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Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

425 points by richardatlarge 5y ago

joelbondurant 5y ago
What a total disaster for the communists. If tyranny loving diaper faces can't live in a perpetual state of terror, the entire endemic was a failure.
richardatlarge 5y ago
Quote: The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.
- umpalumpaaa 5y ago
  Maybe it is lower because it is the second infection some had.
  - richardatlarge 5y ago
    Wouldn’t that be inconsistent with the other, related data: Quote: “National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection.”
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - croes 5y ago
      Maybe "new infection" doesn't mean first infection.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Or they were vaccinated
    - elsherbini 5y ago
      South Africa has <25% vaccintion rate. "South Africa has a better vaccination rate than most countries on the continent: Just under one-quarter of the population has been fully vaccinated" [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa-omicron-vaccination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa...
    - ageitgey 5y ago
      For what it's worth, the vaccination rate in South Africa is low. It's only around 25% for the original course with little to no boosters done.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Edit: double post, reference edited in above.
    - tylerscott 5y ago
      Source?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - vkou 5y ago
    Second infections, on average, have slightly worse outcomes then first infections among the unvaccinated. https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253 https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253 It's a small sample, but it was done on data available in 2020, which was before vaccines were available.
    - dsizzle 5y ago
      That link shows most (69%) have similar outcomes. 68.8% -- 19% had worse symptoms and 12.5% had milder symptoms. Small sample size, but even similar result is somewhat surprising -- I would've thought the 2nd infection would be weaker.
      - rich_sasha 5y ago
        Worth bearing in mind, 19% -> 3 patients, 12.5% -> 2 patients.
        dsizzle 5y ago
        Indeed, small sample size!
      - dsizzle 5y ago
        Went looking for later studies with larger population sizes and found this review https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2049080121010803 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S204908012... It's not that much larger -- I guess reinfections are hard to find -- but surprisingly this found that ICU admission was higher for reinfections.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- raphaelj 5y ago
  Could it be because we just got slightly better at treating Covid before hospitalization?
  - simonh 5y ago
    How do we treat Covid before hospitalisation? I just caught it at the weekend and feeling pretty crappy. I'm not aware of any particular treatment I should be taking.
    - QuarterReptile 5y ago
      This is another problem of the modal Western approach. Few people have any knowledge of mitigating strategies or medications because we've moved so aggressively to eradicate discussion of those things.
      - simonh 5y ago
        We have entire industries and research institutions funded to the tune of billons of dollars doing exactly that, using the very latest technology and scientific techniques. If there were effective treatment strategies that were easily discoverable, It'd have been patented, clinically trialed and be available from a counter near you at an affordable price extremely quickly. If it was cheap or safe enough, whole foods and such places would have shelves full of it. Capitalism is pretty good at that sort of thing, just look at all the vaccines we got in less than a year.
      - vkou 5y ago
        No, what we've done is that some parts of our press have denounced shilling of snake oil that doesn't work. There's no shortage of that shilling still taking place, though. And as for knowledge, step into a hospital, and you'll see plenty of medications being used to treat actual cases of COVID. Doctors don't just put an oxygen mask on your face, and wait for you to die. You'll find a bit more knowledge there than you will in a deraged InfoWars rant, or a Joe Rogan podcast. Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn't have 190 million monthly listeners. [1] [1] If the most popular podcast[2] in America is your definition of 'eradicating' discussion, it's certainly an odd one. [2] Or, if you're looking for variety in your media, you could always tune in to AM radio. Or the biggest television news syndicate in the world.
bognition 5y ago
There are a few important bits here: First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020." and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”" Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  > Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants. Why "BUT"? Shouldn't the second part be, uh, a good thing?
- trutannus 5y ago
  It sounds from this like the diminished efficacy is being compensated for by the reduced lethality of the new virus.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Reduced lethality ? How many times can we catch covid ? Symptoms might be cold like in ~90% case but long term damage ?
- croes 5y ago
  Don't forget this part: "South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection" So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
  - akamaka 5y ago
ufo 5y ago
The title is misleading. It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine. > South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.
- lee 5y ago
  Additionally, the demographics of South Africa are different too. The median age is significantly lower than most Western countries.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  a large percentage of the planets population has some immunity from previous infection or vaccination
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  It would be nice, and seemingly feasible, if they could compare to recent Delta infections (or even current one, seeing as both variants are present right now). Presumably any kind of acquired immunity is more comparable to 3 months ago vs. 21 months ago. It could still be that among people infected with Omicron, there is a larger proportion of vaccinated people, due to vaccines being less efficient, but that's still a better yardstick.
- janmo 5y ago
  Also, most people who would have died of Covid in South Africa already died during the Beta and then the Delta wave.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker! EDIT: Also, on a side note, the actual doctor who found Omicron said it was less dangerous. She even described it as "extremely mild." https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-interview-with-south-african-doctor https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-inter... Needless to say, politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it.
boringg 5y ago
I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  From what I know as not being a professional doctor, I would say that it appears to me that viruses get less dangerous over time, not more dangerous. This appears to be because viruses that are overly dangerous kill off their hosts too quickly, limiting their ability to spread, whereas the milder forms don't kill their hosts as easily and spread more broadly, building immunity against the stronger variants over time. Edit: The result of this, if you look at previous diseases that have plagued humanity (see Black Death), is a high initial death count when the virus breaks out, but the death rate declines as the milder variants spread and people survive them, building immunity to stronger versions, until eventually the virus mostly disappears.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It's not something you can count on; smallpox remained highly lethal across thousands of years. There's probably also a bit of an element of natural selection against humans involved; the people who died early of the Black Death may have been genetically more susceptible to it.
- loup-vaillant 5y ago
  I’ve heard that it depends on the virus. Some become less severe as they become more contagious, but sometimes their severity stays the same. Naively, you’d think selection pressure would decrease severity, because severity is not how viruses spread. However, if (some of) the same mechanisms that ar causing the virus to spread better are also responsible for (some of) its severity, then things may not really get better over time —unless our immune systems themselves adapt, but that generally requires a first infection…
deleted 5y ago
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zzzeek 5y ago
cue the "it's just the flu!" army. on this end, I do not want covid at all, straight up. I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  > I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there. The masks have never been about protecting yourself but have at it. I don't care what you do just stop forcing your attitude on everyone else. At this point you're just trying to make a statement, not protect anyone.
