Each wave is less deadly because: a) we're getting better at treating it b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves. c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.
If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more.
But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount of herd immunity, it may be a few weeks of heavy spread and then very little.
Giving "natural selection" as a force the capacity to "want" is probably less controversial that saying that a virus "wants". For example if you are a religious evolutionary biologist you can think that natural selection is an entity that makes some kind of conscious decisions that may appear random to us only because we don't understand them. I don't think that believing that will hamper your ability to actually understand natural selection as much as any other scientist, specially if you go by the Roman Catholic tenet of unquestionable faith in unsolvable misteries.
If you go by the more neutral terms used in evolutionary science I think natural selection is more of a process than a system or force and then it "wanting" things is also anthropomorphism.
My personal line for when anthropomorphism is tolerable and when it's not is when as an analogy it can make you come to dangerous conclusions. For example "oh COVID wants to mutate, we should just let it mutate because when you give something what it wants it will usually leave you alone" or stuff like that.
If this variant is 5x more infectious, but 5x less likely to result in hospitalisation, the net effect on healthcare resources should remain level, no?
Omicron might be a blessing in disguise, but there is a very bad plausible outcome for the coming month.
If the infection is milder across the board, hospital stays will be shorter on average. People will improve faster and will be discharged sooner.
500 people who on average need 3 days of hospitalization are less of a load than 200 people who on average need 10 days of hospitalization - unless those 500 arrive at the same time, of course.
Doesn't matter. The virus has nothing to do with how humans react to it. The virus didn't tell us to shut everything up and hunker down for 2 years. We could decide to move on tomorrow if we chose. Many places moved on almost a year ago with very little repercussions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3
> YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza
And that is after all the societal changes to deal with the disease.
I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations.
They were (IMO) justified early on when vaccines were not available and when we knew a lot less about the effective treatment regimens.
Imagine a reliable oracle tells you: "The flu season in 2025 will be 10x as bad as the typical flu season." Is that cause to shut down restaurants, bars, close offices, schools, and universities, shutdown borders, etc, etc. for 12 months to make it only 5x as bad? For me, that's cause to make sure I get the flu vaccine that year, wash my hands a little more, not go to work if I'm ill, and pet my dog.
Some jackass tried unsuccessfully to light his shoes on fire and 20 years later we're still taking our shoes off at the airport. I hope we have a more threat-appropriate response over the long-run here.
To properly debate this claim we need to know (1) the baseline -- how many YLLs are caused by flu?, and (2) how many YLLs were _saved_ by the mitigations. (Would we have had 2x more Covid deaths without them? 10x? 1.1x?)