Its milder than Delta but way more transmissible. The more people get this, more will be the chances of a new variant which can be more deadly/transmissible.
However it is important as the WHO recommends to do way more to export vaccines to countries that need it. Not just developed countries to prevent the chance of new variants.
My understanding is that in many of those countries, the vaccine is readily available, but people don't want to take it for various reasons.
why long? The EcoAlliance's gain-of-function (with the "Human Subjects Included" checked) NIH grant for Wuhan started in 2014, the human-specific DNA modifications of the virus were described in the EcoAlliance's 2018 DARPA grant proposal, and in the end of 2019 - voila!
With regard to omicron - we may be also witnessing the continuation of the same magic of the fast "gain-of-function" by the virus :
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints.
This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease."
https://www.newsweek.com/how-dr-fauci-other-officials-withhe...
What's new to me though is how deep the involvement of US entities apparently was and how close to SARS-CoV-2 territory the whole endeavour came. So in this case, absence of evidence is definitely not evidence of absence.
Also that one of the drivers of shutting down the lab-leak theory was apparently commissioning the WIV to do GoF research! (Though I still wonder what all the other scientists supporting that editorial were doing.)
If those FOIA papers will be used for more investigations in the near future, thing should definitely become interesting.
If we're worried about Omicron mutating to become more deadly, why aren't we worried about the other human coronaviruses doing the same? 229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1 that have been around for ages?
There's nothing magic about Omicron, its just a repsiratory virus thats relatively new to humans so there's not so much population immunity. And looks like we're rapidly getting exposed to it, so its about to lose its advantage.
They can only insert themselves into specific cells (acidic ones in lungs, nose, throat, stomach) and thus are respiratory viruses.
SARS-Cov-2 can insert into most cells of your body and loves the organs like the heart, brain, testes, lungs, etc.
It is airborne like a cold but can damage your brain and heart where a cold cannot.
Many viruses can attack multiple organs in the body if the infection is bad enough and the viral load is big enough to spread that far - e.g. see https://www.healthline.com/health/viremia