So is this the fabled transition into COVID becoming the common cold? More infectious, less deadly?
It’s also quite obvious, mechanistically: COVID doesn’t lose many infections by eventually killing the patient who, by then, is obviously sick and most often in the hospital. It gets 80%+ of retransmission even before symptoms appear, removing all evolutionary pressure from the later stages.
But viruses spread in the real world not some hypothetical lab. In the real world as viruses become deadlier they tend to provoke a much larger response from governments and populations, both in terms of prevention and vaccines/cures/treatments. That's why there's a lot more money spent on potential HIV vaccines than on vaccines for the common cold. Being deadlier is a distinct disadvantage if you're a virus trying to survive for the long haul.
I doubt the top epidemiologists are spreading myths.
The "unusual" cases where covid is causing death might not be enough, no. The fact that it causes people to stay at home however could be.
Do any of them have names? (Either the viruses or the epidemiologists)
And that’s supposedly because… these common cold viruses were just too quick to kill their victims, at first?
But those viruses don't generally spread very fast because of their severity.
A virus probably doesn’t ‘care’ that much about a 1% host death rate in the short term.
Prior to that, it was both very deadly and very contagious. Those facts were not hurting it.
Those attributes did not make it evolutionarily weak unless you count motivating people to make vaccines.
What is your point?
In other words, the high-level theory is that more severe viruses either kill their hosts, or make them so sick that they stop interacting with other potential hosts. A form of social distancing, if you will.
In both cases, the virus is triggering some form of behavior change in its host that reduces its reproduction, providing evolutionary pressure towards milder viruses.
One could argue that the development and wide distribution of a vaccine is just one form of host behavior change, and should be factored in.
Something with a mortality rate of 30+% and kills children at orders of magnitude higher rate than COVID has is far easier to convince the world populace to vaccinate for than something with 1-2 order of magnitude lower CFR.
So you can most 100%, certainly say, it was eradicated because it is so deadly. If only say 0.5% of people died from it, disproportionately the elderly those with comorbidities, eradicating smallpox would have been a hell of a lot harder to get worldwide vaccinations on board. A hell of a lot.
It's honestly too early to tell what the characteristics of Omicron are, there's just not enough data. Some anecdotes look positive, but mostly what we're seeing is the media going nuts trying to say something when the responsible thing to do is say nothing and wait.
But there is a lot of data, it is just hard to interpret, even for experts (which I'm not): It is currently summer in South Africa, but there was a summer wave last year. "Around 60-70% of South Africans have already had a Covid-19 infection" (from another comment). Age distribution. How fast omicron is spreading and why. How many are vaccinated (once, twice,...). How many breakthrough infections. Delta and other variants are spreading faster than the previous mostly due to higher viral load. Omicron seems to have has higher viral load. Omicron also binds to ACE2. What is the typical delay between infection and hospital / ICU admission. Some of this is discussed e.g. in https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-were-...
I understand that the media doesn't just stay silent. What I'm missing from them is in-depth and up-to-date info, with error bars. They can do that for weather forecasts, they should also be able to do this for omicron.