Item — HN Reader

Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking?

I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?

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Does it even matter? Covid is here forever. Doesn't matter if the next variant is "good" or "worse" or "horrible". It's here forever. We cannot continue playing this restriction / mandate game any longer. We have something like a dozen vaccines globally, multiple treatments, etc. We've had 2 years for government's to build healthcare capacity to handle any "surge" we get and it is no longer fair to the public to keep blaming them any time some hospital gets full.

It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.

Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.

Move on.

Thanks for expressing how I feel. Winter was always the worst season for me. With Covid it has become unbearable. I’ve lost 50% of my life quality.

I know how you feel buddy. I have really strict rules for myself around drug and alcohol consumption. For example, if a bottle of Scotch lasts less than 1 week, I am drinking too much and need to cut back etc. I've not broken that rule since I made it, except for this winter and last winter.

I was always not a fan of gloomy winters, but this on top of it has made it terrible. I am so over all of the panic and fear.

Hang in there!

It’s like society decided to make hysteria and fear a virtue.

At least in the West, disease has always been viewed as punishment for vice. Either punishing the sinful and poor (bubonic plague) all the way to punishing for drugs and sex (HIV). Hell the schoolyard rumor when I was a kid was that HIV originated via beastiality (Apple refuses to recognize that word so spelling may be wrong)

Today we find the term “gay plague” abhorrent and I wonder if in 30 years we will be equally as shocked and embarrassed of Herman Cain awards etc etc

And that theory about viruses becoming less deadly isn't an universal rule in the first place. For example, smallpox and measles never got less deadly. In many cases, the virus becoming less deadly is because the population acquired immunity from vaccinations or previous infection, not because the virus evolved that way.

In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.

It does seem to be true of respiratory viruses though. Asiatic flu is still around, probably HCoV-OC43, now a nearly harmless common cold virus. Spanish flu is still dangerous like all flus, but not the killer that it was.

It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.

But is HCoV-OC43 harmless because the virus became less deadly, or because everyone has immunity from being infected by it when they were still children?

I wonder if there's extra selective pressure among relatively smart creatures like us. Supposing there's a really nasty disease that manifests after a week, and we're contagious for a few days before. Eventually we'll get wind of it and start being more careful. If it's a less nasty virus, we just won't care enough and let it spread.

There's been no time to have real, peer reviewed science to make a definitive conclusion either way. All we have is preliminary data which seems to be trending towards the positive.

The sensationalist flip-flopping media reports have been mostly unhelpful. I've been swinging between "this is wishful thinking and it's going to be really bad" to "this is overly dramatic and it's going to be ok" for the past few weeks. I've been feeling more of the latter recently, but I'm still not 100% certain. Call it cautious optimism.

They discovered the variant less than a month ago. The science will take time, all we can do in the meantime is make our best guesses

There is a recently released preprint that concludes that omicron-infected have an 80% reduced likelihood to be hospitalised compared to non-omicron infections.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...

Of course, it's not yet peer-reviewed, and doesn't model the possible outcomes based on the conclusions, but it certainly seems to be great news.

This paper is interesting and I agree seems like good news. It was posted yesterday BTW.

There is a wrinkle though: the 80% reduction in hospitalizations is compared to this summers delta infections, but they found no difference in hospitalizations compared to non-omicron infections this November (the time period of the study).

They have some discussion of maybe if that’s due to prior immunity or something, but it seems like things are still just not clear, and more data is coming down the pipe.

We shouldn't act until we have a peer reviewed study published in 18 months.