> First, we have less severe variants now.
Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.
The more cases the greater the chance of mutations. The more mutations the greate the chance of nasty variant.
One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.
But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal with every year.
Future pandemic waves will be less and less severe.
It doesn't matter how virulent the variants are, they're all about the same within a factor of 2 or so.
The thing that moves the needle is the human immune system. >90% of the population everywhere has T-cells now one way or another. People who are boosted have T-cells that have gone through affinity maturation and been boosted which should be a mature immune response that will keep them out of hospitals permanently (barring compromise of their immune system of course, but that's a risk with influenza and everything else).
As the unvaccinated/antivaxxers manage to get mature boosted immune systems the hard way then the impact of each successive wave will be lower. Once we hit the point where the unvaccinated percentage in the hospitals roughly equals the unvaccinated percentage in the general population then the pandemic is probably over.
So with 90% unvaccinated in the hospitals right now with 64% fully vaccinated, then at some point another Omicron-sized wave of infections should result in only 15% of the overall hospitalizations. Of course it won't be perfect, but the trend of each successive wave should move the needle more to that level. Each successive wave should asymptotically approach that burden.
Eventually its likely that the waves become smaller as well, due to mature boosted immunity against infection and transmission.
And Omicron probably isn't significantly less severe of a virus, the studies in culture and in mice attempting to show that have large problems. The less severity of hospital burden in the Omicron wave is showing that the human immune system (and vaccination and boosting) works.
I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.
I would love to see how your children feel about that.
Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.
I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.
Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.
There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.
0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths
Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted in bad outcomes. Vaccines (and to some extent prior infection) make us no longer naive. That's the way out.
We have vaccines. Take the damn win.
Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].
There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"
Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.
0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/
1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...
Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.
Of course, more severe variants can always develop. Holds same for flu, HIV, ... not just COVID.
Often that selection pressure works towards less dangerous variants because that gives them more opportunity to infect others.
Sometimes a virus kills off everyone who is susceptible to it. So it's now less dangerous to those who remain.
In the caae of Covid, it is infectious long before it kills, and so there is no great selection pressure for it to become less dangerous.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
I personally credit the prediction attributed to Luc Montagnier back in 2020 that because COVID exhibited unnatural characteristics that exacerbated the severity of illness, he predicted that over time the characteristics would evolve out of the virus and result in a more benign illness. This is a reason why it would have been useful to have a scientific debate over the lab leak theory, because the origin of the virus informs our best guess of the path it may take in the future, which has so far confirmed to this prediction.
HIV is an interesting case because it is "just a flu" for a few weeks, then remains contagious but isn't severe at all, until it develops into AIDS years later.
Thank you politifact.com political fact check fact check for checking that.
That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.
Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?
Lets retry:
Please stop with the anti-intellectualism and fear-baiting based on personal feelings!