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Is a cloth mask effective enough against the omicron variant? Start your day informed and inspired. A high number of prior infections from past COVID surges may have had a similarly mollifying effect in South Africa , where the average age of the population is also very young, and thus better steeled against severe COVID The second part of the equation—the inherent potency of the virus itself—unfortunately gets harder to parse when the world is more immune , Roby Bhattacharyya, a microbiologist and infectious-disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told me.
Still, even unvaccinated people with Omicron seem less likely to end up hospitalized, in the ICU, or on ventilators. Read: Hospitals are in serious trouble. The variant offers a harsh lesson in multiplication: So many people have been infected that a relatively small percentage of medically severe cases has still erupted into an absolutely staggering number. Hospitalizations have already hit a new pandemic peak.
Among them are huge numbers of kids , many of whom are still too young to be vaccinated. And Omicron is finding them. Lekshmi Santhosh, a critical-care physician at UCSF, has seen Omicron exacerbate chronic health issues to the point where they turn fatal.
In high-enough numbers, any Omicron infection can wreak havoc. Across the country, people are entering isolation in droves, closing schools and businesses, and hamstringing hospitals that can already ill-afford a staffing shortage. In many parts of the country, hospital capacities are already being reached and exceeded , making it difficult for people to seek care for any kind of illness.
Omicron also still harbors dangerous unknowns. This vaccine would last a lifetime, as opposed to today's vaccine, which has to be given anew every year.
Today's flu vaccine is the result of a painstaking international collaboration between the authorities and pharmaceutical companies. Vaccines contain killed viruses from ordinary patients from around the world. The job of the researchers is to predict which virus strains they think will infect most people during the coming flu season.
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health keeps track of which influenza viruses are infecting people in Norway. Hungnes himself has twice participated in the international meetings organized by the WHO, where it is decided which viruses should be part of the coming season's influenza vaccine.
The decision as to which viruses are most likely to spread has to be made long before the flu season begins. And since viruses only multiply inside living cells, the way the vaccines are produced may be a little surprising to many. Before ending up in the vaccine, however, the viruses from the eggs are killed or inactivated with chemicals. Unfortunately, a lot can change during the months it takes to produce the vaccine:. If the viruses in the vaccine are different from those you are infected with, your immune system may not be able to recognize them.
But if the viruses change so much all the time, is there any hope of making a flu vaccine that provides lifetime immunity? Our immune system can recognize the spikes on the virus, which are proteins that are called hemagglutinin.
Many of the scientists who are trying to make a new flu vaccine think the key is getting our immune system to focus on these spikes. So instead of injecting whole or large parts of the virus into the body, it may be enough to just use hemagglutinin in the vaccine. The way Bogen and his colleagues do this is to create a DNA fragment that contains the recipe for different variants of the spiked surface protein. The idea is to create what is called a DNA vaccine.
This kind of vaccine causes your body to create the substances that the immune system will learn to recognize. The researchers have tested this type of DNA vaccine in mice. It contains the recipe for seven variants of hemagglutinin. Now they are testing vaccines with up to 18 different variants of the surface protein.
Another strategy for making a universal flu vaccine is to concentrate on an even smaller portion of the virus. The hope is that a new universal vaccine will also be able to provide protection against pandemics.
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