Gates: Once the omicron variant passes, Covid will be more like the seasonal flu | Hacker News Reader

Gates: Once the omicron variant passes, Covid will be more like the seasonal flu

cnbc.com

2 pointsmiles5 comments

I doubt an upper respiratory variant is going to be the worst left. Perhaps we should engineer a dominant strain every year to be more vanilla.

Why? Immunity against coronavirus is fleeting. Every year in Winter from now on, the healthcare system is going to get clobbered with people ill with Covid. Plus, every year there will be a new variant that current vaccines are not efficaceous against. Where does Gates get his data from?

T cell immunity should permanently reduce the severity of subsequent infections holding viral load constant. Variants would have to somehow keep getting worse to do the same amount of harm.

I mean, to some extent, _that is what happens with the flu_. Every year, the flu strains hospital systems, and has for decades. Every year, vulnerable people require a flu vaccine (and really, everyone should be getting one).

While I think Gates is being rather optimistic here, it's not a completely out-there idea; with high levels of vaccination and prior infection, most covid cases would be expected to be relatively mild (very highly vaccinated countries, and countries with a very high rate of prior infection like South Africa, are seeing this now to some extent; Omicron just isn't converting to severe hospitalization cases at the same rate as prior variants).

You just described the flu and made gates's point for him.

Deaths were front-loaded, there will be fewer deaths in future waves. and many doctors now turn people away from ER because.... it's not the right place to go when you have non-serious covid, and was taking away from their capacity to help other patients.

In short, people just spent the last 2-3 years with a weight of 0.95 on covid and a weight of .05 on everything else, but that was not a justifiable rational thing to do.

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