Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week

Re:Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week by jacquesm on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @01:30AM (#29634615)

But HIV/AIDS does kill a lot of people.

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Re:Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week by bruce511 on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @03:05AM (#29635098)

Technically it doesn't - people don't die Of Aids they die With Aids.

But that's semantics. The point is that Aids has a long time between infection and death, thus encouraging spread.

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Re:Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week by jacquesm on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @03:37AM (#29635291)

Which is why you can't say that "Truly deadly virus's don't kill a lot of people." They can, and they do, there are many examples besides HIV.

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Re:Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week by bruce511 on Thursday December 23, 2021 @10:38PM (#29669857)

Yes, my original statement was incomplete. More accurately I should have said that truely deadly viruses don't kill people _quickly_.

Ebola for example gets you sick, and you die quickly. This results in it not spreading well.

AIDS kills you very slowly (over multiple years) so it has lots of time to spread (fortunately for us it's hard to catch).

So the perfect virus would have the transmisabilty of Omicron, but with no symptoms for years - then by the time the first person dies we all have it already.

Fortunately we haven't seen that one yet (in my lifetime anyway) and to some extent worrying about it is fruitless because there will be pretty much nothing we can do about it.

You may as well be worried about every other ELE - asteroids, alien invasions etc.

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