Scientists are seeing signals that the shocking omicron wave of COVID-19 may have peaked in the UK and is about to see the same in the US, when cases could start to plummet.

Why: The variant has proven so widely contagious that it may have left no one to infect, just a month and a half after it was first spotted in South Africa.

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

At the same time, experts warn that there is still considerable uncertainty about how the next phase of the pandemic will unfold. The stagnation or recession in both countries did not happen at the same time or at the same pace everywhere. Even after the decline has passed, patients and overwhelmed hospitals will still face weeks or months of pain.

“As we go downhill, there are still a lot of people that will get infected,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas’ COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that the report of cases will peak within a week.

According to Mokdad, the University of Washington’s own highly influential modelling said the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. would reach 1.2 million by Jan. Anyone who is infected will be infected.”

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In fact, he said, based on the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who have never been tested — has peaked at 6 million on Jan. 6. .

Meanwhile, in Britain, new COVID-19 cases fell to about 140,000 a day last week after soaring to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said that while cases were still rising in places like the south-west of England and the West Midlands, the outbreak in London may have peaked.

The numbers give hope that both countries are about to witness what is happening in South Africa, where waves hit record highs before falling sharply about a month later.

“We’re seeing a clear drop in cases in the UK, but I would expect to see a further drop in cases before we know if what’s happening in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr Paul Hunt, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Differences between the UK and South Africa, including Britain’s ageing population and the tendency for people to spend more time indoors in winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak in that country and others like it.

On the other hand, the UK authorities’ decision to impose minimal restrictions on omicron could allow the virus to spread among the population and spread it faster than in Western European countries with stricter COVID-19 controls such as France, Spain and Italy .

Shabir Mahdi, head of the health sciences department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said European countries imposing lockdowns would not necessarily pass waves of omicron with fewer infections; the cases could just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there were 7 million new cases of COVID-19 in Europe in the past week, calling it a “wave across the region.” WHO cites the Mokdad group’s model, which predicts that half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron in about eight weeks.

By then, however, Hunt and others expect the world to exceed the omicron surge.

“There may be some ups and downs along the way, but I hope by Easter we’ll be out of the woods,” Hunt said.

Still, the sheer number of people infected could overwhelm fragile health systems, said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“The next few weeks will be brutal because in absolute numbers, so many people are infected that it will spread to the ICU,” Jha said.

Mokdad, also in the US, warned: “It’s going to be a tough two or three weeks. We have to make tough decisions to keep certain essential workers on the job knowing they could be contagious.”

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers of the University of Texas. Immunity to all new infections, along with new drugs and continued vaccinations, could make it easier for us to live with the coronavirus.

“At the end of this wave, there will be more people infected with some variant of COVID,” Meyers said. “At some point, we’ll be able to draw the line — and omicron could be that point — — We will move from a catastrophic global threat to a more manageable disease.”

It’s a plausible future, she said, but it’s also possible that a new variant will emerge — one that’s even worse than omicron.