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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

So far Omicron has been shown to be extremely mild with only some minor symptoms. Isn’t this the ideal situation? Finally a variant that is less lethal and may help provide immunity against more lethal variants.

Just missing the “now is the time to panic” vibe being pushed by many news outlets.

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In fact it hasn't been shown to be extremely mild. Much too early to tell.

There are strong suggestions that it evades immunity from prior infection - presumably the reverse would also be true.

Early days yet as we wait for the data to come in, but indeed Now may well be the time to panic!

“In fact it hasn’t been shown to extremely mild”.

Where have you heard this? I agree much too early to know from sure but all initial reporting has this variant shown to be quite mild.

GP said it hasn't been shown to be extremely mild, not that it has been shown not to be extremely mild. It's too early to tell since the first known cases were skewed towards young people.

The doctor from South Africa making that claim seems to have been basing it on a couple of dozen very self-selecting patients at her private practice. The reality is that the hospitalizations are increasing rapidly in South Africa.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1466480120215048199

It might be a bit milder (though we won't know for a while, there's a lot of confounding factors and data lag). It could also be a bit more seriousl. But it seems very unlikely to be an order of magnitude milder.

I'm cautiously hopeful about this too, it would be ideal for a "high transmission yet benign" variant to take over. Effectively joining the common cold class of viruses.

But like everything else this pandemic, we have to wait and see. Hopefully we get the good news before the end of the year.

The governments who enact the restrictions and the majority who support them are not acting entirely on arguments based on health. For example, origin of COVID is animal reservoir (bats) which makes a bunch of the restrictions illogical (they are predicated on sterilizing immunity / eradicating it entirely - also known as zero covid).

So, it is not cut and dry case that you can present a health policy based on health, like you are making now. You probably need some kind of Girardian scapegoat or a political argument to shock the public out of it. I don't think the latter is coming because majority supports and sees the restrictions as positive.

Animal origin theory is far from settled, and there is mounting evidence that the lab leak theory was squashed early on for political reasons. This book that came out recently and it’s extremely compelling. I was fully in the “lab link is conspiracy theory” camp until I read it.

https://www.amazon.ca/Viral-Search-COVID-19-Matt-Ridley/dp/0...

It's still too early to say it's mild.

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