As described in Ensheng Dong, Hongru Du, and Lauren Gardner, An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time,. What does it hold in store? A country in which the elderly are overwhelmingly immune will have much better outcomes than will a similar country where the same level of overall immunity is concentrated in the young. The authors wish to thank Giles Colclough, Alina Glukhonemykh, Abhishek Sharma, and Zihao Xu for their contributions to the article. Omicron subvariant BA.2 likely to have same severity as original WHO, Reuters, February 2, 2022, reuters.com. Sarah Zhang, Watch the U.K. to understand Delta,. Given all of these variables, where do we net out? Covid pandemic: Biden eyes 4 July as Independence Day from virus, BBC, March 12, 2021, bbc.com. Gaining that confidence will require a continuation of the progress made to reduce mortality and complications, as well as further scientific study regarding long-term health consequences for recovered patients. Eames, Fine, and Heymann, Herd immunity: A rough guide, pp. While many people are acquiring natural immunity through infection, variants with enhanced transmissibility, if they predominate among all strains, could increase the proportion of people who need to be simultaneously immune to achieve herd immunity by ten to 20 percentage points, and increase vaccine coverage levels needed to 65 to 80 percent of the population (or 78 to 95 percent of those over 12 years old).141Based on a reproduction number (R0) of 2.4 for the original strain and assuming that the herd immunity threshold can be approximated using the formula 1- (1/R0). These are estimates for the United States, which is likely to have fast and ready access to vaccines. 13. Several clinicians in South Africa have noted the apparently mild presentation of Omicron cases.61Fareed Abdullah, Tshwane district Omicron variant patient profile - early features, South African Medical Research Council, December 8, 2021. Most importantly, we will remain an optimistic and forward-looking people. We're so far beyond COVID-zero that Queensland's Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard said it baldly this week: infection with COVID-19 was required for the pandemic to evolve to be endemic a constant presence in our lives. But Australia is approaching the wave from a different starting point to other countriesand that's affecting how our infrastructure is handling the surge and our attitudes towards it. For an example of a low-end estimate, see Max Fisher, R0, the messy metric that may soon shape our lives, explained, New York Times, April 23, 2020, nytimes.com. The death of the wallet. Globally, of the approximately 30 million people known to have COVID-19, more than 900,000 have died.1Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University & Medicine, September 18, 2020, coronavirus.jhu.edu. He said he did not agree with the move from some countries to place entry restrictions on people travelling from China afterthe powerful nation's decision to open its borders. For more, see Eames, Fine, and Heymann, Herd immunity: A rough guide, pp. Their task will be determining what burden of disease is low enough to warrant lifting of public-health restrictions, and how to manage the public-health impacts of endemic COVID-19.