  - cipheredStones 5y ago
    Cloth masks are somewhat effective at protecting those around you, but only slightly effective at protecting you; masks like the N95 do both quite effectively, if you wear them properly.
    - CountDrewku 5y ago
      Almost no one is wearing any mask appropriately. Even the n95 needs to be changed more than daily. I highly doubt any decent percentage of people are doing that. At this point it's just a statement and nothing to do with protecting themselves or anyone else. Alternatively, they're suffering from psychosis.
      - zzzeek 5y ago
        That's for hospital workers wearing them 18 hours a day in highly contaminated environments. I am exposed to other people for an hour a day with social distancing, tops. The N95 is much more protective than a cloth mask and it is entirely for self protection, the last thing in the world I want to do is make a "statement" in the places i go. However the intolerance for my silent practice is fairly frequent.
exabrial 5y ago
IIRC, this was predicted, which is hopeful and good thing. I remember reading an article last summer that generally diseases become less severe over time.
- simonh 5y ago
  Generally, statistically yes, but not always. Most of the people that died in the Spanish Flu epidemic died in the second wave, a year after the first. A couple of years after that and less dangerous variants came to dominate but there was huge devastation before that came about.
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    >but not always Nonetheless, in your example it did. At extreme cost, though that was already understood when you said Spanish Flu.
    - simonh 5y ago
      Yes long term, I'm just making the point that it can swing the other way for significant periods of time along the way.
loourr 5y ago
Yes. Covid will continue to mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. This is the natural progression of endemic viruses, they don't want to kill their hosts and they want to spread.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Viruses have no agency, will or desires.
  - mrkstu 5y ago
    The one imperative they do have, in effect, is to replicate. That imperative translates into the real world into analogues of action that replicate to equivalent observable effects.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    This kind of anthropomorphism is acceptable, it's not like the poster doesn't understand how evolution works... I'm pretty sure "experts" have used the phrase as well. The gist of the comment is correct though.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      A variant could emerge which is more contagious and more deadly.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - jjk166 5y ago
    "Want" in this case is clearly understood to mean the option that is evolutionarily favorable. Per this site's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
fabian2k 5y ago
The data on severity is still difficult to transfer across countries. What seems reasonably certain is that vaccinations and previous infections do protect reasonably well against hospitalization and death. It is still not clear how the unvaccinated and not infected will fare. And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
- peteradio 5y ago
  You gotta be careful with those doubling times. Is that due to the raw number of tests being done increasing substantially? If it is unnormalized raw reported numbers then they can't exactly be used to infer the doubling time without more information. I know this is something everyone must know by now, but you will still see incorrect comparisons in media.
34679 5y ago
Omicron has been found in 38 countries and there are still no deaths caused by it. [1] The media are running with the story that the first death from Omicron just happened in the UK, but read Boris Johnson's quote: "Sadly at least one patient has now been confirmed to have died with Omicron," Johnson told reporters [2] This sounds batshit crazy, because it is, but in the UK, if you die from something unrelated while infected with SARS-COV-2, it's counted as a COVID death. [3] The key word in Boris' announcement is "with". 1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fourth-us-state-to-confirm-omicron-live https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fo... 2: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spreading-phenomenal-rate-2021-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread... 3: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-counting-covid-19-deaths/ https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-co...
- panarky 5y ago
  Do you have a source that says covid did not contribute to the death of the UK patient?
  - 34679 5y ago
    Just the quote that says "with" instead of "from" until the data is released.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      I love how we often assume every single word someone says is carefully chosen to 100% reflect what one wants to communicate.
      - the_doctah 5y ago
        For press releases like this, they damn well should be.
        barbazoo 5y ago
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Omicron is apparently very unstable and as such may not be with us very long before another variant emerges from it: https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20 https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20
stef25 5y ago
Is the "less severe" part just from a roll of the dice? I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years. Be it a variant of Covid, or something new altogether. That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
- 323 5y ago
  > I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years We already know one such thing - bird flu (H5N1 - 50% mortality). Luckily it doesn't pass from one human to another. But scientists already built a version that presumably can (gain-of-function): > (2019) Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. ScienceInsider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research. https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controversial-experiments-make-bird-flu-more-risky-poised-resume https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controvers...
roody15 5y ago
This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
- fbourque 5y ago
  Won't it contribute to more variants in the future if it spreads? But maybe we are past that point with other variants?
  - laluser 5y ago
    Yes, as long as it is out there, it means it can continue to mutate.
    - patentatt 5y ago
      But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
      - magneticnorth 5y ago
        I think we aren't very confident yet that there's much selective pressure toward less severe disease - the reason being that the virus does a lot of its spreading before symptoms get to be their worst, so the severity of "worst" doesn't seem to factor into the evolutionary fitness of the virus. And this is supported by the fact that delta was both more contagious and more severe. We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        > But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable? No, evolution doesn't work that way.
kingkawn 5y ago
It remains to be seen if the reduction in severity is offset by the increase in infectiousness. Just as an example, if a new virus is only 1/2 as deadly but 3x as infectious the mortality rate would climb by 50%.
oldstatsstudent 5y ago
Did anyone notice the comparison of vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity in the findings within the source PR [0]? With a little work, you can compare them. If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection. Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization. From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics? 0: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleases/discovery-health-south-africas-largest-private-health-insurance-administrator-releases-at-scale-real-world-analysis-of-omicron-outbreak-based-dot-dot-dot-3150697 https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cmonfeat 5y ago
  Given the high percentage of the population in SA who has already had an infection, there's probably a significant chunk of people in finding 1 who also already had natural immunity. That's probably going to make it difficult to use these results to compare vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity, right?
NoblePublius 5y ago
Who cares? If you die with Omicron, you are very old and dying above the average life expectancy, or already sick with chronic preventable illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices. We should be banning McDonalds advertising, not deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police. If you are not very old or already sick and get omicron, whether you have antibodies or not, you’re going to experience mild symptoms, if anything at all, and achieve broader and more durable immunity than you would get from vaccine alone.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  You sound like you're fun at parties /s. If we're looking at the US, "already sick with chronic preventable illnesses causes by poor lifestyle choices" is >50% of our population, so I would say a majority of people care (here). Our society and businesses have done a pretty good job making sure most people don't have the time available to make the right choices.
