30 Nov Anxiety over Omicron: Could Omicron ruin the nation’s Christmas plans?
It’s understandable that we are becoming increasingly anxious over the new Covid-19 variant Omicron. Psychotherapist Noel McDermott offers advice on how to handle these anxieties and gives hope to those who are worried Covid will once again ruin our Christmas plans.
Psychotherapist Noel McDermott comments:
“The latest variant of Covid-19, Omicron, is doing what all viruses do, mutating to survive and making copies of itself. All viruses over time mutate and in general become more transmissible and less lethal. Early indication shows Omicron behaving in this way and the return of public health measures should not be seen as an emergency, it’s simply sensible. Mask, hand hygiene and social space are extremely effective on top of the medial interventions we have with vaccines, boosters and therapeutics”.
In the UK we are moving from pandemic to endemic meaning that the virus is no longer an outsider illness but has become the norm in the population. The example most used is the flu, it is endemic to the UK as it is permanently in the population and at times it spikes, such as Winter. We have learned to live with the flu, putting in place medical support through flu jabs for the high risk and having good medicines when people become ill and vulnerable. We don’t reinvent those responses each year, they are managed through protocol, and this is the way the Covid-19 virus is going in the UK.
Living with the pandemic
Whilst the UK has and continues to lead the world in the move from pandemic response (producing new treatments and vaccines) to endemic response, (using vaccines and medical procedures off the shelf), the world in general is nowhere near this. This is especially true in regions less able to respond because of lack of freely available medical infrastructure. The world has actually only eradicated one illness through worldwide vaccination and that is smallpox. This current pandemic is very unlikely to be eradicated in that way which means that the pandemic is here for many years, but in the UK and soon also in Europe, more generally we will have the infrastructure in place to manage the infection as a native born one.
Remain resilient to Omicron
It would be unusual for the virus to mutate into a more lethal version but the reduction in its lethality will gradually drop of over many years. So as variants emerge, we will see responses that use public health rather than medical interventions. Being armed with this knowledge and understanding this is crucial to ensure you remain resilient to the emergence of Omicron. Until we have the science of the new strain and understand how it interacts with our medical systems, (our vaccines and current stock of therapeutics) we have to be cautious and adopt a pandemic (public health – masks, social distancing etc) response rather than an endemic (medical health – vaccine, therapeutics) response. We don’t panic about the flu jab each Winter we trust our medical services to deal with it. That is the way we are going with Covid-19, but we have a few more years ahead. Though this Winter is likely to be the last one we see major public health responses.
Normalising and educating
Normalising and educating yourself are two of the best ways to remain psychologically resilient, also having a realistic frame of reference. The virus, unlike many more lethal ones, is not looking like it will burn itself out, so it’s here to stay and we have to learn to accept that and take it in our stride. Our scientists will pretty quickly learn what they need to about this strain and we can then produce medical responses.
Advice on how to cope with feelings of increased anxiety:
Take a deep breath and practice having faith in the future, tell yourself the bad times are behind us, telling yourself positive internal stories reduces stress significantly
Helping others helps ourselves. Make time in your day to do something kind/helpful for someone else
Take a challenging situation and find deeper meaning from it; moving into the bigger picture to explain our challenges to ourselves as purposeful reduces fear and depression
Put the oxygen mask on yourself (not just the face mask) as if you are not meeting your own needs, you will not meet any other needs. These basic needs are self-care, regular exercise, sleep/rest, hydration, social and emotional support
Manage our reactions and train our stress responses
Psychologically it’s crucial with Covid-19 to avoid the repetition problem at the moment whereby we gradually react more and more as the same negative event repeats. To the point we only have to think about a negative situation
repeating to have a serious negative psychological response. We have to learn to manage our reactions and meet this situation in an emotionally contained manner. When we hear news about the public health measures take some time to breath, relax your body, visualise pleasant and safe images (what we call a safe place), using this type of biofeedback we can train ourselves away from stress responses to the current situation. Also cognitively framing it as a new event (which is is) will means we look at it differently asking our mind and body to find new reactions and not default to the stress ones.
Psychotherapist Noel McDermott continues:
“We don’t know if Christmas will be affected but we do know we can deal with whatever happens. We have learned a lot over the past two years and mostly we have learned that what gives us strength is our love for each other. So, get back to those basics, Omicron is reminding us that we have found the secret to happy life through connection with our loved ones and the pandemic didn’t and can’t take that from us. Omicron doesn’t stand a chance against the wonderful ability humans have to bond and protect each other.”
