Omicron Is the Beginning of the End | Hacker News Reader

Omicron Is the Beginning of the End

theatlantic.com

38 pointsyarapavan22 comments

I think this article is correct in the social prediction.

Truth of the matter is, I'd rather use masks for the rest of my life and socialize outdoors than have the neurological after-effects of COVID.

My worry is that after omicron, we will see pi, rho, sigma, and tao. Each of those will cause neurological effects in, say, 5% of the population. Depending on how this works, we might see a quarter of the population in moderately bad shape, or 5% of the population in very, very bad shape. Or we might see a variant that lands 100% of the population in bad shape.

Prior to the advent medicine, mankind has dealt with diseases like that before. I'd be very sad if modern gave us a 100 year lull, rather than solving the problem.

What neurological after-effects are you talking about?

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/neurological-manifestations...

https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7970685/

.... and so on.

Acute are things like memory lapses and pretty severe deficits. Those are less common, but do occur. Very common is a small but statistically significant general decline in cognitive function.

I wonder if this has always been the case for major illness, and the effect/study was too hard to observe.

Most likely this. It is hard to imagine that covid has disproportional ability to cause lasting side-effects without causing causing severe disease and/or death.

It actually does seem that this virus has a fairly unique ability to directly attack the brain.

Sorry, it doesn't seem like that at all.

Yes, this was the case for many major diseases. It also wasn't hard to observe:

* Syphilis could cause madness later in life

* Polio could lead to paralysis later in life

* Rabies moves up the nervous system very, very slowly, with no symptoms, and suddenly you go crazy, fear water, and die.

* Lyme disease causes memory losses and cognitive dysfunction

... and so on.

Good thing we managed to fight those off!

It doesn't work like that with cold viruses. You get it as a child and then every year with minimum effect. Maybe at the end of your life when your body and immune system is weak it causes severe disease and/or death.

The same with covid. Once you get several vaccinations and then maybe you get omicron. And then every year another variant and so on. The risk of severe disease and significant lasting side-effects are very minimal. We should not compare them to the current state when our immunity is far from adjusted.

I see. COVID is now just a cold. Next please.

Seriously. Look up the history of infectious diseases. For most of history, we were living with truly debilitating ones. Polio. Smallpox. Measles. Syphilis. The Roman Empire would probably be around if not for the Plaque of Justinian. Heck, look at the impact of disease on IQ in parts of Africa.

Yes, it's possible COVID will behave like how you describe. It's equally possible it will knock 5 IQ points off each time it hits you, until we're drooling idiots in our old age. We don't know yet.

We do know colds don't cross the blood-brain barrier like COVID.

I'm rather hoping that after Omicron is the point at which we can mostly forget about covid and go on with the rest of our lives. Covid will be there still but hopefully a low level thing like the flu or colds that you don't think about much. (I presently have Omicron - feels like a cold - I'm jabbed - but I'm having to isolate unlike a normal cold).

Same here. I tested negative before a trip, positive after landing. I’ve had colds that felt worse, but my parents are older so I missed the holidays and I missed a trip with my friends because of this. Seems really silly when other people will have the same virus around us, but they’ve made me believe that I’ll kill my own parents if I pass this along. We’re all vaccinated even with boosters but I don’t want to risk it.

I had COVID before vaccines were available as a healthy and fit 23 year old. I would compare it to the swine flu, which I've also had when I lived in Buenos Aires, and put both far beyond a cold.

A non-ignorable section of the population cannot be vaccinated, others have risk factors that vaccinations mitigate but no guarantees. We currently believe Omicron arose from an HIV patient in South Africa, where only ~25% of the population is vaccinated for lack of doses. The virus is more likely to mutate in immunocompromised patients, and mutations increase the chance that existing vaccinations become ineffective.

If people are serious about wanting to forget it and go on with their lives, the failure to vaccinate poor populations because it is not profitable to do so is a much larger issue than first worlders getting boosters.

> where only ~25% of the population is vaccinated for lack of doses

South Africa is refusing vaccine shipments because their stockpiles are full.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...

How solid is the basis that the virus came from South Africa? I believe it was South African district which first reported but as far as I can tell South Africa as confirmed source is a meme. If that is the case it is also lacking basis to make any judgements from which the population the virus arose.

I think a culture shift away from seeing others while sick without be a good thing. While the affects are very minimal for most, many still die. Working while sick shouldn't be the norm.

I wonder why it's not more broadly advertised as "let's turn this thing into a cold/flu" thanks to vaccination? To my profane mind, that seems like a simple message everybody understands, and kind of agrees to, at least around me.

Am I deluded?

Some unvaccinated have always maintained COVID is equivalent to the seasonal flu. So from that standpoint getting vaccinated should do more than that.

I agree with your thinking in general but am not sure it would reach everyone in the way you might think.

Yes, but it's a mass delusion.

1) Vaccination doesn't appear to turn COVID19 into a cold/flu, except for death rates (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2/)

2) If it did, COVID spreading wildly would mean more variants would evolve, and specifically, vaccine-hopping ones. COVID has shown how bad variants can get.

It's worth looking at diseases both historically and world-wide for how these things can effect humanity.

Part of the reason for mass delusions is oversimplified messaging. At this point, we should have been able to educate everyone about COVID19 to the level where we could hold rational discussion, and perhaps even discuss things like probabilities (we don't know X, and there's a chance of Y and a chance of Z, rather than polarized battles).

Looking at that nature article I think the delusion is that influenza hasn't also been causing many more problems in young healthy people like the ones described and that makes it hard to have a real discussion about what to do if after everyone has had at least one exposure to a COVID virus we end up with data showing we have gotten to two pandemics that should be equally (un)acceptable.

https://archive.ph/rmgdE

On my phone I cannot read more than the first page. Something wrong with the site?

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