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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 m

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.
    - jyounker 5y ago
      Delta is more infective than Alpha. The mortality rate is comparable if not worse, but it's hard to say as we've had extensive vaccination, which has made it hard to assess. We're lucky for the moment with Omicron, but there is no guarantee. The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid. The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population. The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent. Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them. The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  Isn't the concern with "more variants" that you'll get some which are resistant to the vaccine, which apparently this one already is?
qez 5y ago
This isn't good news. The title says it's more resistant to the vaccine. That is the worst possible thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
calebm 5y ago
I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).
- chinathrow 5y ago
  How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    Random mutations cause random changes to "strategy", and viruses with "strategies" that cause them to spread faster become more common
  - lukeasrodgers 5y ago
    It probably makes no sense to talk of a virus having a strategy. I don’t agree with all of his stuff but the point of Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” is basically that attributing mental states to things is just a pragmatic matter. If it helps us understand virus behavior better to treat them as if they have strategies (which implies mentation), then we should do it. I don’t see how it would help at all here, though.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    It's similar to Dawkins' "selfish gene" analogy.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    A strategy doesn't have to be planned to be executed. A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans. Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
  - 5y ago
furyofantares 5y ago
A vaccine resistant strains is extremely bad news; if it's less severe that would be good, but that remains to be seen while it's obvious now that vaccines are less good against it. We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Yeah, a highly infectious vaccine resistant strain spreading while the world opens up and people rely on the waning strength of their first two shots is pretty much a recipe for year three of this crap.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    At this point I'm expecting this crap to be a thing until we have a winter of excess deaths at or below Pre-Covid levels. Once that is observed I think people will finally move on. It sounds like this is still going to result in deaths, so I am now expecting year three of this crap. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      At some point, it seems like you have to weigh the lifetime risk of dying from COVID against the loss of life enjoyment and decide “We shouldn’t subject ourselves to another 1.25% of our lifetime of this (whatever “this” is) to lower the fatality rate from Y to X.” (If you’re lowering from 5% to 1%, that trade makes sense for even severe social restrictions. If you’re lowering it from 0.5% to 0.4%, that trade makes no sense for anything beyond the very mildest of restrictions.)
      - AlexandrB 5y ago
        I think it's better to consider some kind of "casualty rate" that includes long COVID, rather than just the "fatality rate". At the moment it's possible some people may never fully recover full function after contracting COVID even though they survive.
andrewflnr 5y ago
If I evades vaccines for more dangerous variants, I'm not convinced catching it will make me immune to those variants either. It might actually be different enough to be independent.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  Have you seen any evidence that this may be likely?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    That omicron is able to so easily infect people who have had and recovered from delta points to it being almost a different disease from the perspective of the immune system.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    We know Omicron can cause infections in people who have already been vaccinated or recovered from Delta; why would the reverse not be true?
bla3 5y ago
I think it's not yet a given that omicron competes with delta. Since they're fairly different it's possible both strains can coexist.
- ok123456 5y ago
  Data shows otherwise. In ZA over 85% of cases are omicron from not existing last month.
  - jpambrun 5y ago
    There is literally ~90% more cases per day compared to 2 weeks ago in South Africa..
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ok123456 5y ago
      Vast majority of those are mild illness or where it was a secondary finding. There's been a sharp decline in the number of hospitalizations requiring additional oxygen.
  - bla3 5y ago
    That might still be true if they coexist. But I'm no expert. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-defined https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-def... says they compete, so I'm willing to believe that. But the thread https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 linked from there says it's not certain, and it sounds fairly convincing too.
  - chki 5y ago
    This is unclear at the moment, see also https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420216232374281 https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420216232374281
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild. From today: > lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-africa-low-deaths-and-hospitalizations/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-afr...
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist: > Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe. It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    It’s believed that 70%+ of South Africa have already had covid, and there is substantial protection from severe cases on reinfection.
    - 5y ago
chimprich 5y ago
> 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. There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections. The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Evidence so far: - Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote. - Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms. - Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines. There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild. The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because: 1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease. 2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all. 3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view. I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
  - romwell 5y ago
    > One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed You mean succeeded? As in, prevented many people from dying, and forced the virus to mutate into Omicron, which is far less dangerous.
pwthornton 5y ago
Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare. If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
- hpoe 5y ago