- fuzzybassoon 5y ago
  This comment adds nothing to the discussion and of course ignores important factors like: * people with cancer or autoimmune diseases * concerning early signals like drastically increased hospitalizations in the under-2 population * unchecked spread allowing further mutations that could be worse It also lacks human decency.
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    Good point. Let's fire half of all the black people again like we did 2020. You're so empathetic and really looking out for the little people out there.
- TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
  > deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police Oh god, I fled post-the_donald reddit to avoid trite drivel like this. Please don't.
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
shtopointo 5y ago
This is pretty good news imo. A mild version of Covid is in a way like a vaccine. Maybe this is how COVID fizzles out. * all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
stakkur 5y ago
Almost no vaccines prevent infection (e.g., rotavirus vaccine). But most reduce/prevent symptoms. In fact, it's still not proven that existing COVID vaccines 'prevent infection'--that is, provide sterilizing immunity. Unless I'm missing something, this 'study' seems to do little more than support that understanding.
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
So it's a weak cold at best. Still, these "vaccines" aren't going to sell themselves.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads straight into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You can make your substantive points without that, so please do so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Omicron is an evolution in the spike, which is what the mRNA exclusively focused on (and assumed would not evolve). That’s why the mRNA vaccines aren’t super effective for it.
nikkinana 5y ago
Remember folks covid is a cold virus
jollybean 5y ago
The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it. So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising. Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue. FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1] [1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article
cblconfederate 5y ago
I wonder if there is comparative research on the mutations of SarsCov2 compared to other betacoronaviruses. Is it mutating similarly, or do the vaccines /self-isolation and distancing cause a different mutation pattern
cryptonector 5y ago
So... who cares? Seriously, if it's no worse than a cold, can we please stop talking about vaccination for it?
- hollowcelery 5y ago
  The article doesn't say that it's no worse than a cold. In fact, all signs show that it can be worse than a common cold. This is a non-sequitur.
alex-korr 5y ago
Prediction - nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. I am seeing it in my company already - in the today's tech virtual townhall "omicron is going to hit hard, so why go back to the office in Jan" was the most upvoted comment in the stream.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Nobody wants to pay Bay Area rent to live next to drug addicts and piss smelling sidewalks. Everyone I know in tech that was in SF has moved out of SF.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Obviously some people do, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people still living in SF...
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be screaming to get rid of them. Instead the force all the (mostly vaccinated) "servant class" that brings them deliveries, makes their food, and checks out their groceries to wear some nasty mask all day and when these tech workers are called back into the office "but still wear masks" they all scream about it and continue to work from home. ... because wearing a mask for an entire workday absolutely sucks. Our response to this virus requires a hell of a lot of privilege when you really start thinking hard about it. Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class and transfered massive amounts of wealth in to the pockets of some of the richest people in the world. But hey! We are saving grandma!
  - vkou 5y ago
    > Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves. You know what actually decimates the working class? Catching COVID. Taking unpaid time from work, because they fall sick. Crippling medical bills, from trips to the doctor, or heaven forbid, the hospital. Lingering damage from long COVID. Strangely enough, the 'reopen everything' political movement also tends to oppose things like worker protections, mandated sick days, affordable healthcare, taxes on the rich...
jimmyearlcarter 5y ago
SHUT IT DOWN
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I read an article somewhere that said something along the lines of "...due to fears of the omicron variant corona virus" and all I could think of was that, nobody has fears. Only the media outlets are the ones saying the word "fear" here. I haven't heard a single person where I live or elsewhere ever say they were fearful of the coronavirus in the past three months. This is worse than Alex Jones freaking out about black hawk helicopters. This is a straight up echo chamber of a narrative being spit out. The only people who should be fearful are the vaccinated. To which, like the governor of Colorado said, "it's your own fault at this point."
vmception 5y ago
Out of curiosity, do we really require these studies? Like it is good to have more and more sources, but wouldn't the expected outcome to be the following: - vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload - naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective because the body made immunity to the payload alongside the total viral shape
- SergeAx 5y ago
  Yes, we need to know how severe the illness from this variant is. It was never a question of transmission. When we got news from Norway where 120 vaccinated negative tested people came into the restaurant for a couple of hours and at least 60 of them came out with positive omicron test - it became clear that we are fucked. Also, news from South Africa, where two people were quarantined in a hotel their rooms was across the corridor, and virus got from one to another, despite they never get out, just opened the door to take food and make tests. So it looks like everybody will have this variant in the next year, except maybe people in distant places. The question was how many will get seriously sick and how many of them will die. Looks like numbers will be lower than expected.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Also meaning natural immunity faster, hopefully an underwhelming hospital load. Someone needs to check if masks and cloths over nose and face still have moderate effectiveness in densely populated areas.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Do you really need to check the safety on your gun if you expect that it’s on?
  - vmception 5y ago
    Going to definitely need you to explain that analogy though
oxymoran 5y ago
“ The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.” 29% LOWER THAN OG COVID In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess if it can become the dominant strain, why are we still peddling fear about omnicron instead of hope?
- jedimastert 5y ago
  If we peddle hope in the wrong way, it'll give people an excuse to not get the vaccine or the boosters.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    If you lie, or omit the truth and get caught, they will never listen to anything you say ever again.
    - vkou 5y ago
      I wish the antivaxx/snake oil/it's just the flu folks were held to that standard.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        I don't think you'd believe anything they would have to say, would you? Either way, if you are a public health official you have to be held to a higher standard than a guy with Facebook account.
        bink 5y ago
        They are held to a higher standard. That's why they aren't making assumptions based on such limited data. They're being cautious until enough data is gathered to make an informed decision.
rbartelme 5y ago
"Less severe" as in less hospitalizations and death. The long-term effects of comorbidities are still being hashed out. A fair amount of the literature surrounding pulmonary megakaryocytes, platelets, and covid, is pretty alarming.
- landemva 5y ago
  Not sure if I agree with this, 'The long-term effects of comorbidities are still being hashed out.' I thought there was scientific consensus that being overweight is detrimental to health.
SergeAx 5y ago
Missing link to the original research (not in the article): https://discovery-holdings-ltd.mynewsdesk.com/pressreleases/discovery-health-south-africas-largest-private-health-insurance-administrator-releases-at-scale-real-world-analysis-of-omicron-outbreak-based-dot-dot-dot-3150697 https://discovery-holdings-ltd.mynewsdesk.com/pressreleases/...
