Is this the beginning of the end of the pandemic?

Omicron was the mass vaccination campaign the unvaccinated didn’t know they signed up for. Will it be enough to end the pandemic phase of COVID-19?

It’s easy to forget what the “19” at the end of COVID-19 stands for…2019, the year SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in Wuhan, China. We’re now firmly into the fourth calendar year of the pandemic, the third year since it’s been wreaking havoc in our lives.

With the advent of the wildly transmissible omicron variant, most of the pandemic era records for cases and hospitalizations have been set in 2022. Indeed, omicron has been so efficient at exploiting holes in our immune armor that it has acted as a sort of natural vaccination campaign with a predilection for the unvaccinated. 

So today, as omicron ebbs, I want to answer the question on all of our minds: could this finally be the end of the COVID-19 pandemic? 

Let’s look at what history and science have to say.