As a weary world faces a third year of coronavirus, just as its spread is supercharged by the most infectious variant so far, there is optimism among many scientists that the pandemic’s toll on global health will ease in 2022.
Although Omicron threatens a crisis over the next few months, the most likely scenarios show a much improved outlook after that due to increasing immunity among the global population, through vaccination and natural infection, which is likely to make the consequences of the virus less severe.
“The upswing in Omicron cases in Europe and North America has been extremely fast and we may see an equally fast downswing over the next month or two, though it could take four to six months for the variant to reverberate right round the world,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome medical foundation.