Does anyone have insights/thoughts as to the implications of this variant growing as fast as it subsides? Does that mean a new variant will emerge which will be more/less infectious or more/less deadly?
I don't know if it's possible to assess the infectiousness and deadliness in isolation from the collective social immunity.
Each wave is less deadly because:
a) we're getting better at treating it
b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves.
c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.
Virus just wants to replicate and spread as much as possible. Sometimes the side effect of this is death etc.
If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more.
But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount of herd immunity, it may be a few weeks of heavy spread and then very little.
Viruses don't "want", anthropomorphizing COVID like media headlines do is a bit of a "language virus" in and of itself that makes global understanding of what's going on more difficult. AFAIK the virus mutates randomly, and we just see more of the more infectious and less deathly (in the short and mid-term) variants because those are the ones that spread faster and successfully among humans, but attributing even collective behavior to COVID, like to an ant colony, is too liberal of a use of our imagination.
Classic HN response spending an entire paragraph to disect how I used the word "want" even though it's obvious that I meant "to achieve their goal of maximizing proliferation".
Hmm, good question. I guess I can go full pedantic on this because it's HN but probably on any other social setting this exposition would drain everyones vital life and just fuel my autistic dissociation until I have no idea where I am anymore.
Giving "natural selection" as a force the capacity to "want" is probably less controversial that saying that a virus "wants". For example if you are a religious evolutionary biologist you can think that natural selection is an entity that makes some kind of conscious decisions that may appear random to us only because we don't understand them. I don't think that believing that will hamper your ability to actually understand natural selection as much as any other scientist, specially if you go by the Roman Catholic tenet of unquestionable faith in unsolvable misteries.
If you go by the more neutral terms used in evolutionary science I think natural selection is more of a process than a system or force and then it "wanting" things is also anthropomorphism.
My personal line for when anthropomorphism is tolerable and when it's not is when as an analogy it can make you come to dangerous conclusions. For example "oh COVID wants to mutate, we should just let it mutate because when you give something what it wants it will usually leave you alone" or stuff like that.
Nope but we can attribute properties to a group of brain cells that we can call a "human" the property of "wanting" without implanting incorrect analogies that, so far and according to our understanding of consciousness, don't impair the collective spread of the best knowledge we have about how "human" works. If you really literally think COVID wants something you are probably delusional or your understanding of what's a virus is like below high-school level.
super fast spread even with milder effects will still meant overwhelming healthcare capacity
let's not even go near the notion that more infection means brewing more variants
we've never entertained herd immunity for polio, why covid..
It only means overwhelmed healthcare if the hospitalisation/requirement for healthcare rate is high enough.
If this variant is 5x more infectious, but 5x less likely to result in hospitalisation, the net effect on healthcare resources should remain level, no?
No, there is no formula quite that simple while we're still in the transient, exponential growth stage for omicron. 5x transmissibility can lead to single-day infections much greater than past peaks. If omicron does cause a disaster in the US and other western countries, it will probably be due to a short (2-3 week) window of insanely high daily case rates, leading to very high daily hospitalization/ICU requirements. If the US hits let's say 1M confirmed cases/day for example (3x the peak last winter), with a daily demand for beds (non-icu) of ~25k, things would get very bad in urban centers. The combo of exponential growth and localized hospital resource constraints means that what would seem at face value to be an even tradeoff of transmissibility for lethality is not so simple.
Omicron might be a blessing in disguise, but there is a very bad plausible outcome for the coming month.
Not if you factor time into that math. 5x more infectious on the first cycle means just 5 times the infections, and equal hospitalizations, but the next cycle all of those 5x the number of people spread it again to 5x the number of people. So even though it's 5x milder, you've still got 5x the people showing up in the hospital. It gets worse and worse the more cycles you go. 25x in hospital, 125x in hospital, etc. You run into mitigating factors in real life, as the entire population is consumed, but that's a super steep slope comparative to the baseline.
Not necessarily. The load that the healthcare systems must carry depends not just on the absolute number of cases, but also on how long the average stay in hospital is. Think of it as IT notorious "man-days", in this case "patient-days".
If the infection is milder across the board, hospital stays will be shorter on average. People will improve faster and will be discharged sooner.
500 people who on average need 3 days of hospitalization are less of a load than 200 people who on average need 10 days of hospitalization - unless those 500 arrive at the same time, of course.
Each wave is less deadly because: a) we're getting better at treating it b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves. c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.