tamaharbor 5y ago
What good are “studies” when a majority of government seems to be ruling by the seat of their pants?
wnevets 5y ago
I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
JudasGoat 5y ago
I am going to go against the grain here and ask someone more knowledgeable than myself if the large number of changes in this variant is typical in virus evolution? Because as an outsider, it appears to me that studying the history of past pandemics would present a road map as to what must be modified to attenuate the damage potential in a virus. I suppose my question really is, why are we chancing GOF research, if not to use in this situation?
- Sitio 5y ago
  What do you mean by studying past pandemics? We did not had that many and I'm not sure but I assume COVID is one of the most studied ones. Due to our modern technology and the high capital damage. Certain predictions were expected through pref pandemics like expecting COVID becoming 'normal' like the common cold.
- wonnage 5y ago
  Influenza viruses mutate enough to require new vaccines every year, coronaviruses tend to mutate less frequently but this is offset by the number of hosts with Covid
  - beebmam 5y ago
    There are currently trials in the US for a universal influenza vaccine which will counter most possible mutations of the influenza virus: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-clinical-trial-universal-influenza-vaccine-candidate https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-c...
- beebmam 5y ago
  Thank you for your question. There are virologists and immunologists currently exploring the mutation-space of SARS-CoV-2 for nearly all potential mutations that produce a viable virus capable of infecting human cells. Based on that mutation-space, they're trying to determine if a vaccine regime can exist which can counter all possible mutations of SARS-CoV-2. So far, it looks like it's possible. Here's a presentation about the work being done at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0
Animats 5y ago
Moderna is working on a vaccine targeting the Omicron variant for 2022.[1] The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part. Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like we're stuck with the original vaccines. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-variant-vaccine-could-be-ready-in-early-2022.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-vari... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c463baf3512f https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c...
- liber8 5y ago
  According to reports, the original BioNTech vaccine was developed in a matter of hours: https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-designed-in-hours-one-weekend-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-desi... Moderna's was done in two days.
  - starik36 5y ago
    Right, but the underlying tech was in development for a decade or more. I can deploy an app to Azure, tell it to allocate a server farm, databases, Redis, queues, etc... in 5 minutes too. But that's only because someone took years to do all the necessary work.
    - johnisgood 5y ago
      > but the underlying tech was in development for a decade or more. By tech you mean mRNA vaccines? How did those studies go about it? Why was it not a thing before COVID-19?
      - barbazoo 5y ago
        Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine for an idea of a timeline going back to the 60s.
mchusma 5y ago
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  If we're only looking at deaths, only for vaccinated people - then yes. If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
  - Otek 5y ago
    To be fair, In my country hospitals were also overwhelmed pre-COVID, only by regular flu
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      We pushed H1N1 flu mandates back when that flu started overwhelming our hospitals back in the early 2010s.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  It’s not “banned” it’s just not approved yet. The US is making plans to buy tons of it in advance. Banned has a very specific connotation that is wildly out of place.
  - 5y ago
parasense 5y ago
I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it. I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation. I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Viral evolution can go down that path, provided there are selection pressures that select for weaker viruses. Viral evolution can also not follow that path at all. Evolution doesn't have a chosen path, and it doesn't have an end-goal. Evolution is the name that we give to the effect that chance has on genetics. The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of viral hosts. The stronger viral variants literally die off in the hosts they kill, and can't keep spreading, whereas the viral variants that didn't kill their hosts before spreading their genes can keep replicating. The majority of people with COVID do not die before spreading it to other people. That selection pressure isn't there for COVID, therefore there is nothing really stopping it from mutating into stronger variants. If it starts killing people like Ebola does, then the selection pressure for weaker variants might exist because a lot of hosts will die. Even in that case, it isn't a given that a highly fatal virus would mutate to become weaker. It could very well wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on. All of this selection happens over evolutionary timelines, which span over many human lifetimes. If the virus becomes weaker, it could take many human lifetimes to reach that point. From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]: > “Becoming more transmissible and less lethal are absolutely what’s best for the pathogen,” said Day. “But the problem is that it’s not always possible, and in many instances is never possible, to be more transmissible and also less lethal.” > Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken. > Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts. > Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. > “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.” [1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270
barbs 5y ago
I won't deny that this is good news, but considering Omicron is much more transmissible than other variants (I've seen numbers saying 4x more transmissible, though I don't have a source right now), wouldn't that still mean higher hospitalizations and healthcare overwhelm?
deleted 5y ago
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somewhereoutth 5y ago
a) we don't know, and b) we are about to find out, and find out hard.
desktopninja 5y ago
Not an expect in this subject matter and not even an anti-vaxxer but do wonder: If I were the COVID organism, its beneficial for me not to be lethal to the host I infect. Initially I would but other mutations and time I'd learn not be. My host is useless to me if I kill it. The point: perhaps we're hyper focused on "COVID is out to kill us senseless"
- mjg59 5y ago
  The virus has no idea what's beneficial to it. A virus that infects you for two weeks and which can pass itself on to two other people in that time is going to infect fewer people than a virus that kills you after two weeks but can pass itself on to four other people in that time. Once enough people start dying then the numbers start changing (if everyone around you is already dead, you're not going to infect anyone else), but the virus doesn't know that. So no, COVID isn't out to kill us senseless. But nor is it out to maximise the length of time it can persist in the population. It's RNA. It's not out to do anything. It has no ability to learn. It has no awareness of the fact that it's in a host, let alone any preferences about what happens to that host. Don't anthropomorphise it.
markvdb 5y ago
Has there ever been serious research on the safety of "contagious vaccines"? I'm thinking of strains of problematic infectious diseases engineered to be super mild in terms of symptons, and relatively contagious. Ethical problems and risk of mutations make this a non-starter I guess, but I'm genuinely curious.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Ethical problems and risk of mutations Hopefully there's no direct work on them for exactly those reasons.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    Certain restrictions and de facto vaccine mandates are also arguably ethically challenging. So... we're already there.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      There's a big ethical difference between those restrictions and releasing an engineered contagious pathogen into the air. It's not really about the "airborne vaccine" itself, its about the fact that the engineering that goes into designing something like that can be used to deliberately kill a lot of people.
asimpletune 5y ago
Is it just me or does it make perfect sense that the selection pressure would push the virus to do this? After all, it’s competing against other variants, as well as counter measures by other human beings. I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred. Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns. Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?

