Is Everyone Really Going to Get Omicron?

As COVID-19 case numbers and headlines about the seemingly unstoppable omicron wave continue to proliferate, the question on the minds of many seems to be: Is everybody going to get omicron? You might think so, based on recent comments from top health officials like Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases—who this week said that the variant will “find just about everybody.”

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Fauci told senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies J. Stephen Morrison on Tuesday, as CNN reports. While “some, maybe a lot” of vaccinated and boosted people will get infected, Dr. Fauci explained, they are “very likely, with some exceptions” to avoid severe outcomes. Unvaccinated individuals are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this” in terms of hospitalization and death, he said.

Omicron’s ability to spread like wild fire is very real. But infectious disease and public health experts point out that operating under the assumption that getting omicron is inevitable carries serious consequences that could make matters worse.

“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get COVID,” Janet Woodcock, M.D., acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Tuesday, according to CNN. “What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation [and] other essential services are not disrupted while this happens,” Dr. Woodcock added.

It’s a mistake to take Dr. Fauci and Dr. Woodcock’s words as arguments for giving up on containing omicron, though. In fact, their statements emphasize the critical need to keep up with measures like vaccination, boosting, masking and testing as hospitalizations break records and more health care workers call out sick.

While many (if not most) people may indeed end up getting COVID-19, taking a defeatist attitude and throwing out safety precautions (or even purposely trying to get the virus) is not the answer. Several experts frustrated with this narrative—that everyone getting omicron is inevitable, so we should just give up on trying to contain it—have been taking to Twitter to explain the flaws in that reasoning, the danger of throwing caution to the wind right now, and the benefits of continuing to take measures that lessen your chance of getting COVID-19.

For one thing, there is a meaningful difference between assuming everyone will get exposed to omicron vs. everyone will get infected with omicron. Correctly assuming that virtually everybody will be exposed encourages people to keep taking precautions (like getting boosted and wearing proper face masks), as Bob Wachter, M.D., professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explained on Twitter. Assuming—incorrectly—that everybody will get the infection encourages people to give up on reducing transmission, and “promotes counterproductive behavior as hospitals are overwhelmed,” Dr. Wachter writes.