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Scientists are noticing signs that Covid-19's worrisome omicron wave has crested in the United Kingdom and is about to do so in the United States, at which point cases may begin to decline substantially. The reason for this is that barely a month and a half after being discovered in South Africa, the variation has proven to be so contagious that it may be running out of individuals to infect.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Experts warn, however, that much remains unknown about how the pandemic's next phase will play out. In both countries, the plateauing or ebbing does not occur at the same time or at the same rate. Even if the drop-off occurs, patients and overburdened hospitals would still face weeks or months of pain.

"As we decline the slope on the backside, there are still a lot of people who will get infected," said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas Covid-19 Modeling Consortium, which anticipates that reported cases will peak within the week.

According to Mokdad, the University of Washington's widely influential model predicts that the number of daily reported cases in the United States will peak at 1.2 million on January 19 and then drop rapidly "simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected."

Indeed, according to the university's complicated calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the United States — an estimate that includes people who have never been tested — has already peaked, reaching 6 million on January 6.

According to government data, new Covid-19 cases in the United Kingdom fell to around 140,000 per day in the previous week after rising to excess over 200,000 per day earlier this month.

While cases are still climbing in locations like southwest England and the West Midlands, Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain's Open University, believes the outbreak has peaked in London.

The data have generated optimism that the two countries are set to see something similar to what happened in South Africa, where the wave crested at record highs for almost a month before falling dramatically.

Professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, Dr. Paul Hunter said, “We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the UK, but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here.”
Differences between Britain and South Africa, such as Britain's aging population and its people's inclination to spend more time indoors in the winter, could make the outbreak more difficult for the country and others like it.

On the other side, the British government's decision to put modest limitations on omicron could let the virus to spread through the population and run its course faster than it would in Western European countries like France, Spain, and Italy, where Covid-19 controls are more rigorous.

European countries that implement lockdowns, according to Shabir Mahdi, head of health sciences at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, will not necessarily emerge through the omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may simply be spread out over a longer period of time.