  If the choice is between that and permanent "emergency powers" for all levels of government to continue to panic and scare monger and implement things like vaccine passports, required immunizations as a condition of employment, the destruction of SMB and the demonization and hostility towards anyone that doesn't trust The Science (while shutting all discussion down about The Science because the plebs aren't smart enough to understand The Science) Then yes yes I will take that.
- jimmyearlcarter 5y ago
  You know Covid-19, like the flu, is treatable right? https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/. Also in what universe does the flu kill hundreds of thousands of people?
  - dang 5y ago
    We've banned this account because (a) single purpose accounts aren't allowed here; (b) using HN primarily for ideological battle is not allowed here; (c) trollish usernames are not allowed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
renaudg 5y ago
> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all. Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening. In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted) Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence. That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.
- jgalt212 5y ago
  > Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening. With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection. The story has always been that it reduces symptoms and hospitalization, so there are plenty of opportunities for the disease to get “tickets” in the evolution lottery. Between that, the animal reservoirs (COVID can spread to different species), and the millions of people in undeveloped countries who will never get a vax, COVID was guaranteed to mutate no matter what the public policy. Letting it rip is less a strategy and more an acknowledgement of reality.
  - 5y ago
BoxOfRain 5y ago
>Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear training running full steam. Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis. If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language. The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.
- chimprich 5y ago
  The evidence of the past year or two suggests otherwise. For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!" What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!" There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!" Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
snarf21 5y ago
This isn't some final strain so let's all hurry up and get it. The more people that get any variant increases the likelihood of new variants and we don't get to pick what they do. We need to stop thinking about this as a pandemic that will end and start thinking about it as an endemic disease that is never going away. Soon, you'll be getting your annual covid shot along with your flu shot. It is going to continue to kill immuno-compromised people for a very long time. Our lungs are definitely our weak spot (just look at the elderly mortality rates for pneumonia, 20-30%).
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  It is most likely pretty close to the final strain, viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections) and this one is pretty close to the global maximum.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Why do people parrot this nonsense?
    - engmgrmgr 5y ago
      people are easily influenced by others who they admire, even if they have no idea what they’re talking about. athletes, politicians, investors, artists, etc.
  - engmgrmgr 5y ago
    Evolution isn’t programmed, it’s a function of survival. If there’s a highly infectious virus with a huge lead time to develop deadly symptoms, that’s more than enough to spread “optimally”
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create. People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.
DantesKite 5y ago
I think the reality is a lot more complicated than that. There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains. There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.
eloff 5y ago
Agreed. I found out about this early perhaps due to my South African family who sent me this doctors analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vI4XczqZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vI4XczqZ8 It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous. If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better. I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest. But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time. The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better. You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier. The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
  - chki 5y ago
    Making COVID extinct is unfortunately not a reasonable scenario. There will be animal reservoirs, high vaccination rates are difficult to achieve for most countries, long-term lockdowns will be hard to enforce if you're not China.
DarknessFalls 5y ago
It's so good in fact, it makes me wonder if this was the Wuhan Virology lab's penance act.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  There's no particular reason to believe this. It's just as likely as "space aliens did it" at this point, until there's more evidence in any given direction.
makeworld 5y ago
> leads to natural immunity Evidence so far suggests Omicron has high rates of reinfection.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> 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. No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time. Long term damage is not getting enough attention. In decades maybe we get a mild covid. > Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.
- 988747 5y ago
  > No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    > we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. Clearly not how it works and not what's happening. We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading. Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ? > That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly. We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu. > Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild. Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants. It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu. Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take. Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking. edit: > we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers. Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ? We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines. And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.
earthbee 5y ago
If a past infection with Delta doesn't protect against Omicron should we expect an infection by Omicron to protect against Delta or any future strains evolved from it?
wmock 5y ago
completely agree with you - at this point, if we can coexist with covid, it'll hopefully become more and more like the common flu
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Yes, the best case scenario might be an extremely mild disease that gives everyone natural immunity to more virulent strains. But half as deadly with twice transmission rate is kind of a wash, in the short term right? But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window. I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Perhaps. But keep in mind, the world isn't suffering equally. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-pandemics-united-nations-fcf28a83c9352a67e50aa2172eb01a2f?fbclid=IwAR1ylLDRtv4Ml4GZRVHPbvR0Fp4YfaOhCSjTB_th8aV58ywyTWTxFd5IxJY https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...
nerfhammer 5y ago
Doesn't this depend on how much cross-immunity it provides?

