[throwaway894345]

With how much more contagious omicron is, I wonder what the odds are that future strains will come from it or an earlier strain? In particular, I assume there is some zero-sum competition going on between strains—if someone gets infected with Omicron it becomes very unlikely that they would later contract Delta—thus at a certain point Omicron is everywhere and less contagious strains largely die out? This has happened in the past with syphilis, for example.

[whynotminot]

It’s sort of interesting to think about. One epidemiologist I follow mused that we could end up with delta and omicron co-existing, with omicron hitting the vaccinated (but not boosted) while delta continues to wreak havoc among the unvaccinated. It’s hard to tell if omicron is actually more contagious than delta, or if it just appears to be because of its immunity evasion.