What a total disaster for the communists. If tyranny loving diaper faces can't live in a perpetual state of terror, the entire endemic was a failure.

richardatlarge 5y ago

Quote: The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.

umpalumpaaa 5y ago
Maybe it is lower because it is the second infection some had.
- richardatlarge 5y ago
  Wouldn’t that be inconsistent with the other, related data: Quote: “National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection.”
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - croes 5y ago
    Maybe "new infection" doesn't mean first infection.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Or they were vaccinated
  - elsherbini 5y ago
    South Africa has <25% vaccintion rate. "South Africa has a better vaccination rate than most countries on the continent: Just under one-quarter of the population has been fully vaccinated" [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa-omicron-vaccination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa...
  - ageitgey 5y ago
    For what it's worth, the vaccination rate in South Africa is low. It's only around 25% for the original course with little to no boosters done.
- vkou 5y ago
  Edit: double post, reference edited in above.
  - tylerscott 5y ago
    Source?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- vkou 5y ago
  Second infections, on average, have slightly worse outcomes then first infections among the unvaccinated. https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253 https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253 It's a small sample, but it was done on data available in 2020, which was before vaccines were available.
  - dsizzle 5y ago
    That link shows most (69%) have similar outcomes. 68.8% -- 19% had worse symptoms and 12.5% had milder symptoms. Small sample size, but even similar result is somewhat surprising -- I would've thought the 2nd infection would be weaker.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Worth bearing in mind, 19% -> 3 patients, 12.5% -> 2 patients.
      - dsizzle 5y ago
        Indeed, small sample size!
    - dsizzle 5y ago
      Went looking for later studies with larger population sizes and found this review https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2049080121010803 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S204908012... It's not that much larger -- I guess reinfections are hard to find -- but surprisingly this found that ICU admission was higher for reinfections.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
raphaelj 5y ago
Could it be because we just got slightly better at treating Covid before hospitalization?
- simonh 5y ago
  How do we treat Covid before hospitalisation? I just caught it at the weekend and feeling pretty crappy. I'm not aware of any particular treatment I should be taking.
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    This is another problem of the modal Western approach. Few people have any knowledge of mitigating strategies or medications because we've moved so aggressively to eradicate discussion of those things.
    - simonh 5y ago
      We have entire industries and research institutions funded to the tune of billons of dollars doing exactly that, using the very latest technology and scientific techniques. If there were effective treatment strategies that were easily discoverable, It'd have been patented, clinically trialed and be available from a counter near you at an affordable price extremely quickly. If it was cheap or safe enough, whole foods and such places would have shelves full of it. Capitalism is pretty good at that sort of thing, just look at all the vaccines we got in less than a year.
    - vkou 5y ago
      No, what we've done is that some parts of our press have denounced shilling of snake oil that doesn't work. There's no shortage of that shilling still taking place, though. And as for knowledge, step into a hospital, and you'll see plenty of medications being used to treat actual cases of COVID. Doctors don't just put an oxygen mask on your face, and wait for you to die. You'll find a bit more knowledge there than you will in a deraged InfoWars rant, or a Joe Rogan podcast. Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn't have 190 million monthly listeners. [1] [1] If the most popular podcast[2] in America is your definition of 'eradicating' discussion, it's certainly an odd one. [2] Or, if you're looking for variety in your media, you could always tune in to AM radio. Or the biggest television news syndicate in the world.

bognition 5y ago

There are a few important bits here: First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020." and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”" Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.

sjwalter 5y ago
> Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants. Why "BUT"? Shouldn't the second part be, uh, a good thing?
trutannus 5y ago
It sounds from this like the diminished efficacy is being compensated for by the reduced lethality of the new virus.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Reduced lethality ? How many times can we catch covid ? Symptoms might be cold like in ~90% case but long term damage ?
croes 5y ago
Don't forget this part: "South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection" So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
- akamaka 5y ago

ufo 5y ago

The title is misleading. It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine. > South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.

lee 5y ago
Additionally, the demographics of South Africa are different too. The median age is significantly lower than most Western countries.
foolfoolz 5y ago
a large percentage of the planets population has some immunity from previous infection or vaccination
rich_sasha 5y ago
It would be nice, and seemingly feasible, if they could compare to recent Delta infections (or even current one, seeing as both variants are present right now). Presumably any kind of acquired immunity is more comparable to 3 months ago vs. 21 months ago. It could still be that among people infected with Omicron, there is a larger proportion of vaccinated people, due to vaccines being less efficient, but that's still a better yardstick.
janmo 5y ago
Also, most people who would have died of Covid in South Africa already died during the Beta and then the Delta wave.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker! EDIT: Also, on a side note, the actual doctor who found Omicron said it was less dangerous. She even described it as "extremely mild." https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-interview-with-south-african-doctor https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-inter... Needless to say, politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it.

boringg 5y ago

I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?

gjsman-1000 5y ago
From what I know as not being a professional doctor, I would say that it appears to me that viruses get less dangerous over time, not more dangerous. This appears to be because viruses that are overly dangerous kill off their hosts too quickly, limiting their ability to spread, whereas the milder forms don't kill their hosts as easily and spread more broadly, building immunity against the stronger variants over time. Edit: The result of this, if you look at previous diseases that have plagued humanity (see Black Death), is a high initial death count when the virus breaks out, but the death rate declines as the milder variants spread and people survive them, building immunity to stronger versions, until eventually the virus mostly disappears.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's not something you can count on; smallpox remained highly lethal across thousands of years. There's probably also a bit of an element of natural selection against humans involved; the people who died early of the Black Death may have been genetically more susceptible to it.
loup-vaillant 5y ago
I’ve heard that it depends on the virus. Some become less severe as they become more contagious, but sometimes their severity stays the same. Naively, you’d think selection pressure would decrease severity, because severity is not how viruses spread. However, if (some of) the same mechanisms that ar causing the virus to spread better are also responsible for (some of) its severity, then things may not really get better over time —unless our immune systems themselves adapt, but that generally requires a first infection…

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zzzeek 5y ago

cue the "it's just the flu!" army. on this end, I do not want covid at all, straight up. I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.