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.
  - jyounker 5y ago
    Delta is more infective than Alpha. The mortality rate is comparable if not worse, but it's hard to say as we've had extensive vaccination, which has made it hard to assess. We're lucky for the moment with Omicron, but there is no guarantee. The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid. The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population. The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent. Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them. The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
Isn't the concern with "more variants" that you'll get some which are resistant to the vaccine, which apparently this one already is?

qez 5y ago

This isn't good news. The title says it's more resistant to the vaccine. That is the worst possible thing.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

calebm 5y ago

I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).

chinathrow 5y ago
How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.
- anchpop 5y ago
  Random mutations cause random changes to "strategy", and viruses with "strategies" that cause them to spread faster become more common
- lukeasrodgers 5y ago
  It probably makes no sense to talk of a virus having a strategy. I don’t agree with all of his stuff but the point of Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” is basically that attributing mental states to things is just a pragmatic matter. If it helps us understand virus behavior better to treat them as if they have strategies (which implies mentation), then we should do it. I don’t see how it would help at all here, though.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  It's similar to Dawkins' "selfish gene" analogy.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  A strategy doesn't have to be planned to be executed. A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans. Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
- 5y ago

furyofantares 5y ago

A vaccine resistant strains is extremely bad news; if it's less severe that would be good, but that remains to be seen while it's obvious now that vaccines are less good against it. We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.

Spivak 5y ago
Yeah, a highly infectious vaccine resistant strain spreading while the world opens up and people rely on the waning strength of their first two shots is pretty much a recipe for year three of this crap.
- fullshark 5y ago
  At this point I'm expecting this crap to be a thing until we have a winter of excess deaths at or below Pre-Covid levels. Once that is observed I think people will finally move on. It sounds like this is still going to result in deaths, so I am now expecting year three of this crap. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    At some point, it seems like you have to weigh the lifetime risk of dying from COVID against the loss of life enjoyment and decide “We shouldn’t subject ourselves to another 1.25% of our lifetime of this (whatever “this” is) to lower the fatality rate from Y to X.” (If you’re lowering from 5% to 1%, that trade makes sense for even severe social restrictions. If you’re lowering it from 0.5% to 0.4%, that trade makes no sense for anything beyond the very mildest of restrictions.)
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      I think it's better to consider some kind of "casualty rate" that includes long COVID, rather than just the "fatality rate". At the moment it's possible some people may never fully recover full function after contracting COVID even though they survive.

andrewflnr 5y ago

If I evades vaccines for more dangerous variants, I'm not convinced catching it will make me immune to those variants either. It might actually be different enough to be independent.

rednerrus 5y ago
Have you seen any evidence that this may be likely?
- deleted 5y ago
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- sandworm101 5y ago
  That omicron is able to so easily infect people who have had and recovered from delta points to it being almost a different disease from the perspective of the immune system.
- chimprich 5y ago
  We know Omicron can cause infections in people who have already been vaccinated or recovered from Delta; why would the reverse not be true?

bla3 5y ago

I think it's not yet a given that omicron competes with delta. Since they're fairly different it's possible both strains can coexist.

ok123456 5y ago
Data shows otherwise. In ZA over 85% of cases are omicron from not existing last month.
- jpambrun 5y ago
  There is literally ~90% more cases per day compared to 2 weeks ago in South Africa..
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - ok123456 5y ago
    Vast majority of those are mild illness or where it was a secondary finding. There's been a sharp decline in the number of hospitalizations requiring additional oxygen.
- bla3 5y ago
  That might still be true if they coexist. But I'm no expert. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-defined https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-def... says they compete, so I'm willing to believe that. But the thread https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 linked from there says it's not certain, and it sounds fairly convincing too.
- chki 5y ago
  This is unclear at the moment, see also https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420216232374281 https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420216232374281

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago

The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.

GeekyBear 5y ago
>The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild. From today: > lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-africa-low-deaths-and-hospitalizations/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-afr...
- peteradio 5y ago
  Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist: > Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe. It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  It’s believed that 70%+ of South Africa have already had covid, and there is substantial protection from severe cases on reinfection.
  - 5y ago

chimprich 5y ago

> 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. There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections. The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.

native_samples 5y ago
Evidence so far: - Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote. - Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms. - Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines. There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild. The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because: 1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease. 2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all. 3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view. I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
- romwell 5y ago
  > One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed You mean succeeded? As in, prevented many people from dying, and forced the virus to mutate into Omicron, which is far less dangerous.

pwthornton 5y ago

Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare. If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?

