We don’t know a great deal about this with any certainty yet.
It appears:
- To have milder symptoms in the young. We don’t know if it does in the old.
- To be more transmissable.
- Less cough, no loss of taste.
Many are suggesting this is a good variant: mild, everyone gets it, gets immune — or it turns into a new flu.
Maybe. (“Appears” is the word I used for a reason.)
What I want to know is how deadly it is for the old, how long any acquired immunity lasts, and whether it spawns long Covid.
If it does spawn long Covid, how does that work? If you don’t get Long Covid the first time, can you get it another time? If you can, and Omicron is chronic and widespread, the odds of eventually getting Long Covid go way up.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And, of course, if Covid, in general, continues to mutate fast, will a high virulence variant lead to other variants? If so, the next one might be high virulence with worse symptoms.
In the meantime, I’d suggest being careful, still. N95 masks, and let’s see how this plays out.
anon
Covid-19 will continue to mutate which is what the pharmaceutical companies want. This will last for generations and we will all be recommended to take booster shots every 6 months for the rest of our lives. Meanwhile, most people in developing countries don’t have access to the vaccine, guaranteeing that we’ll see new possibly deadlier variants.
Ché Pasa
Going somewhat CT here, but it seems to me that all these Covid variants popping up are serving the function of herd-culling, slowly, slowly to be sure, but they’re doing their job efficiently enough for the purposes and pleasure of our overlords — who by and large are convinced of the need to reduce the human population significantly, say by half or more, within a generation or less.
Most of us are useless to Our Rulers anyway. We saw in the initial outbreak of the Covid 19 virus that not only were old people in nursing homes getting it and dying in bunches, but some political and supposed public health leaders ruled that packing more vulnerable old people into infected nursing homes was a good thing, and many thousands of the old died because of it.
Overall, the objectors to vaccines and masking and such are right: the death rate from Covid 19 is in the 1% range, so your chances of dying are not that much higher than from other common viri, but the disease itself seems to be devastating to many who survive. In other words, worse to have than say, the flu.
The health care system in the West is straining mightily under the burden of treating Covid patients. Many patients, I suspect, are falling through the gaping voids in the system. We know not how many. In the poorer, browner regions of the world, there is almost no knowledge of how the disease is progressing, practically no knowledge of the spread, mutations and death rates. The notion that ivermectin is somehow protecting Africa and other regions from the ravages of Covid is comforting, I suppose, but it’s probably not true.
Perhaps 100,000,000 have died globally so far, and 500,000,000 or more have survived but barely. This isn’t enough to make a significant dent in global population — yet. But so long as the disease is allowed to spread relatively unchecked, it (and who knows what else) will inevitably start ticking population numbers downwards.
I keep reading that China’s population will fall by half or more by the end of the century even without Covid. The reasons are complex but according to the experts (!) pretty much certain. And what of the rest of us?
The combination of unchecked disease, climate change, political and social upheavals and wars, and increasing levels of famine will likely do the job.
And so far as we can tell, Our Rulers are fine with it.
Dan Lynch
Milder symptoms? People don’t get hospitalized for mild symptoms, yet hospitalizations are soaring, including for children, in the Omicron zone.
At any rate, I just assume it may be 2 months before we have solid data on Omincron. If you remember back to the beginning of the native strain wave, and then the beginning of the Delta wave, it took 2 or more months to reach some consensus on fatality rates, transmission rates, etc..
The bigger question is the long term strategy for covid. Is there even such a thing as herd immunity, setting aside the problem of how to deal with anti-vaxxers. Will we gradually acquire some resistance to it? Or will it be like the flu, continually mutating to new strains while our immunity continually wanes? I don’t think anyone knows. And then there is the problem of “long covid.”
Willy
Just because big inkjet makers are out to rip you off, doesn’t mean their cartridges don’t print reasonably well.
Big pharma’s gonna have plenty of handy scapegoats with today’s unwitting “freedom fighters” as well as the pharma-industrial skeptics who haven’t thought their own strategies through very well. It’s a real shame because pharma’s aren’t exactly new strategies.
