Omicron wave passes in SA with no big spike in deaths

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This is promising news:

https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject. ... cine-tests

NYC hasn’t been having many deaths, either. About the same amount as before Omicron.

This is to be expected. The virus seems to mutate extremely easily and all viruses mutate into weaker forms.

Maybe by June the crisis level will subside.

There is an awful lot of fear-mongering going on in the press over this, but that's to be expected.

Caught the tail end of interview with an expert on NPR. He was cautiously optimistic. Said most diseases evolve this way. The bad news maybe the covid will never go away, but the good news is that may turn into something no worse than the common cold. And that Omicron may not be that just yet, but could be stage in that evolution.

So knock on wood.

Do they, though ? We had this discussion at home NYE. Is that the natural cycle of all viruses? If it is, why hasn't HIV fizzled out over the last 40 years? We have way better treatments, so AIDS hasn't progressed like before, but HIV still does serious damage as a virus and afaik hasn't gotten a bunch weaker. Or has it and I'm uninformed about that?

I did a quick search on HIV and came up a few articles that state it has weakened over the years.

That aside, I'm not that informed on the topic.

I believe the prognosis is hopeful.

Viruses generally weaken over time due to better host adaptation to hide from the immune response. If Unicron came from someone with HIV that caused several years of adaptation in a few months, then that can be why it's less severe. When they first jump into humans, our bodies recognize them quickly as foreign, and it often goes overboard with the immune response, so higher fatality rates. SARS-CoV-2 was quite well adapted to humans from the beginning, hence why it's nowhere near as bad as SARS, but it can still adapt more, which it has done.

For those interested, you should take a look into OC43 from the late 1800s. A common cold coronavirus now, but it looks like it caused something similar to SARS-CoV-2 when it first came along. It even had something akin to "Long COVID" too.