I'm probably going to get down voted like crazy HN in particular seems to have quite a noticeable "skeptic" bent about it, so I wouldn't worry! The new varian

I'm probably going to get down voted like crazy HN in particular seems to have quite a noticeable "skeptic" bent about it, so I wouldn't worry! The new variant is basically a bad cold This is what I was worried people would start inferring from that headline – it's not really an accurate representation, since this article is just talking about how the UK government describes "symptoms". Initial data from South Africa does suggest it's possible this variant may be less severe than we saw in previous waves. We don't really have enough data to come to a clear conclusion on that at this stage, because of the pace of change and the number of confounding factors, such as previous infection. The Discovery Health study suggests that hospitalisations may be up to 30% lower than in South Africa's initial Delta wave – if that does turn out to be the case, it's positive. However, the same study also points out that the risk of reinfection is higher, as is the risk of hospitalisation (from a very low base level) among children. We can also see evidence from the UK that Omicron appears to be significantly more transmissible – the number of cases is currently doubling every 48 hours. Of course that won't continue, but my understanding is that we are likely to see up to about 1m cases a day in the UK by the end of the year. At the moment (very roughly) about 1% of positive (confirmed by test, so lower in practice) in the UK result in hospital admission. So it's not hard to see that a rapid increase in the number of infections could result in a significant spike in hospital admissions, with all of the knock-on effects that this causes – even if the severity of each individual case is much lower. I'm sure everyone hopes this isn't the case, and that it turns out that this wave spikes and subsides quickly with minimal harm – but it definitely seems way to early to be drawing conclusions like "this is just a bad cold". I'm personally a little bit confused about the number of posts I see which seem to want to twist any data they can find into an existing narrative they've already settled on.