I'll venture some guesses here: * How transmissible is Omicron? Very. But how much? Based on current data, there's a sort of invariant involving a tradeoff

I'll venture some guesses here: * How transmissible is Omicron? Very. But how much? Based on current data, there's a sort of invariant involving a tradeoff between greater escape of post-infection/post-vaccination immunity and greater transmissibility where anything along that invariant line can explain it's aggressive rise. Either way, it doesn't really matter. If it continues to behave as it has, we'll see a lot more of omicron. ~60% confidence * Are Omicron infections milder, or more severe? That's the BIG question right now. I've seen one MD describe patients that they've seen with omicron as being mild. On the other hand, there's also been a significant rise in hospitalizations in affected areas, however, if there's simply more infected, that would be expected. I don't have a good guess here. We haven't had enough time to find out. * Can Omicron become dominant in this Delta environment? Given it's very rapid rise to dominance in the small subset of testing data I've seen, I'll put money on it out-competing delta. ~60% confidence * How much can Omicron evade the vaccine-immunity and/or natural-immunity? Another good question. Despite the fact it has a lot of spike-protein mutations, and many experts believe that immune escape is likely here: I'm not convinced that's the best metric, and I've only 20-30% confidence in my agreement with it. I'll revise this according to the following pieces of evidence I expect to see, in increasing order of how much confidence I'll gain in that assessment for each piece: I'll gain more after I hear a lot of anecdotes about vaccinated getting sick, more if I see lab results confirm lower antibody affinity, and more still after actual numbers to high statistical significance confirm that previously infected or people 2-6 months post-vaccination have a high rate of infection en par with the rest of the population.