hpoe 5y ago
If the choice is between that and permanent "emergency powers" for all levels of government to continue to panic and scare monger and implement things like vaccine passports, required immunizations as a condition of employment, the destruction of SMB and the demonization and hostility towards anyone that doesn't trust The Science (while shutting all discussion down about The Science because the plebs aren't smart enough to understand The Science) Then yes yes I will take that.
jimmyearlcarter 5y ago
You know Covid-19, like the flu, is treatable right? https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/. Also in what universe does the flu kill hundreds of thousands of people?
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account because (a) single purpose accounts aren't allowed here; (b) using HN primarily for ideological battle is not allowed here; (c) trollish usernames are not allowed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

renaudg 5y ago

> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all. Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening. In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted) Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence. That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.

jgalt212 5y ago
> Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening. With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
oceanplexian 5y ago
The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection. The story has always been that it reduces symptoms and hospitalization, so there are plenty of opportunities for the disease to get “tickets” in the evolution lottery. Between that, the animal reservoirs (COVID can spread to different species), and the millions of people in undeveloped countries who will never get a vax, COVID was guaranteed to mutate no matter what the public policy. Letting it rip is less a strategy and more an acknowledgement of reality.
- 5y ago

BoxOfRain 5y ago

>Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear training running full steam. Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis. If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language. The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.

chimprich 5y ago
The evidence of the past year or two suggests otherwise. For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!" What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!" There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!" Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"

snarf21 5y ago

This isn't some final strain so let's all hurry up and get it. The more people that get any variant increases the likelihood of new variants and we don't get to pick what they do. We need to stop thinking about this as a pandemic that will end and start thinking about it as an endemic disease that is never going away. Soon, you'll be getting your annual covid shot along with your flu shot. It is going to continue to kill immuno-compromised people for a very long time. Our lungs are definitely our weak spot (just look at the elderly mortality rates for pneumonia, 20-30%).

drexlspivey 5y ago
It is most likely pretty close to the final strain, viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections) and this one is pretty close to the global maximum.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Why do people parrot this nonsense?
  - engmgrmgr 5y ago
    people are easily influenced by others who they admire, even if they have no idea what they’re talking about. athletes, politicians, investors, artists, etc.
- engmgrmgr 5y ago
  Evolution isn’t programmed, it’s a function of survival. If there’s a highly infectious virus with a huge lead time to develop deadly symptoms, that’s more than enough to spread “optimally”
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create. People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.

DantesKite 5y ago

I think the reality is a lot more complicated than that. There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains. There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.

eloff 5y ago

Agreed. I found out about this early perhaps due to my South African family who sent me this doctors analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vI4XczqZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vI4XczqZ8 It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous. If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better. I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest. But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time. The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.

sangnoir 5y ago
> The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better. You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier. The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
- chki 5y ago
  Making COVID extinct is unfortunately not a reasonable scenario. There will be animal reservoirs, high vaccination rates are difficult to achieve for most countries, long-term lockdowns will be hard to enforce if you're not China.

DarknessFalls 5y ago

It's so good in fact, it makes me wonder if this was the Wuhan Virology lab's penance act.

newsbinator 5y ago
There's no particular reason to believe this. It's just as likely as "space aliens did it" at this point, until there's more evidence in any given direction.

makeworld 5y ago

> leads to natural immunity Evidence so far suggests Omicron has high rates of reinfection.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> 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. No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time. Long term damage is not getting enough attention. In decades maybe we get a mild covid. > Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.

988747 5y ago
> No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. Clearly not how it works and not what's happening. We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading. Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ? > That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly. We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu. > Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild. Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants. It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu. Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take. Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking. edit: > we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers. Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ? We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines. And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.

earthbee 5y ago

If a past infection with Delta doesn't protect against Omicron should we expect an infection by Omicron to protect against Delta or any future strains evolved from it?

wmock 5y ago

completely agree with you - at this point, if we can coexist with covid, it'll hopefully become more and more like the common flu

jonnycomputer 5y ago

Yes, the best case scenario might be an extremely mild disease that gives everyone natural immunity to more virulent strains. But half as deadly with twice transmission rate is kind of a wash, in the short term right? But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window. I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Perhaps. But keep in mind, the world isn't suffering equally. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-pandemics-united-nations-fcf28a83c9352a67e50aa2172eb01a2f?fbclid=IwAR1ylLDRtv4Ml4GZRVHPbvR0Fp4YfaOhCSjTB_th8aV58ywyTWTxFd5IxJY https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...

nerfhammer 5y ago

Doesn't this depend on how much cross-immunity it provides?