Sadly, no. A really virulent strain could emerge at any moment. Some hope that there will be a little immunity in the population after omicron to blunt the spread of another variant. Problem is 1) immunity wanes and 2) unvaccinated (in this country and others).
@Nrdsb4 Terrifying. There really is a lot if crazy out there.
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Thatâs putting it mildly. Believe the conspiracy theories if they must - every village needs their idiot, but threatening people crosses way over the line.
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Yeah, thatâs absolutely not what my 2x-vaxed former student and his partner, both sick for weeks now and describing it in Boschian terms, are saying. They do in fact know what colds are. You do not want your kids to have what theyâve got.
Yeah, this thing about âevolving toward mildnessâ is nonsense promulgated a couple of years ago. If that were the case we wouldnât bother developing vaccines for anything. Polio, nbd, just wait a few years and you can melt down all those iron lungs for munitions or something, why bother with a Jonas Salk. HIV, whatâs all the fuss.
Viruses mutate all the time and very fast; itâs a key thing about viruses, their genetic instability. This oneâs a very very long virus, meaning it has lots of bits that can mutate, meaning that the number of permutations available is gigantic. Most (this is genetics 101) will either be mutations that change nothing in how it functions or that make the viral descendants less likely to survive. But some will allow the descendants to spread faster than other variants around, meaning the descendants will outcompete those variants.
From the virusâs perspective, it doesnât matter if you die five days after youâve been to a party feeling like a cold was coming on: the only thing that matters is that you spread a lot of virus before you went. Thereâs no intentionality in there; itâs strictly a numbers game. So if you insist on being social in the midst of a pandemic, and so do lots of other people, then sure, you can get a wicked bad virus spreading highly efficiently, so long as itâs highly transmissible before you feel rotten enough to stay home. Or die. Or if it remains highly transmissible even after youâve somewhat recovered, have decided youâre fine and âcanât hide foreverâ and are back to dragging yourself around.
Actual scientists, please correct.
eta: oh â and donât forget, if you get it and stay alive, no matter what kind of wringer it puts you through, all it means from the virusâs point of view is that some new variant capable of avoiding whatever antibodies youâve developed gets to have another go at you. Until youâre dead, thatâs when that ends. Thatâs why we have flu shots available every winter. Fluâs less dangerous than covid, but sure, now and then a wicked bad one evolves, and the fact that most people survive anyway just means it gets another go at us every year.
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I like your explanation!
We canât seriously be worrying about things that may or may not happen. Letâs worry about what we have currently and that is a variant that acts not dissimilar to the common cold in young healthy adults/kids.
We donât know what we donât know. For instance this article concerns me. Iâm not sure if further study will support the title of the article, but I personally tend to err on the side of caution.
I read the MMWR on this one, and I think there are a lot of strong arguments for a temp lockdown or near enough, or just for staying home if youâre not sick already, but this isnât one of the stronger ones.
Yes, the increased risk percentages are big. But the overall risk numbers are very very small. The post-covid kids see a miniscule risk of diabetes bumped up to a slightly less miniscule risk.
If a kidâs at very high risk of diabetes to begin with, then maybe thatâs something to pay attention to. But I donât think that people whose kids get covid should be worried about it. There are bigger things to worry about.
This happens with flu too.
Thank you! I should probably also have mentioned that thereâs no âprogressionâ in evolution. That monkey-to-man image has done a lot of mischief in leading people to think that critters âevolve towardâ targets. Critter DNA just mutates by whatever accidents are happening in the cell, is corrected or isnât, and if it isnât then the change may or may not allow it better odds of reproduction in whatever world it finds itself in.
A lot of evolutionary science is aimed at trying to understand what directions a pathogen is likely to evolve in â what molecular forces and instabilities pertain that might allow this or that mutation, and how that goes over generations. The (theoretical) idea is that if you can see a dangerous mutation coming, you can maybe do an end-run by (theoretically) developing an antibiotic or antiviral to treat the future variant. Thatâs part of why there are labs devoted to playing with made-up viruses and viral fragments: you make a rudimentary test virus and then push it very fast through many generations of evolution. They do this in computer models, too, but end of day you have to test it at the bench to know. Thereâs a large infrastructure of wargaming against pathogens that most people never get to see.
That âmake evolveâ science is also part of how we trace evolutionary lineages: after a period of mutation, short RNA/DNA sequences can stabilize and stay more or less as they are, and get preserved as the rest of the RNA or DNA keeps mutating around them. The proteins the stable regions code for can just get to be so good at their jobs that theyâre hard to improve â changes donât give the mutated critter any edge in reproducing â so the sequence more or less stays put.
Anyway. When youâre talking about evolution and mutation in these things, you get to some deep questions this way about randomness vs. ordem e progresso, and a lot of people are profoundly uncomfortable with a physical universe that shows no interest in our need for narrative, reason, care. So, yeah, I wouldnât be surprised if this too is really doing a number on our ability to do public health well in a pandemic.
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I agree.
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The fact is covid and itâs future variants are here to stay. Weâre not eradicating this. There will be many future variants as the world wonât reach herd immunity. Itâs here to stay. The US and the world will have to deal with this new endemic. We are dealing with it. Itâs obviously good to be vaccinated and boosted. We arenât going to lockdown and get rid of this. At most it would delay things for a short time. The best we can do is continue to share factual data regardless the virus, the vaccines and the outcomes and let people make their personal choices. I would love to see everyone vaccinated and boosted. I canât force them to do it though and in the end Omicron doesnât care if weâre vaccinated, itâs spreading like wildfire and will expose the vast majority of us anyway.
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Agree. It is just sad - had everyone that could get vaccinated actually gotten vaccinated, Omicron may not have never developed.
It would become the first virus in history that failed to mutate? Unlikely. Nor could we vax the worldâs entire population, including children, in time to prevent mutation. And our current vaccines substantially but not perfectly prevent serious illness, but some infection will still occur regardless. I support vax mandates, but acknowledge that this and future variants will occur irrespective of them.
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However, some viruses mutate much more or less in terms of vaccine escape. Flu viruses mutate enough that yearly vaccines are always playing catch up, but there is no push for boosters for mutations of measles and some others.
COVID-19 seems to be closer to flu than measles in this respect. However, well matched COVID-19 vaccines are better than the best matched flu vaccines. Unfortunately, the vaccine companies have not offered vaccines for newer variants of COVID-19 that would likely restore the high effectiveness seen against earlier variants that were closer to the ancestral virus.
Why is that? Is it so they can make money selling us the same vaccines over and over? Modernaâs CEO was out hawking the 4th shot. If omicron supposedly confers some immunity to other variants as well as itself why isnât an omicron shot on the fast track?
I think itâs because the Omicron wave will be over by the time a targeted vaccine is developed, and more importantly, approved.
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Why is approval necessary? I thought the vaccines had final approval? The flu shot isnât approved every year? They tweak the âformulaâ, produce it and roll it out.
Moderna and JNJ still have only EUA. Moderna has filed for full approval, not sure about JNJ.
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I presume itâs because the mRNA technology is still so new that âreprogrammingâ the vaccine to target a new variant isnât as routine as mixing a few dead flu viruses every year.