What could 'COVID season' actually look like?
CBC
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As wave after wave of COVID-19 crashes over us, the hope is that we'll eventually reach a point where seasonality of the virus will make the pandemic easier to predict and ride out.
But with highly contagious new variants emerging and driving surges around the world at different times — will we reach a regular "COVID season" anytime soon?
The pandemic hasn't followed a clear-cut pattern in Canada, with waves hitting erratically in the spring, fall and winter over the past two and a half years, largely due to public health measures lifting and new variants threatening immunity from vaccines and prior infections.
Different variants have also caught countries off guard at unexpected times (and sometimes missed them altogether), making it increasingly challenging for us to predict when and where COVID waves would hit next.
"Let's be honest, the virus is in control here, not us," said Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious diseases physician, medical director of infection prevention and control at Women's College Hospital in Toronto and CEO of Health PEI.
"We're entirely at the whim of whatever random evolutionary events occur and it's really hard to predict."
Canada currently has a nasty mix of Omicron subvariants — including BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1 and BA.2.3 — fuelling an ongoing sixth wave after public health measures were widely lifted, despite over 80 per cent of Canadians vaccinated and close to half the population infected.
The U.S. avoided a major BA.2 wave until late last month, but BA.2.12.1 is now quickly becoming the dominant strain at almost a third of new cases, while Europe is also contending with a surge in BA.2 subvariants and the emergence of BA.4 and BA.5.
That's despite relatively high vaccination rates, with just over two-thirds double vaccinated in the U.S. and more than 70 per cent in Europe, and even higher levels of prior infection.
More than half of Americans had been infected with the virus as of February, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while EU officials reported between 60 and 80 per cent of the European population have had COVID-19.
"It is going to get increasingly difficult to compare countries … and honestly even before this it was kind of hard," said University of Arizona immunologist Deepta Bhattacharya.
"The Alpha wave really nailed the U.K. and it didn't really here and I don't know why that is. It certainly got introduced here and it didn't spread to the same extent and I have no idea why. So there's all sorts of stuff that makes it very difficult to understand and predict."
Another factor that's hard to predict is just how population immunity will change — and whether prior infections and high vaccination rates will protect, or wane over time.
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