How humanity may 'finally figure out how to live with' COVID-19 in 2023: report

26 December 2022

Three years have passed since what came to be called COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China. Since those early cases in December 2019, COVID-19 has, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, killed more than 6.6 million people worldwide. That includes over 1 million deaths in the United States, which has had more COVID-19-related fatalities than any other country in the world.

COVID-19 has been the world’s worst health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919, although that pandemic was much deadlier; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Spanish flu-related deaths is “estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide.” Even deadlier than the Spanish flu was the Black Death of 1347-1351, which historians estimate killed somewhere between 75 million and 200 million people. Some historians estimate that as many as one in three — or even one in two — Europeans were killed by bubonic plague during the Black Death.

After three years, COVID-19 continues to be highly contagious. Yet much has changed since 2020. Millions of people around the world have been vaccinated for COVID-19, and as 2022 draws to a close, most COVID-19 infections are not fatal. Hospitals in the U.S. and Europe are no longer being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients the way they were during the pre-vaccine months of 2020.

In an article published by the Daily Beast the morning after Christmas 2022, journalist David Axe lays out some reasons why 2023 may be the year in which “most” of the world “finally figures out how to live with COVID.”

“Ironically, we’ll have the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to thank for it,” Axe explains. “ Successive waves of infections from Omicron and its subvariants, starting in late 2021, have produced so much natural immunity across the human population that most countries are now in a good position to weather new subvariants…. Yes, people will get sick when some new form of the virus becomes dominant. But owing to their natural immunity, they probably won’t get very sick. And fresh infections will seed fresh antibodies that will then prolong the population’s natural immunity through the next wave of cases.”

Jeffrey Klausner, an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, told the Daily Beast that with COVID-19, the “waves” will “get shallower and shallower and further apart like ripples in a pond.” And Lawrence Gostin, a global health expert at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., told the Beast, “I see the United States and most of the world gradually exiting from the acute phase of the pandemic.”

According to Axe, “More transmissible than older variants but less severe, Omicron drove record cases in late 2021 and early 2022 — and spawned subvariants such as BA.2, BA.5 and BQ.1 that drove their own, smaller surges in cases throughout the year. But the overall trend in 2022 was toward fewer and fewer hospitalizations and deaths. In countries where people were getting back to a version of normal and the virus was circulating, all those accumulating natural antibodies were doing their thing.”

Axe notes that it’s possible that there will be a “new variant or subvariant” of COVID-19 that “dodges our natural antibodies” — in which case, “the dream of a normal-ish 2023 could turn into a nightmare.” But Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida’s Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research, believes that COVID-19 will become increasingly “manageable” in the future.

Michael told the Beast, “Ultimately, the cycles of repeat waves will progressively decline to a steady-level low transmission endemic state. New variants will cause flare-ups, but I am expecting that given how robust natural immunity is, such spikes in cases will be small relative to Omicron, for example — and so, easily manageable.”

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