As COVID-19¡¯s omicron wave begins to subside, one thing seems pretty clear: After it has passed, the number of Americans who are still immunologically naive to COVID-19 ¡ª that is, they¡¯ve been neither infected by it nor vaccinated against it ¡ª will be quite small.
How small? By my rough estimate, 1.8% of Americans, about 6 million people, will remain untouched by either vaccines or COVID-19 a month or two from now. I arrived at this by taking the covidestim.org estimates of cumulative U.S. COVID-19 infections through Jan. 19 (257.5 million) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention¡¯s estimate of how many Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (209.5 million) and making several somewhat dodgy assumptions, so I wouldn¡¯t take the exact percentage too seriously. But it¡¯s clearly not a whole lot of people.
This doesn¡¯t mean the coast will be clear after, say, February. Some new variant could upend everyone¡¯s calculations just as delta and omicron did, and even endemic COVID-19 will still be deadly for many. In October, before omicron, computational biologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle set out to model what COVID-19¡¯s toll in the U.S. would be after everybody over age three had been exposed or vaccinated. His estimate: 40,000 to 100,000 deaths a year, somewhat worse than seasonal influenza, though in the same ballpark.
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