As nations decide to live with the virus, some disease experts warn of surrendering too soon

Notably, few countries today outside of China — which is still locking down cities — cling to a “zero-covid” strategy.The phrase often heard now in the United States and many other nations is “live with the virus.” That new stance is applauded by some officials and scientists, and welcomed by people exhausted with the hardships and disruptions of this global health emergency entering its third year.But there are also disease experts who fear the pendulum will swing too far the other way. Even the arrival of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant did not throw the world back into winter 2021, when the paramount goal remained stopping viral spread at all costs — much less back to spring 2020, when people were told to stay home, wipe down their groceries and not touch their face.Even officials in Australia, long a fortress nation that sought to suppress the virus at all costs, have chosen to ease some mandates in recent weeks.The country has gained global headlines for its treatment of unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who flew in for the Australian Open and immediately ran afoul of the government’s virus protocols, spending the better part of a week in a detention hotel. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said he believes that about half of the U.S. population will be infected with omicron during the next three months, with most cases asymptomatic.“There’s no way to stop its spread — unless we do measures like China is doing, and you and I know very well that’s not possible in the United States,” Mokdad said.There is no unified global response to the pandemic. Also geography: New Zealand has managed to record only a few dozen deaths from covid-19, one of the lowest per capita death tolls on the planet, by leveraging its isolation in the South Pacific.Japan, Singapore and South Korea, nations with a long history of mask-wearing and aggressive measures to suppress epidemics, have managed to keep the virus largely in check without draconian lockdowns or major sacrifices to their economies.Peru, hammered by the variants dubbed lambda and gamma before the delta and omicron waves arrived, has had the deadliest pandemic per capita, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracking site. The speed of omicron’s spread is the key factor in the equation that determines how much pressure it will put on hospitals — which are currently seeing record numbers of covid patients in the United States.“If we just completely let everything go and allow the omicron epidemic to run its natural course, we’ll completely overrun our health system and be left in a situation potentially worse than what we experienced in early 2020,” said James Lawler, co-director of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security.He is not seeing the precautions he saw early in the pandemic, when he was among the first disease experts to sound an alarm about the extreme transmissibility of the coronavirus. But when a virus spreads as quickly as omicron does, the equation suddenly spits out alarming results — millions of people sick at once, many of them with underlying conditions that have already put them on the edge of a cliff and vulnerable to a shove.Rasmussen, the University of Saskatchewan virologist, is among the experts who think people have misunderstood the concept of endemicity — which is the point at which a virus continues to circulate at low levels but is not generating epidemic-level outbreaks.