I’m wondering how specific we can get with all the “with how contagious Omicron is, everyone’s gonna get it eventually” theory.
I’m guessing by the time this is over 99% of us will either be infected with covid, vaccinated against it, or both. We live in a very interconnected world in 2022. Unless you’re a hermit who lives in the wilderness, or you never leave your bedroom without a hazmat suit on you are going to get it. Amongst the very few who will remain blissfully unaffected: the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, an island in the Indian Ocean where an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe lives in isolation from the rest of the world.
Infected OR vaxxed, or both, maybe. But I don’t think everyone who’s vaxxed is going to get a breakthrough infection.
Virtually everyone will have SARS-CoV-2 virus particles entering their body at some point. The fully vaccinated might even be lucky enough to have no symptoms from it.
That’s not the same as having it, though.
Some potentially useful data points:
An estimated one third of the world’s population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic.
1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics - PMC
So, two thirds of the world never caught the Spanish Flu.
I tried in vain to find similar stats for smallpox, but it’s worth noting that the virus circulated for centuries without humans achieving natural herd immunity. Even though no one could get it twice, it took a vaccine to eliminate it. That, and the fact that survivors typically had scars, and most people who lived during those centuries didn’t have those scars, makes it pretty clear we never even came close to everyone having been infected.
Similarly, while data from the Black Death is obviously going to be a bit sketchy, most sources agree that the bubonic plague itself killed about half of those infected, while other forms of the disease had a 90-100% fatality rate, yet the plague wiped out “only” 30-60% of Europe’s population–again, suggesting at least some people managed not to catch it at all.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z7r7hyc/revision/3
I don’t think that’s a conclusion we can draw because a huge percentage (up to 75%) of people who test positive for the flu are asymptomatic, and there’s no reason to think that’s a new development.
That’s most likely because the population has at least partial immunity to seasonal flu. Flu viruses acquire a few mutations but don’t change that much. This is known as antigenic drift.
Pandemics occur when a new strain enters humans or more than one strain recombines to form a strain unfamiliar to people’s immune systems. This known as an antigenic shift and is the cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
I think it’s safe to say Omicron has subsided, if not disappeared; here in the U.S. our infection rates are back to where they were at the beginning of December. As of late January, one model said that just over half of the world had been infected at least once:
An LA Times article from mid-February stated that 73% of Americans had immunity to Omicron (they were counting those who had boosters but had never been infected as well as those who had natural immunity), and estimated that number could rise to 80% by mid-March:
But a study recently published in the Washington Post that relies on data taken through the end of January estimated that only 43% of Americans had actually had COVID.
So it seems pretty clear that everyone’s not gonna get Omicron–maybe as many as half of us still haven’t and might never. There could be more variants coming, and I still wouldn’t be surprised if the combined population of vaxxed people and infected people eventually includes almost everyone. But I still think that a sizeable chunk of the population will never be infected with any form of COVID-19.
Yes, it’s going to hinge on exactly how we define “getting” it, which ultimately will not be a bright line.