If we can't stop it, do we let it run?
So is this what the end of the pandemic looks like: with an incidence of well over a thousand and every two weeks as many corona deaths as road deaths in the whole year?
A year or two ago that was unthinkable.
Today, even in the camp, caution is the order of the day: we have to live with the virus.
Epidemiologically, no end to the pandemic is possible for the time being, rather a political exit.
As happened: No more "deeper" corona measures, that's how it has now been decided and implemented.
Let opponents of loosening and masks argue as they want, two years are enough.
In Omicron times, that much is clear, the standards of corona politics are crazy.
And by no means because the virus variant is actually harmless - Hong Kong's dramatic victim statistics have made it clear that the statistically somewhat milder course of the disease has more to do with the immunity of the population than with the supposed harmlessness of the virus.
In fact, in the first few months of the year, Omikron showed how quickly risks can be overlooked when hope reigns supreme.
Unfortunately, this hope is all too often linked to false myths.
The most popular myth, that the coronavirus has finally been weakened to such an extent that it can hardly be distinguished from the flu epidemiologically, leads to several fallacies.
In fact, the infection mortality may have fallen sharply due to the vaccination rates in the country, which is why high hospitalization and death rates are only achieved when the number of cases is extreme.
But the collateral damage of corona infections is exorbitant.
Thousands and thousands of additional – also younger – diabetics, heart patients, stroke victims, also mental and psychiatric diseases, which can lead to absences from work for months to years after a Covid-19 illness, are among the frequent late effects.
It is far from clear what other burdens “Long Covid” will bring to society.
What is taken for granted, however, is that the mental stress that the contact restrictions and lockdowns, in particular, the psychologically predisposed people - traumatized in any case - had to endure can hardly be seriously offset as collateral damage.
In any case, in the studies it was rarely possible to separate how much of the mental stress was due to the initially rapidly growing fear of the virus and how much was due to the isolation to protect against the pathogen.
Which also applies to the early containment measures and later to the vaccination: infection and illness from Covid-19 are always the worse option compared to protective measures.
And that also applies to Omikron.
Anyone who intentionally becomes infected and hopes for a "natural", harmless immunization can end up badly on their stomach without an additional vaccination.
The study situation is clear: the protection against repeated infections is only minimal after a very short time, and it is highly uncertain what repeated infections with the corona viruses that spread systemically in the body will do.
The myth that the weakened but rapidly spreading omicron opened the door to civil protection ("herd immunity") and thus to the end of the pandemic has also been eliminated.
Impossible with this pathogen.
On the contrary, Omikron shows, more than all previous variants, the tremendous efficiency with which the virus can adapt.
Sars-CoV-2 has managed to dodge the measures and multiply even faster, most recently with its pronounced immune escape.
And it is, the virologists agree, thanks to an incredibly fortunate coincidence that omicron is not more, but slightly less pathogenic than delta.
However, if the number of infections continues to be high, there is no reason why this should not happen at some point.
No law of nature prescribes
that mutations and recombination of viruses lead to ever milder variants.
And in fact, dozens of other evolutionary stages of the omicron variant have already been recorded.
In this uncertain situation, after the protection against infection has been largely disarmed and transferred to the personal responsibility of the citizens, the obligation to vaccinate is finally becoming a question of the character of corona policy.
How big will be the remainder of joint responsibility that the politically responsible want to take on?
In the end, money is also an important signal.
Because the further development of vaccinations will cost billions of euros, and supplying the eight to ten million vulnerable people in the country with antiviral medicines will also cost a lot.
And the longer the procrastinators delay the end of the crisis, the more expensive it becomes.