“There is a possibility that we are seeing a more infectious and less virulent version of the virus, which would be one of those steps along a happier route to living with the virus”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/he...vid19-could-omicron-help-slay-the-delta-beast
@imhotep any comments?
This is what I wrote on last Wednesday....Copied below - in case you missed it.
<snip>
As I noted on another thread we really don't know much about the Omicron variant other than it could be
more transmissible. I can post all the mutations in the variant but that doesn't tell you the whole story unless more details about the behaviour comes out after real life studies. This will take a few weeks.
Let's take the scenario of the virus being mutated into a variant which is
highly transmissible but
benign. This will make everyone sick (including the anti-vaxxers

) but
not seriously ill. The virus is still a problem at large, but there's some hope. The mild infection will probably result in an immune response far
better than the current vaccines can offer.
Not every mutation is bad. Sometimes a bad mutation can cause the solution to the pandemic.. Viruses mutate all the time. It's just pot luck whether a mutation will be beneficial to us. But it has happened before - This is exactly what happened with SARS. That's why SARS dropped out.
One mutation with a 29 nucleotide deletion in the ORF8 region (Open reading Frame 8 containing about 121 amino acids) caused the
virus to be much more potent, but at the same time it lost the ability to
infect humans like before. That was the downfall of the SARS virus.
</snip>