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 — that is, they’ve been neither infected by it nor vaccinated against it — 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.