Omicron has completely changed the pandemic — it's time to change how we respond to it

This is an excerpt from Second Opinion, a weekly roundup of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers every Saturday morning. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

Omicron has completely changed what we thought we knew about COVID-19 — given how quickly it develops in the body, causes symptoms to emerge and infects others — meaning the tools we have to try to contain it are no longer as effective.

The highly contagious variant is now spreading at a rate unlike anything we've ever seen before, completely overwhelming our testing capacity and infecting more Canadians than at any other point in the pandemic as hospitalizations reach record highs.

"It's kind of the difference between a garden hose and a fire hose," said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"As bad as Delta was, that was more of a garden hose. This is a fire hose in terms of transmission." 

Omicron has fundamentally changed the virus at almost every level — from the rate at which it spreads, to the time it takes to infect, to the severity of symptoms it causes. 

"Thank God we're where we are," B.C. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said in a phone interview. "If this had been the initial virus that came ripping through before we had people vaccinated, especially older people, I mean it would have been the plague." 

Henry said one of the biggest challenges with Omicron is that the incubation period has become so much shorter — meaning if it took five to seven days for symptoms to emerge with previous variants, it now takes just two or three days for people to get sick.

"So what that leads to is rapidly explosive outbreaks that are relatively less severe, but when you have that number of people infected, you're still going to have a strain on your health-care system," she said. 

"It's not about stopping this, we cannot stop Omicron … but what we can do is slow it down and try and keep it away from those who are most at risk and try to mitigate the impact on hospitals." 

WATCH | Hospital staff levels to drop as Omicron causes hospitalizations surge:

Canada is responding to the devastating Omicron-driven surge by reimposing strict public health measures — ranging from curfews to the closure of bars, restaurants and gyms, and even delaying the return to school.

But Osterholm, who is also a member of U.S. President Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board, co-authored a viewpoint in the journal JAMA this week that argued it's not possible to eliminate Omicron, saying we need to completely rethink our public health response to it.

"We're not going to contain it. That word shouldn't be used," he said. "But we sure can do a lot to slow it down."