Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
The broad logic is more infections = more variants. Which makes sense in a purely statistical way, since variants are happened upon by chance on infection.
It seems the messaging from the experts is different in the US and the UK.
The message in the UK broadly is: expect to be infected with COVID multiple times throughout your life, vaccination and prior infection should protect you from serious illness.
One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.
But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
That's probably the more realistic expectation. Especially when the west is doing very, very little to help curb infections elsewhere in the world. Until they become interested in that there will always be a fresh supply of variants arriving.
New variants of viruses can arise at any point in the future, regardless of what we do. Any flu season in any previous year in history could have produced a deadly variant, and yet we went on with our lives.
I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal with every year.
I remember at least two flu seasons where flu variants named after certain animals caused people to not simply go on with their lives. Do you remember those?
If you don't have any cases you won't get any new variants, because variants arise when the virus mutates while reproducing in the human body. More cases = more opportunities for a mutation that produces a more dangerous variant.
Covid is here to stay, and you can be expect to be infected with it every few years. You probably won't even know it's covid because we will have stopped routine testing. Talk about having zero cases is ridiculous and fanciful.
> Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe.
Future pandemic waves will be less and less severe.
It doesn't matter how virulent the variants are, they're all about the same within a factor of 2 or so.
The thing that moves the needle is the human immune system. >90% of the population everywhere has T-cells now one way or another. People who are boosted have T-cells that have gone through affinity maturation and been boosted which should be a mature immune response that will keep them out of hospitals permanently (barring compromise of their immune system of course, but that's a risk with influenza and everything else).
As the unvaccinated/antivaxxers manage to get mature boosted immune systems the hard way then the impact of each successive wave will be lower. Once we hit the point where the unvaccinated percentage in the hospitals roughly equals the unvaccinated percentage in the general population then the pandemic is probably over.
So with 90% unvaccinated in the hospitals right now with 64% fully vaccinated, then at some point another Omicron-sized wave of infections should result in only 15% of the overall hospitalizations. Of course it won't be perfect, but the trend of each successive wave should move the needle more to that level. Each successive wave should asymptotically approach that burden.
Eventually its likely that the waves become smaller as well, due to mature boosted immunity against infection and transmission.
And Omicron probably isn't significantly less severe of a virus, the studies in culture and in mice attempting to show that have large problems. The less severity of hospital burden in the Omicron wave is showing that the human immune system (and vaccination and boosting) works.
We have the technology to make COVID just a nuisance to broad swaths of the population. Let them live their lives. Now is absolutely the time to quit the tut-tutting.
I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.
Personally, I would lock my children in a cellar for 15 years if that's what it took to protect those who have compromised immune systems. Talk about not being able to defend yourself!
Good lord. I know this is hyperbolic but do you have any idea the affect that 15 years of isolation would have on children? And you are willing to place the well-being of random strangers over your own children? You seem to think that your comment is morally superior, but that idea is abhorrent and evil to the idea of being a parent. You should be ashamed to be a parent.
I would love to see how your children feel about that.
You don't have to lock your kids in a cellar, but measures like mask mandates and temporary school shutdowns are the sorts of things that are necessary to keep covid under control so immunocompromised people can live their lives, instead of having to stay at home because it's incredibly difficult to avoid exposure due to states just going 'eh I'm done with these lockdowns' and repealing mask mandates.
Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths.
Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.
I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.
Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.
There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.
The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population.
Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted in bad outcomes. Vaccines (and to some extent prior infection) make us no longer naive. That's the way out.
Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].
There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"
Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.
You have to disaggregate those statistics to account for vaccination status. Here's NYC's dashboard. Huge differences in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between the vaxxed and unvaxxed population. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily
Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.
Prior infection gives far more protection than vaccination, and a combination of both is as good as it gets (although the addition of vaccination to prior infection gives much less additional protection than prior infection alone): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
In declaring the statement 'false', the Facebook fact checker confirmed there is a longstanding scientific theory it is true and provided confusing would-be counter-examples of variants of viruses exhibiting treatment resistance and cross-species leaps. Omicron demonstrated that treatment resistance is really incidental to severity, and COVID already is a problem for humans -- the question clearly was not asked by a pigeon or monkey for whom cross-species leaps of a human virus could be problematic. The would be fact check was not especially illuminating.
I personally credit the prediction attributed to Luc Montagnier back in 2020 that because COVID exhibited unnatural characteristics that exacerbated the severity of illness, he predicted that over time the characteristics would evolve out of the virus and result in a more benign illness. This is a reason why it would have been useful to have a scientific debate over the lab leak theory, because the origin of the virus informs our best guess of the path it may take in the future, which has so far confirmed to this prediction.
over <1yr time frame, severity hurts the virus spread. consuming resources and triggering sneezing etc does. Therefore random mutations tend toward mild severity (symptoms like sneezing, not instant death).
HIV is an interesting case because it is "just a flu" for a few weeks, then remains contagious but isn't severe at all, until it develops into AIDS years later.
The article actually specifically endorses anthropomorphizing viruses, because "feelings" are just a human metaphor on top of real biologic and physical processes, as how water likes to flow downhill.
Apologies, the snark is mine not theirs. My point was that the evolutionary pressure on viruses doesn't necessarily make them less serious and there are counterexamples to support that.
> I thought the general theory of "virus evolution" was towards less severe variants.
That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.
Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?
Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.