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Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question and I realize it may be. I've seen that said before, "Nearly everyone is going to catch omicron within the next 2 to 6 months"; the range changes both the quote is similar. I haven't really seen a why, it just seems to be a given. I know it's more virulent, but why is everyone going to have it so soon?

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R is between 2 and 3 infections per infected. That’s exponential growth, and omicron’s life cycle is faster than delta or alpha by a couple days. Health care facilities and airlines can’t keep fully staffed despite them taking the most precautions and requiring vaccinations. There was an outbreak in Antarctica where more than half the research station got it despite strict isolation and testing before arrival. How can we possibly stop that?

Definitely not a dumb question.

Virulence refers to the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. Omicron is not more virulent. If anything it is likely to be much less virulent as it lacks the ability to infect lung tissue.

On the other hand because the infection is now concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, patients are much more likely to exhale and spread the virus. On top of that, the virus has sufficiently mutated thus existing vaccines and prior infections have very limited protection. Combined with the lack of ventilation and increased time spent indoors in winter, this translates to more infections.

I don't know whether "everyone" is going to get it eventually. However I have heard anecdotes that multiple insular communities in the US that have largely avoided the previous Covid strains are now badly afflicted by omicron. That is how infectious the virus is.

Omicron is roughly as contagious as chicken pox. Remember what happened when a single child got chicken pox before the vaccine? There was never a question that everybody was about to get chicken pox--the only thing you could do was manage the timeframe.

Before the vaccine, people would have chicken pox parties so all the children were exposed simultaneously and everybody could get it over with. With Omicron, it's simply the reverse, it's blowing through everybody so fast that it will burn itself out in a couple months.

After that, it will simply have a constant endemic background level like chicken pox prior to the vaccine and the flu.

We are in the endgame. It isn't the endgame we wanted, but it is the endgame.

New variants have followed Omicron. And that will continue to happen. They may be more benign or less benign than what we’ve seen so far. But I keep hearing the assumption of “definitely mild”. I’m not sure the science is so definitive on that point.

I said nothing about mild. I said "contagious".

Before Omicron, we had a hope of creating an R0 < 1 and stamping Covid out. Omicron spreads so well in so many different mammals that it simply wipes that option off the map.

Omicron, irrespective of whether it is mild or not, is simply going to blow through the population no matter what we do. Afterward everybody will have been infected with Covid, vaccinated, or both.

At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.

> At that point, we'll have a background level of deaths from endemic Covid every year just like we do the flu. Welcome to the new world.

I agree. Just like we do for RSV, other common cold variants, etc. We'll get used to it.

That will not necessarily continue to happen, at least not soon. Once you've been exposed to omicron (+ vaxed or exposed to original/delta) a new variant has to be very different from both omicron and delta. And this isn't the flu; it only has so far it can mutate.

However, it's impossible to get rid of it because it infects animals and we're not going to vaccinate them.

I don’t understand your statements. Omicron had many changes vs delta — why would successive variants not have the same?

> Only has so far it can mutate

Says who?

Agreed, I can't see anything stopping it mutating further if the opportunity arises.

I believe the understanding is that the omicron variant may have evolved further in an immuno-compromised person (e.g. with AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy), since it got to stay in the host longer without being killed by the immune system, it racked up more mutations until it got to its current virulent form and started infecting other people.

And there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again I guess.

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