[denton-scratch]

> after the humans reach herd immunity

That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly.

COVID is going to be endemic.

My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of 'flu, but much less nasty than infection with delta. With omicron's extreme success at transmission, perhaps omicron will give the whole world a degree of resistance to all COVID variants, and endemic COVID will eventually become no more scary than endemic adenovirus.

[kragen]

Immunity and resistance are the same thing, not two separate things. Total immunity ("sterilizing immunity") is relatively unusual, and doesn't seem to exist for covid, but covid immunity seems to last for at least several months, maybe a year or more, at high enough levels to prevent epidemics ("herd immunity"). Given how fast O spreads, it seems likely that it will burn itself out among the humans in a few months --- but covid will probably always be able to come back from the zoonotic reservoirs.

I hope you're right about the scariness, but I worry about the incidence of "long covid", and in particular the possibility of widespread organ damage from blood clots.