Supposedly Omicron has followed the established trend: more infectious but less deadly. It may be happenstance, but if not, the prediction would be a still more infectious, but milder (?) symptoms. I gather than Omicron is still not as infectious as measles, but Covid does mutate very readily. Perhaps it will bounce between hemispheres again?

@racocn8
Yeah it would be nice to stop relying upon the archaic by now Wuhan OG. But if they had just started a couple months ago boosting us with a Delta look that might help with Delta, but Omicron suddenly emerged out of left field. What’s next and how close or far will it be from Delta or Omicron?

The Red Queen might be a way to view it at this point:
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
[en.m.wikipedia.org]

We have brains and knowledge viruses lack, but they have a form of technology so to speak with their proteins. They have a much shorter generation time and evolve in the blink of an eye compared to us in the sense of passing our genes to our descendants every 20 years.

But before we even knew what viruses were and before we were a species our deeper ancestors evolved means of keeping up to the quicker pace of microbes by recombining genes of receptors set to respond to pathogen “looks” (antigens). You have pretty much any pathogen covered in your immune system because of the recombined diversity at the lymphocyte gene level before exposure. Exposure to an antigen from a virus or vaccine sets in motion a means of better matching these adversaries through mutation of antibody regions that bind to antigen and selection of the best candidates. Vaccination is the preferable way to get this latter affinity maturation process going as it can take weeks to get up to speed and as COVID has shown, that is something you don’t want to wait for. Even though we have the diversity of potential threats covered the responsive cells are rarer at first and imperfectly matched. The ramp up takes time in antigen naive people. Vaccination shortens the time greatly and ideally improves the already existing targeting. Think number of responsive cells, and specificity and levels of antibodies.

Hopefully we get more up to date vaccines soon. But even with the vaccines we have our situation is much better than in 2020 when we had fewer and less effective weapons. In addition to vaccines are the monoclonals, but they too are susceptible to immune escape and lack the T-cell fall back attack and other adaptive immunity advantages vaccines provide. The antiviral pills might be a strong countermeasure too.