Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: delta variant

  • The omicron variant and scicomm

    Somewhere between the middle of India’s second major COVID-19 outbreak in March-May this year and today, a lot of us appear to have lost sight of a fact that was central to our understanding of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020: that the only way a disease outbreak, especially of the novel coronavirus, can be truly devastating is if the virus collaborated with poor public health infrastructure and subpar state response. (Similarly, even a variant deemed mild in, say, the UK could lead to disaster in Chennai.) The virus alone doesn’t lead to catastrophic outcomes.

    Just as India’s second outbreak was picking up speed, there was a considerable awareness that the delta variant was wreaking as much havoc as we were letting it. In fact, the Indian government was more than letting it. But since the outbreak began to subside in kurtotic fashion and, much later, as the omicron variant appeared on the scene, the focus on the latter has appeared to overwhelm – at least in public discourse – the extent to which we’re prepared (or not) to face it. Put another way, the focus on the omicron variant and the contexts in which it has been discussed have remained far too scientific. I’m not saying that it should become less scientific but that the social should start finding mention more.

    I realise that everyone is weary of the pandemic and would like if it ended already, and together with the fact that most people in India’s cities have received their two doses of some COVID-19 vaccine, it might seem to everyone that there’s sufficient ground to persist with the idea that the omicron variant couldn’t possibly be devastating, and that we can all return to some kind of normal soon. Now, this is one kind of fatigue. There appears to be a second kind also, based on the fact that the delta variant was the first “major” variant, in a manner of speaking, and the way we talked about it and acted in its potential (and menacing) presence co-evolved with its dispersal through the population.

    The omicron variant, on the other hand, affords both scientists and science communicators the option to simply refer to the narratives and discourses we developed with the delta variant, simply updated to match what we’re finding out about omicron. And this, not surprisingly, has led to a bit of laziness as well. The form I find most lazy, and most annoying, is some scientists’ insistence on pointing to graphs of the number of cases over time in different countries and saying, “If this doesn’t shake us out of our slumber, what will?”

    This is scientism, pure and simple, even if it’s not on the nose: pointing to case trends alone isn’t going to solve anything, especially not in the face of the sort of significant, demographic-wide yearning for a ‘new normal’, or in fact any kind of normal, instead of more and more upheavals. In fact, consider the fact that for most of 2020, most poor people in India believed that if the novel coronavirus had an infection fatality rate of just 1%, it was no big whoop, and that they would continue going to work and eke out a living. Let’s be clear, this is perfectly reasonable. The idea of letting the virus take its course through the population went sideways in Sweden, but in India, if something has a 1% chance of getting you really sick – or even killing you – it’s tragically the case that it quickly falls down a long list of threats, most of which are often much more lethal, beginning, in too many parts of the country, with breathing the air around you or drinking the water that’s available to you.

    To repeat in this context exhortations based solely on graphs printed in English and shared on Twitter that rapidly rising case-loads elsewhere on the planet should suffice to nudge us out of the Indian subcontinent’s collective torpor is a deference to facts that, I’m very tempted to say, understand only 1% of what is going on. Even if these exhortations are directed at state leaders and government officials, they are really misdirected: as I have written before in the context of Anthony Fauci’s senseless interview responses, if the government hasn’t done something that’s obvious to everyone, the reason just can’t be that it hasn’t seen the chart or the numbers you’ve seen to reach your conclusions. The only way such statements could make some sense is if they are intended to galvanise public opinion, but even then, I’m not convinced.

    And seeing these scientists do what they do strikes me that just as much as we’d like to encourage scientists to communicate science as often as is possible, there may be virtue in casting science communication as much in terms of what it does as what it doesn’t. For example, as the number of cases due to the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus is increasing in different parts of the world, socially responsible science communication requires us to not stop at pointing at graphs but to continue to reflect on and articulate how much – or how little – the greater transmissibility of the variant means in and of itself. And in my view, not doing this would just be socially anti-responsible communication: sticking to the science, and accomplishing little overall.