CountDrewku 5y ago
> I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there. The masks have never been about protecting yourself but have at it. I don't care what you do just stop forcing your attitude on everyone else. At this point you're just trying to make a statement, not protect anyone.
- cipheredStones 5y ago
  Cloth masks are somewhat effective at protecting those around you, but only slightly effective at protecting you; masks like the N95 do both quite effectively, if you wear them properly.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    Almost no one is wearing any mask appropriately. Even the n95 needs to be changed more than daily. I highly doubt any decent percentage of people are doing that. At this point it's just a statement and nothing to do with protecting themselves or anyone else. Alternatively, they're suffering from psychosis.
    - zzzeek 5y ago
      That's for hospital workers wearing them 18 hours a day in highly contaminated environments. I am exposed to other people for an hour a day with social distancing, tops. The N95 is much more protective than a cloth mask and it is entirely for self protection, the last thing in the world I want to do is make a "statement" in the places i go. However the intolerance for my silent practice is fairly frequent.

exabrial 5y ago

IIRC, this was predicted, which is hopeful and good thing. I remember reading an article last summer that generally diseases become less severe over time.

simonh 5y ago
Generally, statistically yes, but not always. Most of the people that died in the Spanish Flu epidemic died in the second wave, a year after the first. A couple of years after that and less dangerous variants came to dominate but there was huge devastation before that came about.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  >but not always Nonetheless, in your example it did. At extreme cost, though that was already understood when you said Spanish Flu.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Yes long term, I'm just making the point that it can swing the other way for significant periods of time along the way.

loourr 5y ago

Yes. Covid will continue to mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. This is the natural progression of endemic viruses, they don't want to kill their hosts and they want to spread.

the-dude 5y ago
Viruses have no agency, will or desires.
- mrkstu 5y ago
  The one imperative they do have, in effect, is to replicate. That imperative translates into the real world into analogues of action that replicate to equivalent observable effects.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  This kind of anthropomorphism is acceptable, it's not like the poster doesn't understand how evolution works... I'm pretty sure "experts" have used the phrase as well. The gist of the comment is correct though.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    A variant could emerge which is more contagious and more deadly.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jjk166 5y ago
  "Want" in this case is clearly understood to mean the option that is evolutionarily favorable. Per this site's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
UncleOxidant 5y ago

fabian2k 5y ago

The data on severity is still difficult to transfer across countries. What seems reasonably certain is that vaccinations and previous infections do protect reasonably well against hospitalization and death. It is still not clear how the unvaccinated and not infected will fare. And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.

peteradio 5y ago
You gotta be careful with those doubling times. Is that due to the raw number of tests being done increasing substantially? If it is unnormalized raw reported numbers then they can't exactly be used to infer the doubling time without more information. I know this is something everyone must know by now, but you will still see incorrect comparisons in media.

34679 5y ago

Omicron has been found in 38 countries and there are still no deaths caused by it. [1] The media are running with the story that the first death from Omicron just happened in the UK, but read Boris Johnson's quote: "Sadly at least one patient has now been confirmed to have died with Omicron," Johnson told reporters [2] This sounds batshit crazy, because it is, but in the UK, if you die from something unrelated while infected with SARS-COV-2, it's counted as a COVID death. [3] The key word in Boris' announcement is "with". 1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fourth-us-state-to-confirm-omicron-live https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fo... 2: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spreading-phenomenal-rate-2021-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread... 3: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-counting-covid-19-deaths/ https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-co...

panarky 5y ago
Do you have a source that says covid did not contribute to the death of the UK patient?
- 34679 5y ago
  Just the quote that says "with" instead of "from" until the data is released.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    I love how we often assume every single word someone says is carefully chosen to 100% reflect what one wants to communicate.
    - the_doctah 5y ago
      For press releases like this, they damn well should be.
      - barbazoo 5y ago

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Omicron is apparently very unstable and as such may not be with us very long before another variant emerges from it: https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20 https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20

stef25 5y ago

Is the "less severe" part just from a roll of the dice? I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years. Be it a variant of Covid, or something new altogether. That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.

323 5y ago
> I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years We already know one such thing - bird flu (H5N1 - 50% mortality). Luckily it doesn't pass from one human to another. But scientists already built a version that presumably can (gain-of-function): > (2019) Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. ScienceInsider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research. https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controversial-experiments-make-bird-flu-more-risky-poised-resume https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controvers...

roody15 5y ago

This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.

fbourque 5y ago
Won't it contribute to more variants in the future if it spreads? But maybe we are past that point with other variants?
- laluser 5y ago
  Yes, as long as it is out there, it means it can continue to mutate.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
    - magneticnorth 5y ago
      I think we aren't very confident yet that there's much selective pressure toward less severe disease - the reason being that the virus does a lot of its spreading before symptoms get to be their worst, so the severity of "worst" doesn't seem to factor into the evolutionary fitness of the virus. And this is supported by the fact that delta was both more contagious and more severe. We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      > But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable? No, evolution doesn't work that way.

kingkawn 5y ago

It remains to be seen if the reduction in severity is offset by the increase in infectiousness. Just as an example, if a new virus is only 1/2 as deadly but 3x as infectious the mortality rate would climb by 50%.

oldstatsstudent 5y ago

Did anyone notice the comparison of vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity in the findings within the source PR [0]? With a little work, you can compare them. If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection. Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization. From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics? 0: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleases/discovery-health-south-africas-largest-private-health-insurance-administrator-releases-at-scale-real-world-analysis-of-omicron-outbreak-based-dot-dot-dot-3150697 https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas...

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cmonfeat 5y ago
Given the high percentage of the population in SA who has already had an infection, there's probably a significant chunk of people in finding 1 who also already had natural immunity. That's probably going to make it difficult to use these results to compare vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity, right?

NoblePublius 5y ago

Who cares? If you die with Omicron, you are very old and dying above the average life expectancy, or already sick with chronic preventable illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices. We should be banning McDonalds advertising, not deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police. If you are not very old or already sick and get omicron, whether you have antibodies or not, you’re going to experience mild symptoms, if anything at all, and achieve broader and more durable immunity than you would get from vaccine alone.

