[mentat]

"Remain obsessed" with transmission of a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale? That sure seems worth being obsessed about. When it mutates to spread past all current defenses then consistently kill because we failed to stop current spread it will indeed be "depressing".

[jerf]

"a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale"

That doesn't uniquely describe COVID. It describes pretty much every virus you have heard of.

The gradient for viruses trends strongly towards trading severity for contagiousness. They do not generally "mutate past all defenses and kill", the generally "mutate past defenses and give slight to non-existent symptoms", for several reasons, the two most important of which is that killing means they can't spread anymore, and at the Pareto frontier (which viruses live on all the time), contagiousness and severity are in active conflict with each other; energy put into one comes right out of the budget for the other. And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

You've been amped up to a level of fear so severe for viruses that if your fear was accurate, there would be no multicellular life on Earth, because highly contagious and severe viruses would kill anything that provided such a big target. So, good news! Your fear is not accurate. You can verify yourself by checking your environment for multicellular organisms that have not been killed by viruses.

[ptaipale]

This theory of "killing means they can't spread anymore" doesn't really work out with diseases like sars-cov2. It might have worked in a medieval world where people travel by foot, horseback or sailboat, and with a disease where the carrier stays contagious forever.

But we are in a modern world where travel around the globe happens in 24 hours. Covid is contagious for some time before the patient has any symptoms, and for most people, it stops being contagious by the time some of the carriers are so sick they might die.

So, when a patient starts having symptoms in 5 days, (s)he may have had time to infect other people on more than two continents.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

To restate this without the teleological angle: virus will not become widespread unless they are easily transmitted, and they are not easily transmitted if they make the subject excessively ill. Ergo, the most common viruses are better at being transmitted than making people really ill.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

If you ignore the context and the multifaceted consequences of lockdowns etc., then yes, you are correct and we should be obsessed with the transmission rates. However, we don't have the same level of obsessions about other viruses present in humans (say, HSV-1 which unlike SARS-CoV-2 will live inside you until you die), and even other coronaviruses. Why? Because what matters most is how dangerous the virus is.

Fortunately, as of today, Omicron deaths are still at zero, and this fills me with moderate optimism. [0]

[0] https://www.cityam.com/anxiously-optimistic-south-africa-hol...

[bluGill]

> Omicron deaths are still at zero

Omicron hasn't been around long enough to expect many deaths yet. Even the optimists need to wait a few more weeks.

[disambiguation]

I seriously question whether we're at a level technologically that "control" was ever an option here.

With things like covid and the flu, vaccines will always be playing catch up with variants. Its not like the measles which doesn't mutate. Infection and hospitalization rates for vaccinated with covid are already significantly higher than the flu as far as baselines go .. it's reasonable to say we can't expect vaccines to snuff out this kind of disease.

Therefore, the only realistic way to stop the spread is with ruthless targeted testing, tracking, and quarantining. But the problem with that method is by the time we're aware of a problematic strain, its already spread too much for quarantining to be effective.

Nature is inevitable. Once we've done all we can, all that's left is to learn to live with it.

[nahqz]

There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever. Just suggesting it is crazy. It is an option you have to forget about.

Stalling the spread is useless as well - we have already had two major mutations in less than two years.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever.

There's a significant difference between COVID-19/SARS-COV-2 become endemic, and it continuing as a pandemic that threatens public health systems due to caseload density. Yes, we're unlikely to get beyond it being endemic, which means that like influenza, it will continue to be an issue, but we can certainly get a point where it is "just endemic", which would be a huge improvement over the current situation.

[Spare_account]

>we have already had two major mutations in less than two years.

How frequently do equivalent Flu mutations occur?

[toyg]

> There is absolutely no way to stop the spread forever.

Well, there is, we just don't want to pay for it: vaccinating poor countries, where effectively the mutations are being created by high infection rates.