The Omicron wave continues to spread across the world. The first region concerned, Europe – the current main focus of the pandemic – is recording unprecedented levels of Covid-19 contamination, in the hundreds of thousands now in France. In the country, the authorities say however that this wave could be the last. Specialists are cautiously optimistic.
The Omicron variant is in the process of supplanting all others and is becoming the majority in many countries. With 32 mutations on its Spike protein, the last variant classified ” worrying By the WHO is indeed very contagious.
It is this Spike protein that serves as its key to enter our cells, and this new mutated key allows infection even faster. The Omicron variant is therefore doubling the Delta variant at a maddening pace.
A wave that did not prevent the French Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, to be optimistic and to affirm that ” this fifth wave could be the last in the country “.
For many scholars, this statement is unrealistic. At least not in those terms. Because if certain viruses can be eradicated such as smallpox for example, Bruno Canard, specialist in coronaviruses and research director at the CNRS, reminds that this is not the case with Sars-CoV-2, which comes from animals and which can always go back to man.
New variants
On the other hand, Bruno Canard believes that it is indeed possible that this wave is the last to affect our societies as much, with a large number of victims and overwhelmed hospital systems.
” Is Omicron this latest virus? We can not know, but what we suspect is that Omicron is so powerful in his conquest of the planet, that he risks infecting the majority of human beings. So it will bring immunity to men. Will this immunity be sufficient to bar access to a new variant? It’s a possibility », He explains.
It is all the same more likely that we will have the emergence of new variants in the future. The virus continues to circulate and therefore to evolve. However, the researcher Bruno Canard believes that we are heading anyway towards an increasingly harmless virus thanks to the vaccines as well as to the immunity acquired with Omicron and the previous variants.
” As variants accumulate, he said, there is all the same a cellular immunity which remains and which protects, partially in any case, against the next variants. Recent work shows that since this immunity is always present whatever the variant, we are gradually moving towards forms which are less serious. We also see that there are benign coronaviruses which were certainly very virulent at the beginning when they appeared when they went from animals to humans, and then they were gradually subdued by our immune system. . “
Weakening of the virus
We could therefore end up with a benign or at least tolerable virus with which we could live as is the case with the flu for example, a virus which behaves similarly for the moment to Sars-CoV-2.
There could thus be an epidemic every winter and a vaccine updated regularly, with the appearance of more dangerous variants regularly, as is the case with influenza every 15 years or so. Influenza A in 2009 and 2010, for example, claimed between 150,000 and 575,000 victims according to estimates.
►Read again: With Omicron, will Covid-19 become endemic?
But it is still necessary that Omicron behaves well as expected, underlines Professor Olivier Bouchaud, head of the infectious and tropical diseases department at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny. He prefers to be careful:
” We can always hope, but from there to affirming or advancing with a lot of credibility that it is indeed the last strain and that after we will be rid of the Covid, it is to go quickly. “
The epidemiologist confirms that viruses tend, in their natural evolution, to weaken over time:
” Omicron marks a small turning point compared to the strains we have had so far since, of course, it is more transmissible, but it has lost its gravity. So it is in this sense that it can be a signal towards the beginning of a decrease in the virulence of the virus. But let’s be very careful, the Covid-19 has accustomed us to a lot of jokes and vicissitudes, we must be careful not to be too assertive. “
►Press review: What if the Omicron variant was the way out?
In addition, he recalls that if the Omicron variant is less dangerous than the Delta variant, with three times less serious forms according to the latest studies from Great Britain, the very large number of infected people could still mathematically lead to a large number of hospitalizations and deaths. It is therefore too early to celebrate anyway.