Omicron's swift spread may boost our collective immunity to COVID-19. But at what cost?

It feels like everyone knows someone who has Omicron.

Maybe you got it, or your friend did. Perhaps your workplace is in an outbreak. Or you saw on the news that yet another celebrity or athlete or politician tested positive.

There's this growing sense that catching the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is inevitable, perhaps even welcome — as if, after two years of collective anxiety over getting infected, we can all just get it over with and earn some hard-won immunity.

But, like everything with COVID-19, the reality is more complicated.

Multiple medical experts who spoke to CBC News — including infectious diseases specialists, virologists and epidemiologists — stressed that while getting infected with the virus is far more likely now, it's still worth striving to avoid or, at the very least, delay.

"The dangerous temptation is to just let Omicron burn through populations while trying to jack up vaccination coverage," said Dr. David Naylor, who led the federal inquiry into the 2003 SARS epidemic and co-chairs the federal government's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.

That's because there are massive societal benefits to limiting the number of infections that pile up all at once — reducing pressure on a stretched-thin hospital system, for one thing — and huge costs if we don't. Already, hospitalizations are surging to new heights, staff shortages are hitting various industries and an untold number of Canadians may wind up with serious infections or long-term health impacts.

This Omicron wave will certainly help boost immunity, "but at a potentially very high cost," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

This could even be the "last great push" toward the virus becoming endemic, said Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, referring to when a threat like SARS-CoV-2 keeps circulating, but at a manageable baseline level.

"And there are people who are saying that's a good thing," he said. "It's not a good thing to get there at this price."

Knowing just how many people are getting infected with Omicron is tough to determine, since limited access to official PCR testing in much of the country is muddying our data.

We're surely missing tens of thousands of new cases, but even the reported figure — a country-wide seven-day average of more than 40,000 daily infections — is at a sobering, unprecedented high.

The Omicron variant, thankfully, is linked to less severe illness than its dominant predecessor, Delta, particularly for those who have the added protection of at least two vaccine doses. Yet it's also more capable of evading immunity through both previous infection and vaccination, allowing it to tear through care homes, hospitals and households at a rate likely closer to measles than the original virus.

The usual numbers game means some of those being infected are winding up seriously ill — including an uptick in young children, who aren't yet vaccinated — and a smaller percentage of a massive number of total cases is bad news for both overstretched hospital teams and all those who need that level of medical care.