Here in Minnesota, we’ve had a surge going on since August. Since then, I’ve said that anything that’s going to knock off Delta is going to be even more transmissible. Sure enough, that was the case with Delta. That was probably going to be the key factor in crowning the King of the Virus Hill. I had come to the conclusion that the next variant would be much more transmissible. So I thought Delta was really not a surprise. I came about my point of view in March or April with Alpha, and then Beta and Gamma, and said we were a long ways from being done with these. Yes, that’s what I meant last April when I said potentially some of the darkest days of the pandemic are ahead of us. Is that the wave you were predicting when you said we had dark days ahead? Three weeks ago, just before the first cases in South Africa, I said Delta is here now, but I worry about the next variant that’s going to be coming.ĭelta has overwhelmed the country. And that’s what has happened with Delta, and now we have Omicron. Eventually, there was no reason anything would replace Alpha unless it was more infectious. What biological pressure, or what evolutionary law, says that with more transmission we’d have less variance, not more? It made no sense. My line, which actually is more true than you’d believe, is that back in August I’d wake up in the morning humming this song by the 5th Dimension, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” But I’d be singing, “This is the dawning of the Age of the Variants.” I had every reason to believe we were going to continue to see variant development because we had more and more transmission. The world has come to understand what the variants can do. How many more times can you ring that bell? We’ve really gone through it with Delta, and there are a lot of concerns about Omicron. You rustled a lot of feathers in April when you talked about the threat of the coming variant waves. Intelligencer asked Osterholm how Delta will fare against the new variant, how worried we should be about lab tests showing immune escape, and whether the term fully vaccinated should continue to apply to the unboosted. Now Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, is eyeing Omicron. A few months later, his prediction came true with Delta, which has killed more than 100,000 in the U.S. Doom and warned that the darkest days of the pandemic still lay ahead, despite vaccination, due to the emergence of new variants. Michael Osterholm doubled down on his reputation as COVID’s Dr. Photo-Illustration: Inteligencer Photo: CDC