The variant likely won’t be dominating life at the end of the year, so what’s coming next, Justin Giovannetti asks in The Bulletin.

The omicron wave is still growing and New Zealand now has one of the highest infection rates in the world. This variant won’t be the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Sir David Skegg said at parliament this week, speaking virtually for the country’s public health group, it’s possible a variant more transmissible and severe than omicron emerges. He said it would be unlikely that we’d be talking about omicron by Christmas. The NZ Herald’s Jamie Morton (paywalled) looks at what is likely next. Covid-19 is a virus that seems to have been born to spread, with dozens of variants detected over the past two years. There are even sub-variants of omicron.

There’s no proof yet Covid will only be growing milder. While omicron’s symptoms have been milder than delta, that doesn’t mean the next variant will carry on with that trend. According to Nature, the world’s ability to track the next variant is weakening as many countries drop widespread testing regimes. Viruses are unpredictable and experts don’t really know what to expect in Covid’s future. Writing in The Spinoff, Mirjam Guesgen explained that a number of the mutations seen in omicron just baffled scientists. So what’s to come? The next significant variant is going to be the one that transmits more readily, either by being more infectious than omicron or by avoiding the protection provided by vaccines and prior infections.

But first, will everyone catch omicron? It’s a good question and might appear that way with over 20,000 daily infections, but it isn’t inevitable. While the current level of restrictions isn’t designed to stop transmission of the virus, health workers are still calling for caution in the population. Stuff reports that nearly everyone in New Zealand will likely be exposed to omicron, but exposure doesn’t mean infection. So no, everyone won’t get it. Eventually this wave, like those elsewhere in the world, will fizzle. What’s likely to confuse the issue for a few days is that there won’t be a single peak to the ongoing wave, but one for each region, with Auckland expected to be first. At the end of this will be a very long tail that isn’t headed to zero.

The Spinoff’s Covid data tracker has the latest figures.

Life will move on beyond the pandemic as well. The prime minister has already announced that vaccine mandates and social distancing measures will be dropped after the omicron peak. The world is moving towards an unpredictable future of coexistence with the pandemic. It’s just one of the uncertainties of the coming year. The NZ Herald (paywalled) also looked at the big trends of 2022 that are likely to impact us all. Some, like the shifting geopolitics due to the war in Ukraine are relatively new, while others like the great resignation have been talked about for some time but seem to be gaining momentum now.