Teknoman117 5y ago
You sound like you're fun at parties /s. If we're looking at the US, "already sick with chronic preventable illnesses causes by poor lifestyle choices" is >50% of our population, so I would say a majority of people care (here). Our society and businesses have done a pretty good job making sure most people don't have the time available to make the right choices.
fuzzybassoon 5y ago
This comment adds nothing to the discussion and of course ignores important factors like: * people with cancer or autoimmune diseases * concerning early signals like drastically increased hospitalizations in the under-2 population * unchecked spread allowing further mutations that could be worse It also lacks human decency.
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  Good point. Let's fire half of all the black people again like we did 2020. You're so empathetic and really looking out for the little people out there.
TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
> deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police Oh god, I fled post-the_donald reddit to avoid trite drivel like this. Please don't.
- NoblePublius 5y ago

shtopointo 5y ago

This is pretty good news imo. A mild version of Covid is in a way like a vaccine. Maybe this is how COVID fizzles out. * all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.

stakkur 5y ago

Almost no vaccines prevent infection (e.g., rotavirus vaccine). But most reduce/prevent symptoms. In fact, it's still not proven that existing COVID vaccines 'prevent infection'--that is, provide sterilizing immunity. Unless I'm missing something, this 'study' seems to do little more than support that understanding.

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

So it's a weak cold at best. Still, these "vaccines" aren't going to sell themselves.

dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads straight into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You can make your substantive points without that, so please do so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Omicron is an evolution in the spike, which is what the mRNA exclusively focused on (and assumed would not evolve). That’s why the mRNA vaccines aren’t super effective for it.

nikkinana 5y ago

Remember folks covid is a cold virus

jollybean 5y ago

The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it. So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising. Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue. FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1] [1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article

cblconfederate 5y ago

I wonder if there is comparative research on the mutations of SarsCov2 compared to other betacoronaviruses. Is it mutating similarly, or do the vaccines /self-isolation and distancing cause a different mutation pattern

cryptonector 5y ago

So... who cares? Seriously, if it's no worse than a cold, can we please stop talking about vaccination for it?

hollowcelery 5y ago
The article doesn't say that it's no worse than a cold. In fact, all signs show that it can be worse than a common cold. This is a non-sequitur.

alex-korr 5y ago

Prediction - nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. I am seeing it in my company already - in the today's tech virtual townhall "omicron is going to hit hard, so why go back to the office in Jan" was the most upvoted comment in the stream.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
Nobody wants to pay Bay Area rent to live next to drug addicts and piss smelling sidewalks. Everyone I know in tech that was in SF has moved out of SF.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Obviously some people do, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people still living in SF...
spookthesunset 5y ago
> nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be screaming to get rid of them. Instead the force all the (mostly vaccinated) "servant class" that brings them deliveries, makes their food, and checks out their groceries to wear some nasty mask all day and when these tech workers are called back into the office "but still wear masks" they all scream about it and continue to work from home. ... because wearing a mask for an entire workday absolutely sucks. Our response to this virus requires a hell of a lot of privilege when you really start thinking hard about it. Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class and transfered massive amounts of wealth in to the pockets of some of the richest people in the world. But hey! We are saving grandma!
- vkou 5y ago
  > Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves. You know what actually decimates the working class? Catching COVID. Taking unpaid time from work, because they fall sick. Crippling medical bills, from trips to the doctor, or heaven forbid, the hospital. Lingering damage from long COVID. Strangely enough, the 'reopen everything' political movement also tends to oppose things like worker protections, mandated sick days, affordable healthcare, taxes on the rich...

jimmyearlcarter 5y ago

SHUT IT DOWN

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

I read an article somewhere that said something along the lines of "...due to fears of the omicron variant corona virus" and all I could think of was that, nobody has fears. Only the media outlets are the ones saying the word "fear" here. I haven't heard a single person where I live or elsewhere ever say they were fearful of the coronavirus in the past three months. This is worse than Alex Jones freaking out about black hawk helicopters. This is a straight up echo chamber of a narrative being spit out. The only people who should be fearful are the vaccinated. To which, like the governor of Colorado said, "it's your own fault at this point."

vmception 5y ago

Out of curiosity, do we really require these studies? Like it is good to have more and more sources, but wouldn't the expected outcome to be the following: - vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload - naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective because the body made immunity to the payload alongside the total viral shape

SergeAx 5y ago
Yes, we need to know how severe the illness from this variant is. It was never a question of transmission. When we got news from Norway where 120 vaccinated negative tested people came into the restaurant for a couple of hours and at least 60 of them came out with positive omicron test - it became clear that we are fucked. Also, news from South Africa, where two people were quarantined in a hotel their rooms was across the corridor, and virus got from one to another, despite they never get out, just opened the door to take food and make tests. So it looks like everybody will have this variant in the next year, except maybe people in distant places. The question was how many will get seriously sick and how many of them will die. Looks like numbers will be lower than expected.
- vmception 5y ago
  Also meaning natural immunity faster, hopefully an underwhelming hospital load. Someone needs to check if masks and cloths over nose and face still have moderate effectiveness in densely populated areas.
oneoff786 5y ago
Do you really need to check the safety on your gun if you expect that it’s on?
- vmception 5y ago
  Going to definitely need you to explain that analogy though

oxymoran 5y ago

“ The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.” 29% LOWER THAN OG COVID In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess if it can become the dominant strain, why are we still peddling fear about omnicron instead of hope?

jedimastert 5y ago
If we peddle hope in the wrong way, it'll give people an excuse to not get the vaccine or the boosters.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  If you lie, or omit the truth and get caught, they will never listen to anything you say ever again.
  - vkou 5y ago
    I wish the antivaxx/snake oil/it's just the flu folks were held to that standard.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      I don't think you'd believe anything they would have to say, would you? Either way, if you are a public health official you have to be held to a higher standard than a guy with Facebook account.
      - bink 5y ago
        They are held to a higher standard. That's why they aren't making assumptions based on such limited data. They're being cautious until enough data is gathered to make an informed decision.

rbartelme 5y ago

"Less severe" as in less hospitalizations and death. The long-term effects of comorbidities are still being hashed out. A fair amount of the literature surrounding pulmonary megakaryocytes, platelets, and covid, is pretty alarming.

landemva 5y ago
Not sure if I agree with this, 'The long-term effects of comorbidities are still being hashed out.' I thought there was scientific consensus that being overweight is detrimental to health.

SergeAx 5y ago

Missing link to the original research (not in the article): https://discovery-holdings-ltd.mynewsdesk.com/pressreleases/discovery-health-south-africas-largest-private-health-insurance-administrator-releases-at-scale-real-world-analysis-of-omicron-outbreak-based-dot-dot-dot-3150697 https://discovery-holdings-ltd.mynewsdesk.com/pressreleases/...

tamaharbor 5y ago

What good are “studies” when a majority of government seems to be ruling by the seat of their pants?

wnevets 5y ago

I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.

