[mentat]

"Remain obsessed" with transmission of a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale? That sure seems worth being obsessed about. When it mutates to spread past all current defenses then consistently kill because we failed to stop current spread it will indeed be "depressing".

[jerf]

"a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale"

That doesn't uniquely describe COVID. It describes pretty much every virus you have heard of.

The gradient for viruses trends strongly towards trading severity for contagiousness. They do not generally "mutate past all defenses and kill", the generally "mutate past defenses and give slight to non-existent symptoms", for several reasons, the two most important of which is that killing means they can't spread anymore, and at the Pareto frontier (which viruses live on all the time), contagiousness and severity are in active conflict with each other; energy put into one comes right out of the budget for the other. And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

You've been amped up to a level of fear so severe for viruses that if your fear was accurate, there would be no multicellular life on Earth, because highly contagious and severe viruses would kill anything that provided such a big target. So, good news! Your fear is not accurate. You can verify yourself by checking your environment for multicellular organisms that have not been killed by viruses.

[ptaipale]

This theory of "killing means they can't spread anymore" doesn't really work out with diseases like sars-cov2. It might have worked in a medieval world where people travel by foot, horseback or sailboat, and with a disease where the carrier stays contagious forever.

But we are in a modern world where travel around the globe happens in 24 hours. Covid is contagious for some time before the patient has any symptoms, and for most people, it stops being contagious by the time some of the carriers are so sick they might die.

So, when a patient starts having symptoms in 5 days, (s)he may have had time to infect other people on more than two continents.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

A virus that kills the patient will still infect less people than one that doesn't.

The fact that viruses in general can spread more widely and more qiuckly doesn't change this.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

To restate this without the teleological angle: virus will not become widespread unless they are easily transmitted, and they are not easily transmitted if they make the subject excessively ill. Ergo, the most common viruses are better at being transmitted than making people really ill.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

If you ignore the context and the multifaceted consequences of lockdowns etc., then yes, you are correct and we should be obsessed with the transmission rates. However, we don't have the same level of obsessions about other viruses present in humans (say, HSV-1 which unlike SARS-CoV-2 will live inside you until you die), and even other coronaviruses. Why? Because what matters most is how dangerous the virus is.

Fortunately, as of today, Omicron deaths are still at zero, and this fills me with moderate optimism. [0]

[0] https://www.cityam.com/anxiously-optimistic-south-africa-hol...

[bluGill]

> Omicron deaths are still at zero

Omicron hasn't been around long enough to expect many deaths yet. Even the optimists need to wait a few more weeks.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Plenty of evidence that Omicron has been around for a substantial period of time. I believe the lower bound is at least a month in the US and Europe at this point, presumably longer at the point of origin.

[bluGill]

technically you are right. However delta is dominate and we don't sequence most tests so we don't really have any data to work with.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

sewage treatment testing happens behind the scenes, involves essentially the entire population, and is incredibly valuable. it confirms omicron's "long term" presence in the US.

[disambiguation]

I seriously question whether we're at a level technologically that "control" was ever an option here.

With things like covid and the flu, vaccines will always be playing catch up with variants. Its not like the measles which doesn't mutate. Infection and hospitalization rates for vaccinated with covid are already significantly higher than the flu as far as baselines go .. it's reasonable to say we can't expect vaccines to snuff out this kind of disease.

Therefore, the only realistic way to stop the spread is with ruthless targeted testing, tracking, and quarantining. But the problem with that method is by the time we're aware of a problematic strain, its already spread too much for quarantining to be effective.

Nature is inevitable. Once we've done all we can, all that's left is to learn to live with it.

[nahqz]

There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever. Just suggesting it is crazy. It is an option you have to forget about.

Stalling the spread is useless as well - we have already had two major mutations in less than two years.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever.

There's a significant difference between COVID-19/SARS-COV-2 become endemic, and it continuing as a pandemic that threatens public health systems due to caseload density. Yes, we're unlikely to get beyond it being endemic, which means that like influenza, it will continue to be an issue, but we can certainly get a point where it is "just endemic", which would be a huge improvement over the current situation.

[Spare_account]

>we have already had two major mutations in less than two years.

How frequently do equivalent Flu mutations occur?

[hcurtiss]

Every. Single. Year.

[toyg]

> There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever.

Well, there is, we just don't want to pay for it: vaccinating poor countries, where effectively the mutations are being created by high infection rates.

[dharbin]

Don't forget to vaccinate the wild deer and other animals that catch and spread COVID.

[TacticalCoder]

I don't understand: every single study out there says that vaccinated people do still catch the virus and can still spread it.

Why would the current crop of vaccines be able to stop the virus, even if applied worldwide, seen that they don't prevent infection?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

If the vaccine brings R0 down to below 1.0 for vaccinated people, then the vaccine offers a way to get the virus to an endemic situation rather than a pandemic.

The evidence is still not solid on whether or not it does this, as far as I am aware.

[nahqz]

The vaccine hasn't stopped spread in rich countries, why would it do so in poor countries?

Also there haven't been enough variants as to determine that most variants are coming from poor countries. Speaking of delta, India has more population than the entirety of Europe. Mathematically it makes sense than a variant could come from there regardless of whether the vaccine does anything.

[bluGill]

> The vaccine hasn't stopped spread in rich countries, why would it do so in poor countries?

It has greatly slowed the spread. The highest vaccinated countries have almost stopped it. There is every reason to believe that high vaccination across the world would stop covid, and anything less will ensure continued spread (and mutations).

People demanding an all or nothing from a vaccine are missing the big picture.

[hcurtiss]

The highest vaccinated countries have almost stopped it? Israel had among the highest vaccination rates in the world prior to its most recent peak, which has now declined. Other countries are going through the same thing. There is only a very rough/weak correlation between vaccination rate and positive cases.

[bluGill]

Isreal hasn't been among the highest vaccinated countries in quite a while. They got over 50% early, but stalled out. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations (Isreal isn't selected by default) Check out countries like Portugal if you want to see what high vaccination does.

[nojokes]

It is depressing how people pretend that it is the same virus every time.

Israel has faced waves of 3 different viruses - original, Alpha and Delta what have required different level of immunization and Israel has managed to vaccinate itself out of 2 of these waves.

Looks quite impressive to me.

I also fail to understand why people pretend that 2 doses should be expected to stop Delta that has higher viral load - it does not make any sense.

It is a probabilistic game - antibodies are not smart - they are like mines - you need to have high enough concentration to stop viral particles to move around. If the viral particles can overload this concentration - they are going to win. There obviously must be some threshold of antibody concentration below what you can't avoid infection - when 2 dose regimen reaches it too quickly, well, game over. 3rd dose regimen is known to boost antibody concentration and keep it high for longer time. There is no surprise here and yet even people in position (like WHO) that should know better have intentionally ignored it.