Mark Pontin
anon: ‘we will all be recommended to take booster shots every 6 months for the rest of our lives’
No. There will be nasal prophylactic sprays directed at the upper respiratory system. This also will be a more effective therapy mode against a coronavirus than a vaccine injected into a muscle.
There may be two dozen R&D programs aimed at creating such a spray that I’ve heard about.
anon: ‘Meanwhile, most people in developing countries don’t have access to the vaccine, guaranteeing that we’ll see new possibly deadlier variants.’
No. Omicron was almost certainly produced in the body of an individual who was HIV-compromised and at some point WAS VACCINATED.
That’s precisely how selection pressures produced a COVID19 variant that’s mutated to escape the vaccines to some greater or lesser extent.
As the vaccines we have do not provide sterilizing immunity,
we’d see variants even if everybody in the global population was vaccinated The bodies of the vaccinated themselves can carry large viral loads with Delta even if the vaccinated individuals themselves are not sickened.
You may ask: then what was and is now being achieved by the vaccines then?
Mitigation of fatalities, for one thing.
But beyond that, if used in conjunction with restrictive measures like proper masking and targeted lockdowns, the vaccines COULD have ended COVID19 before uncontrollably prolific variants like Delta emerged. It’s too late now.
You may ask: why didn’t we do that?
After all, it’s not so many decades since smallpox was ring fenced and eliminated. This with global cooperation. Hence, something has changed. What might it be?
To state the tediously obvious, what’s changed is that our societies have been captured by a model where the elites who run it are primarily composed of people with no other skill but the extraction of financial rents from the rest of society. If the whole edifice of debt and rent extraction stops, these people — competent only at financial parasitism — lose their place at the top of the heap.
Conversely, China has rejected a social system in which the ruling elite are competent only at financial parasitism. And China — a nation of 1.4 billion people, or a sixth of humanity — appears to have succeeded at suppressing COVID, even allowing for the distortions of CCP censorship.
So in the real world COVID elimination is practically quite possible. But it’s impossible under an international order where neoliberal capitalism is dominant.
different clue
When I put on my tinfoil-colored glasses, I see the following: the Global Overclass wants to reduce the human population by 7 or so billion people over the next century; fast enough to do the job but just slowly and steadily enough that it could look like a series of ” accidents and diseases”. The ChinaGov is definitely ” not with the program” within the borders of China, so the Global Overclass will try to achieve that 7 billion person reduction outside the borders of China. How do I know that the ChinaGov is not with the Jackpot Program? Because the ChinaGov is still trying to exterminate covid from existence within the borders of China. Their ongoing success in the teeth of “international pressure” to let the disease run amok to “build herd immunity” may eventually stand out in such contrast to deliberately engineered failure in most of the rest of the world to where the designated Jackpottees, the ” sacrifice people” may start to get suspicious of what lies behind the difference in results.
( If the ChinaGov could get the governments of Russia, Outer Mongolia and the Central Asiastans to adopt and apply the same “exterminate covid” goals and protocols, this would be a very major geo-power-political achievement in International Diplomacy and Health. It could end up dividing the world into a Forcey-FreeMarket
” laissez-faire let covid rip” zone and a ” covid not allowed” zone.
So, if I am not the only one on these threads who believes that the World Overclass is deliberately fostering and spreading covid on purpose to every country within reach, then I might not be the only one on these threads who would find ” how to keep healthy, including immune-system healthy” a subject of deep personal interest.
In which case, this might be a very good thread for everybody who thinks they have some dissident parallel knowledge about how to keep healthy and covid-resistant or at least covid-tolerant amid the rising tide of covid, this might be a good thread for every such person to bring every such recommendation and suggestion. Things like vitamin D in whatever form is best, zinc, green tea or other “ionophore” carriers to help zinc get into cells better, povidone-based daily gargles to keep killing whatever viruses land on upper respiratory mucosal membranes, etc. Getting all the knowledge into one place so that people who remember it was here can go back to this one specific thread to find it all in one place.
That’s the kind of thing the Internet makes uniquely possible until the establishment kill-switches the internet for good so that it can never be used ever again. Lets use the internet till we use the internet . . . . for things just like this.
different clue
( In my last paragraph above, I meant ” lets use the internet till we LOSE the internet . . . for things just like this).
