Quite a few articles on the topic this but covid appears to be set to become endemic (we’re just going to live with it and it’s not disappearing) this year.
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Yeah, I tend to think they are probably right. My wife sent this to me earlier this week which I found interesting.
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i mean endemic can mean lots of things. Flu is endemic and can kill 65k a year. Bubonic plague is also endemic and it may kill one person every other year in Colorado.
It’s going to be endemic but I think we can do better than tolerating double the yearly toll of the flu, given that we have such effective vaccines out there.
Certainly the current level of death and disability is not sustainable forever.
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The Omnicron mutation could be a good thing. Viruses have a tendency to mutate so as not to kill the host because they want to keep spreading. A milder form that is not so deadly. The Delta variant has already dropped significantly.
Given that, there is some evidence that Omnicron is another lab leak and they are saying that because of how much it is changed and what those mutations are. It skipped some process they think would have had to happen if it was a normal mutation? Probably another accident, but who knows. It will be interesting to know what might come out or if it is about that.
Not the news you wanna hear when you work in healthcare and have t1d 
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Enter from stage left…Deltacron.
I know many believe this to be a lab error but imagine the nightmare if it is real.
Personally I hope (though cynically I doubt) that increased acceptance of public health measures like mask-wearing, hand-washing, minimizing group contact, etc., will in the future reduce the incidence of flu and colds. If people who are sick feel less forced to show up at work, and more comfortable wearing a mask if they do have to mingle, that would go some way to reducing not just annual deaths from flu but the enormous cost in lost productivity.
As for SARS-Cov-2 becoming endemic at this stage: a friend who studied epidemiology likes to quote a line she learned in first year: “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen . . . one pandemic.” It’s anyone’s guess where it goes from here.
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I’m in San Francisco where people are mostly adherent to public health measures, which is probably why we have so few fatalities compared with the rest of the US (well, that and mass uptake of vaccination). But even here I think selling the idea of mask wearing and staying home when sick is going to be tough. I mean, with a flu or a fever, sure, people will stay home. But colds can be contagious for 2 weeks, and flu can be contagious long after a person is fever free for 24 hours. I think getting people to stay home beyond when they’re feeling acutely ill is a tough sell. For some kids, this could mean being out almost the entire winter season.
I hope that kids with cough symptoms are asked to wear masks in school from now on.
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Unfortunately viruses don’t always have a tendency to mutate to be milder. In omicron’s case, there does seem to be a tradeoff – because it seems easier to spread when you infect the upper airways versus the lower ones.
But we shouldn’t bank on the next iteration not figuring out some new way to infect us that happens to not have that tradeoff. Ebola figured out how to spread from dead bodies!
I don’t think there is much evidence for omicron being a lab leak. I think one possibility is that it evolved in a rodent population but we document every SARS-CoV-2 experiment going on in the world now, and you need to be in at least a BSL-3 lab for that kind of work I thought. I think there’s only one of those anywhere near there, in Cape Town. Meanwhile, rodents living in close proximity to humans is not exactly rare, and is how Bubonic Plague and typhus spread in the past.
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@TiaG Yea, you’re right, you don’t know what the next mutation will bring. And with everyone around the world having covid and travel so easily done, there is going to be a ton of various mutations.
Unfortunately mice are used in testing .and yes the Omnicron variant seems very contagious to mice. But they have said it has some kind of mutation pattern that it skipped the natural mutation pattern and resembles more of a changed lab mutation that would be seen in lab mice. And yes, I’ve heard the suspect lab is in South Africa where they do the gain of function type research.
I keep reading this and about flurona and I hate it. People just need to wear the dang masks, not have huge gatherings and get the vaccines. I think the large family gatherings of the holidays are biting back. We’ve not had 14 days without a negative at my job since like… before Thanksgiving. It’s considered an on going outbreak.
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