Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
I know everyone's panicking about Omnicron, but I'm having a hard time getting very concerned about it.
Remember the Brazil variant? The California variant? The Lambda variant?
These were all supposed to spell disaster, yet they all became non-issues.
Of all the variants -- many of which were hyped up upon discovery -- only one, Delta, ended up becoming a problem.
However, even Delta wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Remember the belief that Delta was evading vaccines? In reality, the vaccines were just fading starting around 4 months, and Delta happened to be the one breaking through because it was the main variant around. It turned out that the vaccines worked just fine against Delta, after all.
So far, Delta has suppressed all other variants from taking hold, and they have died out. I did read that Omnicron is as contagious as Delta (and perhaps moreso), so I guess it does have a shot at replacing Delta.
However, we really can't engage in repeated variant panic, because all that does is continue to disrupt everything. It also becomes a case of "the boy who cried wolf", as people are going to tune out variant concern, and then ignore an actual problematic one (say, one which is more deadly and/or evades vaccines) shows up.
Oh, and I'm hearing that the WHO jumped right past Nu and Xi and went right to Omnicron. Why? Well, the WHO didn't want to offend a certain person named Xi. WHO should just change its name to CHO, and be done with it.