Apparently the term is “sub lineage”. Not quite a strain, but different genetic offshoot.
It looks like the news has wanted to make it very scary since Omicron first popped up. It was the “Stealth Covid” reported back in the fall as being able to skate around testing.
Which is why I looked it up, it sounded familiar.
The actual deal is that it’s hard to distinguish from Alpha and Delta on standard PCR tests because it doesn’t have the key mutation we look at to identify Omicron.
Which is bad for tracking it.
We’re tracking it because it’s different enough from Omicron BA.1 that it could turn into something else in time.
In part because at any given time. A less dangerous strain can throw off a more dangerous one.
Evolution does not have a consistent progression toward a “better” or pre-determined outcome. And mutations are effectively random.
This needs to be repeated over and over and over again.
“The flu” is a whole group of different influenza viruses. They are far more adaptable than coronaviruses. But what we learned so far in this pandemic is hopefully going to help us against influenza as well.
The thing I like to stress is you don’t want COVID to be like the flu.
The flu is bad.
The flu kills millions every year.
The flu is insanely difficult to manage with vaccines, and we barely have treatments for it.
The flu sweeps through the globe yearly, and regularly throws off really concerning viruses.
The SARS group is already significantly more deadly and infectious than flu. A cyclical, yearly series of COVID epidemics, with regularly arriving pandemic strains. Is our current situation forever, or until that worse variant we’re worried about shows up and it’s all just The Stand.
You don’t even want the flu to be the flu. We’ve been trying to “solve” influenza for a century.
Are we not doing the Greek letters thing anymore? Did we run out of Greek letters? (Oh, it’s an omicron variant - does it get a second Greek letter? Will viral variants start getting names like fraternities?)
I think it does, because what it mutated from determines if getting sick from past variants give any protection against this one. If it’s an omicron variant, then all the people who just got omicron would have some protection.
Yep. Covid is pretty non-lethal, compared to some of its close relatives, so it could get a lot worse.
That’s a frequently repeated misapprehension created, I think, by survivor bias. Viruses can - and do - become both more transmissible and more deadly. That just increases the possibility that they simply wipe out the local population of any vulnerable organisms and don’t spread anymore. (For humans, the “local population” is effectively global, so that’s cold comfort.)
Only “variants of concern” or some such get the Greek letter, and the Greek letter is mostly for public use. Each identified strain or variant get’s a letter code for tracking and research.
Omicron is B.1.1.529
Then subsets we’re watching get marked with an additional code.
So the Omicron subs groups are
BA.1/B.1.1.529
BA.2/B.1.1.529
BA.3/B.1.1.529
It’s apparently standard, used for tracking them in software and labs. For public use I guess it would be Omicron 1, Omicron 2, and Omicron 3 but the press has glommed onto the BA.#.
But in full the thing we’re talking out is SARS-CoV-2 BA.2/B.1.1.529.
It also seems to respond exactly the same to the vaccines as the other kinds of Omicron.
And would probably be well covered by the Omicron based boosters they’re working on for spring.
You are neither naive nor ignorant. Evolution doesn’t have direction, it just throws shit at the wall and whatever sticks, sticks. The key is reproduction and survival. Its survival. We are just feedstock.
We have had this discussion before. Some mythical tendency to become less lethal is just that. Mythical. More transmissible certainly, but unless it becomes so lethal that it’s victims die before transmitting it, what happens to us is immaterial to the virus’ survival.
I would say that humans do play a role in driving the evolution of this and other viruses by how we modulate our own behavior in reaction to them. Imagine there are two variants, exactly equally transmissible under ordinary social interactions but one has a 25% mortality rate and the other causes only very mild symptoms. If humans decide to lock down and refrain from normal interactions whenever the deadly variant hits a given community, but go about business normally when the other one comes around, then the milder variant would have an evolutionary advantage, being more likely to spread widely. Whether or not you’d consider that evolution to be “natural “ depends on your definition.
At least Omicron BA.2 sounds even more like an evil robot.
The x-factor is more how long it takes to kill, than how lethal it is over time. Or more how long one is contagious before it incapacitates or kills you.
Before antibiotics Syphilis had a mortality rate of up to 60%. It just took decades to do the job.
the only way one covid strain could displace another is if getting one stopped you from getting another - but unvaccinated people have getting covid multiple times.
I was thinking more along the lines of those beneficial parasites that Fry got from eating a sketchy truckstop sandwich in that one episode of Futurama, but that works too.
You don’t, and nor do I. But people who set public health policies do. If a variant is ten times less lethal but 100 times more transmissible, then my local hospital’s problems just grew tenfold. My own problems too, if I need any kind of medical attention in a swamped hospital (broken leg, heart attack, …)