NL
“Just because big inkjet makers are out to rip you off, doesn’t mean their cartridges don’t print reasonably well.”
Oh yeah, printer cartridges is a very good metaphor for COVID vaccine — short-lived, messy and will drive you crazy. The printer cartridge game with its ‘secondary market’ and people being sucked into trying to ‘beat’ the ‘game’ by re-filling these cartridges — oh – it is a sure path to mental illness. Oh, I have seen people suffer with their permanently stained, inked fingers and forgoing time with friends, family and work wasting time on re-filling this useless junk.
But let me free you from mental slavery and show you the ‘truth’ — EPSON ET-2760 (or many other EPSON printers) — large cartridges without sponges in them, filled with liquid ink, lasting for thousands of pages. Try to buy one on Amazon — every step of the purchasing way, it will try to switch you to an inkjet, but if you persevere and have enough will to power, oh the glorious freedom that the Japanese EPSON will give you is indescribable.
Free yourself from mental slavery, say it with me — our inkjets and inkjet cartridges is junk, I deserve better…
Stormcrow
@Mark Pontin:
A qualified “No” to the first assertion, a stronger “No” to the second one.
See Corey, Beyrer, Cohen, Michael, Bedford, and Rolland, “SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Patients with Immunosuppression”
Read and marvel. The second paragraph of that paper tells you everything you need. All that was needed to bake up Omicron, was some poor wretch whose immune system was sufficiently compromised, for any of a whole host of reasons, that it could not clear the infection. So the infection persisted. And since the infectious organism is an RNA virus whose genome is unstable by virtue of the RNA polymerase the virus itself codes for, it proceeded to mutate as it reproduced. Given enough time, and a human immune system to cull it, it’d grow out mutations that favor both proliferation and immune escape.
@Mark Pontin:
The implication of your first sentence, that SARS-CoV2 can be backed into a corner and eliminated the way smallpox famously was 50 years ago, is simply flat-out wrong.
We had two major advantages against smallpox that we most certainly DO NOT have against SARS-CoV2. These are as follows.
(1) Smallpox had no reservoir species whatsoever. None. It had no “sanctuary” species it could cycle in when human hosts became thin on the ground.
SARS-CoV2 almost certainly has several. In the first place, it started as a zoonosis, so the ancestral strain most certianly had a reservior host. In the second place, SARS-CoV2 has been reported in far too many nonhuman species at the time of this writing. The most dangerous secondary host I’ve read about so far are American whitetail deer, who pick this stuff up from humans easily, pass it to each other readily, and tolerate the infection much better than humans can.
(2) We were incredibly lucky enough to learn of a related orthopoxvirus, vaccinia, which confered immunity at the 95% level for 5-10 years, and we learned about this by 1796, more than 200 years ago. We had a better vaccine than anything we’ve found for SARS-CoV2 to date, and two centuries in which to use it.
I cannot quarrel with your last paragraph for the simple reason that I agree with it completely. But the issue of SARS-CoV2 eradication is hopeless on a far more fundamental level. Even though rabies control has rendered our dog population as close to bulletproof against rabies as makes no difference, why do we still lose several people in the US to this disease every year? Simple. We can vaccinate all the dogs, but we cannot vaccinate all the bats.
different clue
@Stormcrow,
Good point and reminder about the white tailed deer. If all we can do is keep covid very severely repressed and rare within the human population, that would still be worth achieving.
The mass-democidal Global Overclass would disagree, of course. Could there be a way to functionally overrule them and abolish their agenda without a global movement to round them all up and exterminate them to stop them from stopping us from abolishing their agenda?
Time will tell, I suppose.
bruce wilder
In the cause of slow-motion democide, social engineering matches genetic engineering. During the COVID, the U.S. has seen a new peak in opioid overdose deaths and a spike in accidental deaths.
Willy
Thanks NL. I’ll buy one when my cartridge consumption rises above two per year. But you do plant the seed of a reasonable point. Always run the numbers, as such numbers applies to oneself.