The COVID-19 metrics policymakers should be watching after omicron, via FiveThirtyEight:
Importantly, how much immunity we need to reduce disease severity is likely to vary from variant to variant, and potentially over time since we know immunity can wane. We also know that
That’s where metrics come in. The trick is not to assume we know but rather to yoke our policy decisions to what the metrics indicate.Going forward, we should count up how harmful each new major variant surge is both medically and economically and weigh that against the costs of public-health mitigation measures to strike a new balance. In terms of medical readouts, the most important are hospitalization and death rates.
The silver lining is that COVID-19 surges don’t happen simultaneously around the world. Instead, hot spots crop up that we can assess, and we can use those early data to guide pandemic responses in areas where that variant arrives later. During omicron, for instance, the whole world watched the site of its first real surge, South Africa, to gauge how things might play out elsewhere.
If the initial epidemiological data suggest the latest flavor of COVID-19 will cause severe disease and death rates below an arbitrary cutoff — maybe 110 percent of pre-COVID levels of respiratory disease deaths? — and hospitals won’t be overrun, then that team can decide not to intensify public-health measures.
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