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Comment by op00to | Hacker News Reader

Are people getting sicker with it?

> However, Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association and a practising GP based in Pretoria, said it was “premature” to make predictions of a health crisis.

“It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said. “Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/26/south-africa-b...

Best case scenario: A virus that causes only mild symptoms, spreads quickly, and causes immunity against the original (more harmful) variants.

Just lift measures and let it do its work...

COVID has been weaponized politically. Any politician that doesn’t take part in counter-measure theatrics risks losing an election where they will be attacked for not doing enough.

This would be incredible

Unfortunately, right now, it seems unlikely :(

There are already reports of (vaccinated) young people getting seriously ill.

Unlike with other viruses, there is little selective pressure towards being less deadly, because illness/death mostly happen after transmission.

And while I'm not a virologist, it doesn't seem far-fetched that "breeds higher viral loads more quickly" would be correlated not only with transmissivity, but also with "kills more".

"the cases we are seeing are extremely mild"

So, like most COVID infections?

I heard the minor symptoms are muscle aches and tiredness.. Like most days for the elderly.

“Mild” in this case means you don’t go to the hospital (and/or the morgue). It doesn’t rule out long COVID or extremely severe (from a layman’s perspective) symptoms.

And that’s the same as other “mild” COVID infections, yep. The ones where you don’t die. You ignorant dipshit.

Well that last bit sure came out of left field.

Yikes - attacking another user like that will get you banned here, regardless of how ignorant they are or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid this sort of degenerate spiral.

If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Have you never had a severe cold when you were young or did you get one of those stupid attendance trophies in school? Geez. I'm starting to wonder if anyone on Hacker news has ever gone through any hardship.

We don't know yet, the number of cases this variant has been confirmed in is far too low at this point. You'll likely get a better idea of what that mix of mutations means in terms of clinical aspects and transmissions in a few weeks, most of the current takes are educated guesses based on what this variant has in common with the previous ones.

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