From where we are today? Unfortunately probably. The best case scenario is that everyone would have gotten vaccinated.
But I guess that’s a different timeline.
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That depends on whether people can still get long Covid from the milder cases of omicron. Long Covid is the thing that scares me the most about Covid. I know a person with long Covid who says he’d rather have died.
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I agree, and it infuriates me that this doesn’t get more sttention. I have a colleague who had a mild case and is now dealing with kidney failure due to vascular damage. I have had a couple kids in for severe weight loss due to altered sensation so “everything tastes like BO” or variations on that. Had several kids dealing with prolonged exercise intolerance, which is incredibly hard on young athletes, due to myocardial or lung damage. This is not a “death or nothing” illness. And treating it like it is condemns an awful lot of kids (and adults) to a totally unknown, possibly lifelong, period of disability. It’s been 2 years and, folks, still WDKS. However bad we think it is, it keeps showing itself to be worse. And the chuckleheads who are pro-virus are making it so much worse. Just saw an article about an ICU doc in Richmond suing Sentara to be allowed to prescribe ivermectin to his patients. In the ICU. Based on a small study he wrote which has been retracted due to “irregularities.” Another about families smuggling ivermectin and hydrochloroquine into hospitals and administering them without knowledge of the medical team. And these folks are being hailed as heros!
ETA, because it’s not worth it’s own post, that we now have Omicron confirmed in VA. No shock, no surprise, but here we go…
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Between @anon29537550’s notes above on Long COVID, the trickle of “COVID eats your brain” work, the “recovery ain’t actually recovered” research, I’m not keen on getting Omicron either. I’ll start believing the “milder outcomes” literature in 2-3 years.
In the TorStar today, Drs. Morris and Sander of the Ontario 
science table have kind of broken ranks and are firing off distress flares, saying a total shutdown is what’s needed. Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri just got COVID after double vax and a booster; bad for him but he’s a high profile case and people might just take notice. Sadly, it will probably take one of Premier Doug Ford’s close colleagues or family dropping dead before anything adequate gets done.
“We won’t even have the testing capacity,” says Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, and a member of the science table. “And the public isn’t ready to shut things tomorrow. No matter what the right thing to do it, you can’t do that. But I’m pretty certain that everybody in the next six to 12 weeks will be infected with Omicron, unless they’re living the life of a hermit. That’s just the reality.”
I’m quite happy to live like a hermit for 6 to 12 weeks… 
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Yeah, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we hear of some deaths but I was encouraged to see that, per the WHO, there were still zero known deaths from Omicron as of yesterday.
As others have mentioned we don’t know about long covid yet though.
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that’s assuming you can’t get both. if catching covid gives you say six months before you can be exposed again, it could just push this on down the road even more.
that said, there are people who’ve always claimed covid would “devolve” eventually. ive always thought that poppycock esp because we have diseases like… well… most of them… which have never mitigated themselves. but id take a less harmful pandemic over being right in almost every timeline(*)
im curious if coronaviruses mutate more than other viruses, or if we’re just noticing mutations more with this one because we’re ( rightly so ) focused so much on this one…?
( * i imagine that it’s possible a more harmful virus might spread less because more people might take it seriously. that seems rather awful tho. and no guarantee of people being reasonable given all we’ve seen here in the states )
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Oh, hell no. With something like COVID, that’s close to the worst case scenario. In addition to the long COVID notes above, what omicron sets us up for is faster, wider spread, which means more infections in a shorter time period. That in turn means statistically more likelihood of mutation over time. What happens when the next mutation gives us omicron, but much higher mortality rate? Or a mutation that better sidesteps vaccination immunity. Or both?
No, more infectious and less severe means more contagious people running around infecting others. It’s the perfect setup for something much, much worse.
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The report cited above in the Toronto Star article and elsewhere with the info on drastically reduced vaccine effectiveness from the “small study of 581 individuals” is Technical Briefing 31 from the UK Health Security Agency from yesterday, Friday Dec 10.
The BBC (apparently lapsing into its wartime propaganda role) is reporting this as “Covid: Pfizer says booster shot promising against Omicron” and “Omicron: Three vaccine doses key for protection against variant”, when the take-away is more like “AstraZeneca Vaccine Apparently Useless Against Omicron”.
