Dec. 14 press event organized by the Ontario Medical Association. “We can get through this. We’ve done it before. We know third doses are going to work, and however hard this is, we’ve done it before and we can manage it again in the short term,” said Dr. Allison McGeer, professor in laboratory medicine and pathobiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and an infectious disease specialist and senior clinician scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute of the Sinai Health System in Toronto. “This pandemic is still going to end. It is just longer and more difficult than we were hoping it was going to be,” she said. Dr. Adam Kassam, a Toronto-based physiatrist and president of the OMA, said the availability of vaccines and increased knowledge of COVID-19 transmission and management should provide more confidence on handling Omicron. While the long-term outlook may look promising, the short-term will be difficult. “Every day we’re learning more about Omicron,” Dr. McGeer said. “The summary of it is that this is very bad news for us at this time." The pace of the spread of the Omicron variant is much faster than that of others, and Dr. McGeer said Ontario could have 5,000 to 6,000 cases by the end of this month. “What that means for the beginning of 2022 is some very difficult decisions and difficult times,” she said. Available data on Omicron so far suggests it causes less severe disease, and the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines do provide protection against the hospitalization and infection. Read: Data indicate omicron is milder, better at evading vaccines A study by Discovery Health, a large private health insurance provider in South Africa, was released Dec. 14. It showed two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine provides 70% protection against hospitalization and 33% protection against infection. “Everybody is going to look and say; ‘oh that’s terrible', but the truth is, if that was all we had, we’d say it was brilliant,” Dr. McGeer said. The third dose of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines will provide more protection, she said. In order to have time to provide third doses, there will have to be public health restrictions, and support for those who suffer most from those restrictions. “If we choose not to do that, then we’re looking at a healthcare system that is going to be overwhelmed sometime in early to mid-January,” she said, noting the time from transmission to time to arriving into the ICU is usually three and a half weeks, so action taken now will decide what ICU occupancy in early January looks like. “We have very little time to put these restrictions in, in order to preserve our ICU capacity,” she said. “There’s no question that we’re facing a really discouraging and depressing and difficult time for the next month." How the omicron variant affects the unvaccinated population is not yet clearly understood. The variant is spreading rapidly because it can spread in people with two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, and lighter public health restrictions mean people have more contacts. Read: How good is Pfizer's experimental pill against Omicron? As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, there will need to be broader discussions on what is an acceptable burden of disease and what thresholds will prompt action, said Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya. “There is no right answer, but there are acceptable compromises within a society,” he said. Dr. Bhattacharyya is the Frigon Blau chair in family medicine research and director of the Institute for Health Systems Solutions and Virtual Care at Women’s College Hospital and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. The Discovery Health study included data on 211,000 people who tested positive for COVID-19, 41% of whom received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Of the positive cases, 78,000 involved the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. The risk of hospital admission was 29% lower with the omicron variant compared to the Delta variant. Read: Ontario needs new pandemic response strategy as Omicron makes inroads

The COVID-19 pandemic will end, but the short term will be tough: experts

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics