South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant: ‘unusual but mild’ | Hacker News Reader

South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant: ‘unusual but mild’

telegraph.co.uk

36 pointstomohawk17 comments

"A widely-shared quote from a South African doctor, saying Omicron causes only mild symptoms, is being taken out of context. She was referring to a small group of young, healthy people and warned of severe disease in other groups"

from https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1464734073897766919

"older people - with co-morbidities such as diabetes" which that exact same population that is at risk with the existing variants... It's the at-risk group which is actually small.

Look at the dead in Peru. Plenty of young healthy folks died.

Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously), but isn't a very contagious, but low-severity, variant a good thing? Wider spread, fast immunity, lower deaths, etc. than Delta continuing its march?

Possibly but if it is able to evade the existing vaccination, even if it has a much lower lethality rate, its ability to infect everyone could possibly come out to more deaths and health complications. Narrower slice of a much larger pie.

I think also even if it is semi-benign to start, it could further mutate of course, and not for the best.

IIRC, virologist have mentioned that this is the usual progression for new mutations of viruses like COVID-19. High vitality and low mortality. The virus wants to stay alive.

While I generally agree I’d just say we should be careful about anthropomorphizing COVID-19 or any other virus. They don’t have desires. It may be evolutionarily advantageous though to “stay alive” by continuing to propagate and spread.

Why should we be careful? Aren’t our desires just a reflection of evolutionarily advantageous behavior?

A desire implies a conscious and at least semi-reasonable actor.

People with desires behave rationally (mostly). If person X doesn't want to be homeless, they probably won't burn their house down. We can depend on that.

COVID is not a rational actor. It might burn its own house down and do a tapdance on the ashes.

Even though being less lethal is evolutionarily advantageous, COVID could absolutely become more lethal in the short term.

Although I agree with your point. And even I personally perceive virus as something more like machine. But your analogy opened another interpretation for me.

Person probably won't burn their house down. But some may argue that people in fact do not have problem to burn whole planet down. Like virus with the whole organism. It may be just matter of focus.

I don't think of people like I do with virus. Just that analogy opened this train of thought for me. Several different interpretations is natural feature of analogies.

> Aren’t our desires just a reflection of evolutionarily advantageous behavior?

I think that’s a great question but it’s not quite there in this context. Think of a virus as being more like a rock. We don’t attribute wants or desires to rocks (though maybe there is some fun and interesting philosophy to uncover here).

The reason to be careful is that you’ll never be able to think like a virus (or a rock) and so when you think that the virus might do X or Y you’re inserting a human bias to the virus that may cause error in judgement. Of course we’re just rambling on the internet but I guess it’s a good rule of thumb or at least something to think about.

One of the interesting things about viruses generally, is that they are right on the line between things we consider alive and things we don't.

The thought had occurred to me that a low-severity virus might, for that very reason, be more contagious. In other words, the fact that it's very contagious might be primarily because it doesn't present severe symptoms, thus the person (and those around them) don't realize it's covid-19. Just a speculation.

You are wrong. Covid might exist in bats or deer or dogs with mild illness just fine yet kill all humans.

Is this not the virus' modus operandi? for Most people it is mild but it kills a few, therefore this is not helpful information.

Why do those so called journalists always take out of context quotes like this? It's downright dangerous with an ongoing pandemic. We don't really know the true impact this variant has and it will be a couple of weeks before we can find out more about exactly what this variant is capable of. The biggest issue is whether this variant can escape the current range of vaccines we have or not. A lot depends on this as it will be up to 3 months before vaccines are reformulated and even longer to get it into the arms of those that needs this.

Hopefully this variant has more than enough mutations for a reformulated vaccine to eliminate all possible variants that might evolve in the future.

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