I start with the proviso that we are in a radically better position than we were two years ago. Most of the population is vaccinated. We have experience treating COVID. We have effective antivirals coming online. But this morning in New York City has a feeling of déjà vu. My inbox is filled with a rush of cancellations: school holiday events; a journalists’ drinking get-together that had just restarted after a two year hiatus postponed the morning of; lines outside testing centers snake around the block. It all has the feel of Spring of 2020 when everything was normal and then on a dime it wasn’t.

Let me share a couple more thoughts on boosters.

The UK is currently in a mad dash to get boosters into the arms of as many people as possible. We’re certainly pushing boosters here too. But it’s a singular focus there in a way that is not the case here. That’s the first, second and third part of their strategy basically. They’re advising work from home and universal masking. But basically it’s to buy time for getting boosters in as many arms as possible over the next two to three weeks. They’re deploying the military to set up pop-up clinics, advising hospitals to suspend routine care to focus on booster administration. They have a goal of getting every adult in the country boosted by the end of the month. So really they’re pulling out all the stops.

We have the first study (still un-peer-reviewed) that advances an evidence-based hypothesis for why Omicron COVID may actually produce milder disease. I want to emphasize this is a single study, which has not undergone peer review. The gist is that Omicron was much faster at taking hold in the air passage leading to the lungs but much less efficient in replicating in lung tissue. The surmise is that this makes it much better at jumping from host to host – which is demonstrated by rate of spread in multiple countries – but much less efficient at creating illness once it gets into the lungs.

I don’t really know what it means to “punt” BBB until next year. I’m serious.

We’re going to hear that phrase a lot, with a certain baked-in assumption that it means something. But it’s not like the assurance that I’m going to finish my homework tomorrow, or complete my term paper this weekend, or turn in this client project by the end of next week. There’s no certainty that this will ever get done.