So there were high degrees of heard immunity… but then Omicron came which has pretty high immune escape, and so it spreads all over, whether you were vaccinated

So there were high degrees of heard immunity… but then Omicron came which has pretty high immune escape, and so it spreads all over, whether you were vaccinated or not, had COVID before or not. And then it finds those who were neither vaccinated nor previously had COVID and puts them in the hospital. Spreads so quickly that the hospital system is overloaded even if the Case Hospitalization Rate isn’t that high. So it’s gonna expose everyone regardless, therefore it is a kind of herd exposure, if not herd immunity. Hopefully, in combination with the previous exposure, the transmissibility will be lowered by this “herd exposure” so in future waves the hospital system won’t be hit as hard. It’s roughly less than half as lethal as Delta, other things being equal. In combination with boosted+vaccination, the risk is pretty low, comparable to flu or perhaps lower now that we have better treatments. We need the pan-coronavirus vaccines, though, in addition to these less lethal variants, to really bring this down to background seasonal flu/cold virus levels. (And it wouldn’t hurt if we finally fixed the HIV pandemic so variants don’t mutate so much. And fix vaccine logistics further so we have a prayer to deploy vaccines before literally everyone gets it like Omicron.) Coronaviruses normally don’t mutate as fast as the typical seasonal flu since they don’t do recombination as efficiently. So we SHOULD be able to keep up with it. But our main vaccine strain is now 2 years old. You can’t expect that to work well forever.