Omicron Variant

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If this turns out to be a milder strain that would not be surprising. New variants have gotten incorrectly conflated as more severe strains. They have not been more severe they have been more transmissible. A main argument for vaccination has been an avoidable new variant would emerge that would evade the vaccine. That is still possible but the opposite is also possible and might be happening with Omicron. This does not negate the pro vaccine argument because more avoidable severe mutations are plausible. Also with more transmissibility comes more severe COVID cases even without the variant being more severe as we have seen.

Might is they key word, the data is very preliminary. If the discover doctor is seeing mostly people under 40 of course their cases will generally be mild this has been true through the whole pandemic.

If Omicron is as mild as suggested and large gatherings continue not to be superspreader events through the holiday season and you do not have any risk factors and especially if you are fully vaccinated it is probably ok to live your pre pandemic life. There are a couple of caveats. If you are at high risk you should probably take more severe migration measures because everybody else is not mask wearing and social distancing anymore. Also the risk of Long COVID is uncertain. Although the preliminary data on vaccinated people is encouraging very disabling Long COVID following mild COVID has not been uncommon. That uncertainty would need to weighed against the near certainty of further economic, societal, and psychological damage of continuing mitigation measures.

I'm encountering this for the first time.
So far, I only read speculations that so many mutations likely happened in one person infected for much longer time than normally - for whatever reason.

Scientists think this individual had HIV/AIDS and was likely unvaccinated.

High risk people should always be vaccinated however, perhaps using the machine gun approach to vaccination might be preventing milder strains from emerging and competing with more deadly ones. The lack of vaccination in South Africa might have actually resulted in a safer strain to infect the planet. Not a bad thing for sure.

They need to be careful with vaccines in general though. A lot of people who were once pro-vaccine are becoming anti-vaccine, myself included, as the promised "game changing, state of the art" vaccine, that was promised to get us out of this situation has run its course and I for one am certainly not impressed with it. It's still running rampant through well vaccinated nations yet restrictions to try and prevent its spread are still in place.....despite this clearly not being possible.

Source?

People expected and it was sold as the next Polio or measles vaccine. Many many vaccines do not work that way, never have. The flu shot is 40 to 60 percent effective but like the COVID vaccine does significantly reduce the chances of severe illness. It could be argued that unlike with Polio vaccines herd immunity is not a factor with the flu shot because a large percentage of people do not take it. Shingles is not transmissible yet the previous vaccine was 51 percent effective. In this era the way a lot of people think is if it does not work perfectly it must be a hoax. Nobody has figured out a way to counter that way of thinking, most attempts have been counterproductive.

Thanks. The scientists call in "speculative" and it looks like it's one of the suspected possibilities, the other being simply gaps in sequencing intermediate forms of the virus.

Anyway, we're living with globally spilled milk. Closing borders won't help with Omicron, it's already in UK and Schengen. The question is, is it really milder than Delta?
Here, hospital workers claim Delta is more dangerous to younger people, children and pregnant women than either the original strain or Alpha. So, the evolution towards milder form is not obvious and, even if real, probably much slower than towards easier spread.

We're living in unpredictable times and nothing can be really done about it.

Still, the present-day Delta variant causes considerable death and hospitalizations, especially in the unvaccinated. COVID is still acting like a “novel” virus.

CMO Professor Paul Kelly says Australia is currently on 'alert' and 'not alarmed' over Omicron COVID-19 variant

Professor Paul Kelly says some reports from South Africa about the Omicron variant indicate symptoms are "mostly mild" but hospitalisation rates are also increasing.

Dominica Funnell
Digital Reporter

November 29, 2021

According to its discoverer, Omicron infections tend to be mild, common-cold-like.
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/sa ... 021-11-28/

You are well aware that the facts released by the UK government
don't support this, but you still press on with this narrative.
Care to explain why?

UK Government vaccine surveillance report week 43