JudasGoat 5y ago

I am going to go against the grain here and ask someone more knowledgeable than myself if the large number of changes in this variant is typical in virus evolution? Because as an outsider, it appears to me that studying the history of past pandemics would present a road map as to what must be modified to attenuate the damage potential in a virus. I suppose my question really is, why are we chancing GOF research, if not to use in this situation?

Sitio 5y ago
What do you mean by studying past pandemics? We did not had that many and I'm not sure but I assume COVID is one of the most studied ones. Due to our modern technology and the high capital damage. Certain predictions were expected through pref pandemics like expecting COVID becoming 'normal' like the common cold.
wonnage 5y ago
Influenza viruses mutate enough to require new vaccines every year, coronaviruses tend to mutate less frequently but this is offset by the number of hosts with Covid
- beebmam 5y ago
  There are currently trials in the US for a universal influenza vaccine which will counter most possible mutations of the influenza virus: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-clinical-trial-universal-influenza-vaccine-candidate https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-launches-c...
beebmam 5y ago
Thank you for your question. There are virologists and immunologists currently exploring the mutation-space of SARS-CoV-2 for nearly all potential mutations that produce a viable virus capable of infecting human cells. Based on that mutation-space, they're trying to determine if a vaccine regime can exist which can counter all possible mutations of SARS-CoV-2. So far, it looks like it's possible. Here's a presentation about the work being done at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0

Animats 5y ago

Moderna is working on a vaccine targeting the Omicron variant for 2022.[1] The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part. Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like we're stuck with the original vaccines. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-variant-vaccine-could-be-ready-in-early-2022.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-vari... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c463baf3512f https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c...

liber8 5y ago
According to reports, the original BioNTech vaccine was developed in a matter of hours: https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-designed-in-hours-one-weekend-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-desi... Moderna's was done in two days.
- starik36 5y ago
  Right, but the underlying tech was in development for a decade or more. I can deploy an app to Azure, tell it to allocate a server farm, databases, Redis, queues, etc... in 5 minutes too. But that's only because someone took years to do all the necessary work.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    > but the underlying tech was in development for a decade or more. By tech you mean mRNA vaccines? How did those studies go about it? Why was it not a thing before COVID-19?
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine for an idea of a timeline going back to the 60s.

mchusma 5y ago

Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
If we're only looking at deaths, only for vaccinated people - then yes. If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
- Otek 5y ago
  To be fair, In my country hospitals were also overwhelmed pre-COVID, only by regular flu
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    We pushed H1N1 flu mandates back when that flu started overwhelming our hospitals back in the early 2010s.
oneoff786 5y ago
It’s not “banned” it’s just not approved yet. The US is making plans to buy tons of it in advance. Banned has a very specific connotation that is wildly out of place.
- 5y ago

parasense 5y ago

I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it. I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation. I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...

heavyset_go 5y ago
Viral evolution can go down that path, provided there are selection pressures that select for weaker viruses. Viral evolution can also not follow that path at all. Evolution doesn't have a chosen path, and it doesn't have an end-goal. Evolution is the name that we give to the effect that chance has on genetics. The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of viral hosts. The stronger viral variants literally die off in the hosts they kill, and can't keep spreading, whereas the viral variants that didn't kill their hosts before spreading their genes can keep replicating. The majority of people with COVID do not die before spreading it to other people. That selection pressure isn't there for COVID, therefore there is nothing really stopping it from mutating into stronger variants. If it starts killing people like Ebola does, then the selection pressure for weaker variants might exist because a lot of hosts will die. Even in that case, it isn't a given that a highly fatal virus would mutate to become weaker. It could very well wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on. All of this selection happens over evolutionary timelines, which span over many human lifetimes. If the virus becomes weaker, it could take many human lifetimes to reach that point. From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]: > “Becoming more transmissible and less lethal are absolutely what’s best for the pathogen,” said Day. “But the problem is that it’s not always possible, and in many instances is never possible, to be more transmissible and also less lethal.” > Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken. > Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts. > Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. > “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.” [1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270 https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270

barbs 5y ago

I won't deny that this is good news, but considering Omicron is much more transmissible than other variants (I've seen numbers saying 4x more transmissible, though I don't have a source right now), wouldn't that still mean higher hospitalizations and healthcare overwhelm?

deleted 5y ago

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somewhereoutth 5y ago

a) we don't know, and b) we are about to find out, and find out hard.

desktopninja 5y ago

Not an expect in this subject matter and not even an anti-vaxxer but do wonder: If I were the COVID organism, its beneficial for me not to be lethal to the host I infect. Initially I would but other mutations and time I'd learn not be. My host is useless to me if I kill it. The point: perhaps we're hyper focused on "COVID is out to kill us senseless"

mjg59 5y ago
The virus has no idea what's beneficial to it. A virus that infects you for two weeks and which can pass itself on to two other people in that time is going to infect fewer people than a virus that kills you after two weeks but can pass itself on to four other people in that time. Once enough people start dying then the numbers start changing (if everyone around you is already dead, you're not going to infect anyone else), but the virus doesn't know that. So no, COVID isn't out to kill us senseless. But nor is it out to maximise the length of time it can persist in the population. It's RNA. It's not out to do anything. It has no ability to learn. It has no awareness of the fact that it's in a host, let alone any preferences about what happens to that host. Don't anthropomorphise it.

markvdb 5y ago

Has there ever been serious research on the safety of "contagious vaccines"? I'm thinking of strains of problematic infectious diseases engineered to be super mild in terms of symptons, and relatively contagious. Ethical problems and risk of mutations make this a non-starter I guess, but I'm genuinely curious.

guerrilla 5y ago
> Ethical problems and risk of mutations Hopefully there's no direct work on them for exactly those reasons.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Certain restrictions and de facto vaccine mandates are also arguably ethically challenging. So... we're already there.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    There's a big ethical difference between those restrictions and releasing an engineered contagious pathogen into the air. It's not really about the "airborne vaccine" itself, its about the fact that the engineering that goes into designing something like that can be used to deliberately kill a lot of people.

asimpletune 5y ago

Is it just me or does it make perfect sense that the selection pressure would push the virus to do this? After all, it’s competing against other variants, as well as counter measures by other human beings. I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred. Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns. Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?