Key info is Figure 7 of the report. The grey circles rising up from the zero line on the left side are for immunity conferred by a Pfizer booster after two doses of AstraZeneca. Error bars here are big, but somehow not reassuring…
There is interesting info also on page 13: household transmission of Omicron appears to be double that of Delta.
I’m not sure I like linking to a Daily Mail article, but this seems to catch the urgency a little better
Edit: so for Ontario 
we can add ~600,000 individuals to the “unprotected” list for symptomatic COVID-19 
based on vaccine distribution numbers.
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What would be a realistic better scenario then? As I see it there are four scenarios:
-
a more deadly variant outcompeting Delta with vaccines still effective against the variant
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a less deadly deadly variant outcompeting Delta with vaccines still effective against the variant
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a more deadly variant outcompeting Delta without vaccines still effective against the variant
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a less deadly variant outcompeting Delta without vaccines still effective against the variant
Remember that by definition a less virulent, less deadly disease couldn’t outcompete Delta.
So of these four options number 2 seems to be the best to me and it happens to be the one Omicron seems to be. @Simon_Clift’s post suggests it might be 4. but that is still better than 1. and 3.
All four of these options give the virus a chance to mutate, so that doesn’t factor in.
Remember, I’m not saying this is great, just the best scenario out of a list of scary scenarios.
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Effective against other variants, Regeneron antibody cocktail fails to tackle Omicron: Study
My stock portfolio!! /s
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Your scenarios are rather incomplete. There are many other options including no change from Delta, which might be a much better outcome than omicron. With a stable target, it’s much easier for vaccine developers to modify the mRNA vaccine to adapt to the current variant.
However you cut it, more infections is a bad outcome.
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Keep in mind, evolution is utterly mindless. All it wants is reproduction. What happens to the host after that is meaningless. And short term mortality is the least of our worries (in the big picture, anyway.) Give or take 99+% recover, but something like 20% are significantly damaged, and we have no idea what the more long term impact might be. Unless omicron or whatever comes next somehow is less likely to cause long covid, we are in trouble. And we won’t know that until it’s too late to fix. My advice? Do everything to can to avoid this beast. And back up your local HCW. We have targets on our backs, and the asshats are getting more violent by the day.
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Disagree. Deadly is not the key factor in outcompeting delta (or whatever.) Transmissability and immune escape are. And omicron seems to have those in spades. As I said above, the damage factor has yet to be determined. Dead/Not Dead is not the end of the story.
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And so short-sighted. I think it’s important to note because people sometimes talk about pathogens being more successful when they don’t kill, since that leaves a steady population of hosts to sustain them. That might be true in the long term, but they have no idea to evolve toward that. It’s genuinely as simple as that if it spreads better there’s more of it. 
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That is indeed a good deal of my point. Every infection, every cell infected, is a roll of the dice. Some infections don’t lead to mutation at all; others lead to non-viable variants. Some new variants are less infectious, and peter out. Once a variant like Delta is out there, the best outcome isn’t a “softer, more infectious” variant like omicron, it’s no variants. Because a less infectious variant isn’ going to dominate Delta. And more infectious means more infections and that’s always bad news. That outcome just means more rolls of the dice to lead to something much, much nastier.
As a second point, in some ways a milder variant is also worse, as infected individuals are more likely to go out and about to infect others, once again yielding more rolls of the dice.
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So what we really need is to crowd out Delta with a variant that’s both extremely mild and won’t mutate, because it doesn’t spread, and instead we simply administer it to everyone. Shame scientists won’t work on that because big pharma is too busy pushing vaccines. (/s)
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That is true. I think that people often fail to appreciate that the deadliness of a pathogen within a population is also a question of how much the hosts immune systems have evolved to combat that pathogen. For example, smallpox in native vs European populations.
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This is maybe wandering from the topic but I am curious about the interplay of the two. People often talk about the threat of some new bacterium from the unthawing permafrost, as something our immune systems have no experience with. But it also wouldn’t have an experience with us. We inhale an awful lot of bacteria and slaughter the vast majority of them.
So I wonder, would that really be such a threat, or is the worst case instead the sort of thing we have now?
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