  • Panicking about omicron

    The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including the delta, with virologists and epidemiologists from South Africa and the UK paying particular attention to real-world data that suggests it could be more transmissible and cause breakthrough infections and that some of the mutations in its RNA correspond to changes on the spike protein that could (speculatively) render the existing crop of WHO-approved COVID-19 vaccines less efficacious.

    Uncertainty about what a new strain of the virus can do, or even uncertainty more broadly, has always been sufficient reason for panic. Nonetheless, the rise of the omicron variant is significant and the response to it more instructive because of its predecessor.

    The delta variant set a new benchmark for how quickly the novel coronavirus could spread, but its effectiveness also prompted some wonderment if the virus may be approaching ‘peak mutation’ – that is, if the delta might represent one of the most transmissible forms of the virus and if future outbreaks happening in a partly vaccinated world may not be so deadly.

    The omicron is thus significant because it dispels this line of thinking, while demonstrating that as bad as the delta was for global society, things can get worse if we let them. Clearly we have. And the world’s panic is ironic because of the particular ways in which we have.

    As far as COVID-19 vaccination coverage is concerned, there are two distinct groups of people: those who have been fully vaccinated and those who have been partly vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated at all. The corresponding split in India is qualitatively similar to the one worldwide, particularly in that it has come to be aligned almost perfectly with the class divide. This is the first point.

    Second, most – if not all – of the current WHO-approved vaccines haven’t been tested for their ability to directly prevent or reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus (such as by reducing the amount of viral shedding). So there’s a not insubstantial possibility that even fully vaccinated individuals could get and transmit the virus, while enjoying the vaccine-granted privilege of not falling ill.

    Third, we don’t know if the omicron variant can cause more severe disease, so let’s say that – at least to those of us who aren’t experts – right now the chance of it not being able to cause more severe disease is a reasonable 50%.

    Taken together, the three points suggest that panic is understandable only among those who haven’t received one or both doses of their (two-dose) COVID-19 vaccines, and whose populations may have been ‘incubating’ the same or different variants by allowing them to persist for longer in their bodies, and replicate, in the absence of the vaccines (depending on each vaccine’s time-to-recovery). For these people, the chance of the omicron variant being able to last for longer in the body and cause more severe disease is already higher.

    This is a crucial difference between the vaccinated and those who have been kept from getting vaccinated – a difference fostered by countries that hoarded vaccines, blocked attempts to ease patent protections and transfer technology and money – the same countries that are now blocking travel from parts of the world where their selfishness encouraged the rise of new variants.

    On the other hand, panic verges on the offensive for fully vaccinated individuals – who are also likelier than not both in India and around the world to be able to access and afford good healthcare and antiviral drugs – to freak out about a viral variant that is currently only known to be able to be transmitted more effectively than the delta.

    This shouldn’t bother us very much because most of us seemed to have stopped thinking about transmission even though the vaccines weren’t tested for preventing that, and went easier on masking up and washing hands just because we’d received our two doses, even as the delta variant continued to spread through the population. (Infections stopped surging but that’s not the way only way a virus can continue to circulate.)

    It’s disingenuous to suggest now that the situation on the ground with omicron in play is somehow different (with the 50% disclaimer) even as we’re responding by blocking travel and trade instead of by increasing access to vaccines.

    In fact, apart from whether any instance of panic could be pseudoscientific or offensive, there’s the question of whether it’s warranted. Among the fully vaccinated, it’s simply not. The rise of the omicron variant in a world of vaccine apartheid should in fact be a grim reminder that, again, we can’t afford to let things get worse, because they will. More people will fall ill, more people will die, more healthcare systems will collapse, more people ill with other diseases will be at greater risk of death or disability, and so forth.

    If you’re fully vaccinated, mask up; if not, please go get vaccinated and still mask up. But if you can’t because vaccines are being withheld to your country – you may have reasonable cause for panic.