OCTA Research Fellow Fr. Nicanor Austriaco said on Wednesday, Jan. 5, that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) variant Omicron is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.
Austriaco made the statement during a Go Negosyo town hall meeting where he shared a study that showed that those who survived the Omicron variant gained antibodies that protected them not only against Omicron but also the Delta, Gamma, Beta, Alpha and the D614G, which was one of the earliest variants that caused a spike in COVID-19 cases in the Philippines in 2020.
"We have to realize that Omicron is the beginning of the end of the pandemic because Omicron is going to provide the kind of population immunity that should stabilize our societies and should allow us to reopen," he said.
"This is the hope and the prayer. The Omicron is actually a blessing. It will be hard for one month but afterwards it should be a blessing because it should provide the population protection that we need everywhere," he added.
He reminded, however, that this finding is not a reason to be careless and risk one's own health as well as the well-being of others.
The OCTA fellow said that they are also hoping that the country will also follow after South Africa. He said that what will happen is that the number of cases will reach so high that the virus will run out of food. He mentioned that a surge goes down because the virus runs out of food.
"So as the virus rapidly increases, it's going to try to spread to everyone and it's going to try to find as many of our kababayans who are vulnerable. It seems it's spreading so rapidly. What you will expect is it will run out of food sooner," he said.
Austriaco explained that this can be seen in South Africa where numbers are crashing and in London where numbers are beginning to fall only because "once it spreads like wildfire, but when all the trees are burned, there's no more from nowhere for it to go." The OCTA fellow said that they are also hoping it will last only about a month in Metro Manila but for now, It's hard to know what will happen. The country should then expect very high numbers of COVID-19 cases but he stated that the public should not be scared of these numbers.
It should be expected, according to Austriaco, that most of these cases will be mild and that there will be fewer hospitalizations and deaths.
"We should expect a very rapid increase...We should expect this but this is a good sign because if it goes up very quickly, and it finds all the food it can find it will also rapidly decelerate. This is our hope. and we should not panic, we should not expect a lockdown in the National Capital Region (NCR) unless our hospitals become overwhelmed and this is really important because a lot of people are going to see the large numbers and they're going to want the lockdown," he said. He added that in order to save lives, the government must protect the hospitals and so long as hospitals are not overwhelmed, especially the Intensive Care Unit, then there will be no need for lockdowns like the ones in 2020 as granular lockdowns would suffice.
What should be done, Austriaco mentioned, is to suppress mobility in order to protect the hospitals further, those who are sick are expected to stay at home.