I don’t like words like “believe” that imply a reliance on faith. I seek truth through evidence and my goal is to filter signal from noise.
> Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections?
I’m far from a virologist, but I think OP’s postulation around mutation frequency is a bit more subtle than simply N / time.
See Exhibit [7.7] for example, which makes it visually clear just how distinct omicron is from any other variant. I’m not qualified to speculate beyond this, but it seems OP is saying a bit more than “there are a lot of mutations” – indeed, he spends multiple sections disambiguating the evidence of pure volume of mutations from that of phylogenetic distance. Still, you may have a point — maybe it only takes one mutation into a new dominant “clade” to produce such distinction, with any subsequent mutation being of little surprise given the prevalence established by the first one.
> It's a workday and I'm busy
On this we can agree.
[7.7] https://i0.wp.com/theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
It's a workday and I'm busy but I'll grant you one substantive critique; the OP heavily relies on "mutations per year" as a metric to derive how plausible it is that something like Omicron could have mutated in the timeframe necessary.
Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections? It should. The rate of mutations/year is a useful metric for determining the average mutation rate between two different viruses given certainty of their dates -- it's not at all useful for "aging" a specific variant because the calculation is independent of the number of infections.
We're in the midst of a pandemic with hundreds of millions of infections, so the selection pressure for more "fit" viruses is immense. OP tries to get around this by claiming that the rate of mutation that we've actually measured (which is an order of magnitude higher than his assumption!) is suspect and would "extinguish SARS COV2 within a season" but that's just gibberish.