4 ms·

>What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nightmare that would keep this rolling. How do we know we won't end

• ummonk 5y ago
  The better omicron is at spreading the more people it will confer natural / hybrid immunity to, reducing the dangers of a future variant.
  • soperj 5y ago
    Hopefully... the history of diseases before vaccines (polio, measles, smallpox, black plague, etc) doesn't exactly fill me with a lot of hope for it just becoming less deadly naturally, even if there are examples (Spanish flu) where they have.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What are the histories of the other coronaviruses? And would those histories be more relevant than histories of non coronaviruses?
      • nradov 5y ago
        Another coronavirus probably caused a worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people, but the survivors gained natural immunity which gave them significant protection against symptomatic reinfections. The same virus HCoV-OC43 is still endemic today. This seems relevant to the current pandemic. https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1751-7915.13889 https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
        • nawgz 5y ago
          I understand this is a reoccurring theme throughout history that lead to most of the endemic coronaviruses today. Omicron is truly fantastic; for example look at Ontario’s case count vs ICU count. Omicron has completely decoupled those graphs.
          • maxerickson 5y ago
            It's not really clear whether that is because it is less severe or if it is because there are lots more breakthrough infections. (but a larger number of mild breakthrough infections is not itself terrible news either as the mildness indicates a population becoming more resilient against the virus)
            • nawgz 5y ago
              It’s perfectly clear, across the world vaccinated or unvaccinated hospitalizations and severities are reduced. South Africa on one extreme and New South Wales on the other. Ontario a textbook example of a first world society’s expectation vis a vis vaccination, age curves, and severity.
        • soperj 5y ago
          'The evidence 1889-1890 outbreak was caused by a coronavirus has been referred to as "weak" and "conjectural" in an analysis of the literature' Seems this theory has only gained traction in the last 2 years. Looking into it further, case fatality rate of during the 1889-90 outbreak seemed to be 0.1-0.28, much lower than Covid-19 has been.
          • nradov 5y ago
            Our data on the 1889-90 pandemic is pretty thin. We don't have any reliable records on deaths in poorer countries so the error bars are quite wide. A lower infection fatality rate in that previous pandemic is not at all surprising. Back in 1889 elderly people made up a much lower fraction of the population. And there was a lower rate of co-morbid conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.
      • mlcrypto 5y ago
        Common cold has a variety of coronaviruses
  • bmitc 5y ago
    Do you have sources for that? Because isn’t that exactly what has not happened with all the existing variants?