LOS ANGELES (KNX) – Delta, Omicron, what’s next? How are these new variants navigated?
When it comes to looking at new variants, Dr. David Agus, the founding director of USC's Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, told KNX In Depth that the big question is whether or not the variants will take hold.
“Will they actually decrease in number? Are they going to have a growth advantage to enable them to push out the variants we have now? And the answer is yes and our hope and prayers are that they won’t be aggressive, that they won’t make us as sick, very much like Omicron didn’t make us as sick as Delta, we hope the same thing gets to happen, but it doesn’t have to,” he explained.
Dr. Agus said he uses GPAS, a “global surveillance system for these viruses” to track the variants’ growth.
“People are the globe are uploading the RNA sequences of COVID-19 now, and we analyze it and we say ‘Hey, this may have a growth advantage. Let’s pay attention,’” he said. “And you start to see a bunch of different sequences pop up that are similar but different than the other one, then we start to take concern and look at its behavior and if the behavior shows that it’s spreading really quickly and people are getting sick, then we can call that a variant of concern.”
He added that we are going to have boosters “at some regular point” to keep immunity up and to keep hospitals open.
“Well what were seeing is that immunity is going down six percent a month, so there’s no question we’re going to have continued boosters at some point. Will they be a different variant? Potentially. We’ll have to see what happens to the variants, but we look at a good portion of the world is not vaccinated, a good portion of the United States is not vaccinated and there’s a lot of virus in those individuals.”
He added that antiviral pills seem to work “remarkably well” against the new variants, and that the biggest is concern is the unvaccinated filling up the hospitals and causing a shutdown. He said people will have to live with “the new normal.”
“And that new normal is that if you are vaccinated and caught up in your boosters, you’re not going to get very ill if you’re exposed and you’re not going to be hospitalized. But problem is, everybody else can be and if the people who aren’t vaccinated fill up the hospitals and you have a heart attack, you’re in trouble. You have cancer, you’re in trouble. You have any other disease that cause you to go to the hospital, they may not be able to treat you because the hospital will be full.
And we have to think of each other. We have to think of one community here and that’s really the difficult part. If we have enough of these (antiviral pills), potentially we can use that as a backway to take care of people who don’t have the vaccine. But that’s not really officiant is the big scheme of things. “
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Agus in the audio above.
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