How likely is this nightmare situation?

[Imposter1]

1. loads and LOADS of people get omicron

2. this gives a huge number of chances for the virus to mutate by chance

3. one of those variants changes so much that vaccines no longer work at all

4. we are back to square 1, March 2020

Will that variant be likely to be less severe as well? Eg just like a cold? Or could it go back to being serious (think collapsing outside a shop in Wuhan)

One of the reasons we should limit infections is because the chances of a freak mutation increase. It’s a bit like buying 1 lotto ticket or buying 90,000…

It it did become more deadly, it wouldn’t do very well. It would make its hosts so ill that they wouldn’t have much chance to spread it around as they’d be incapacitated. It’s not in a viruses best interests to be deadly.. the host dies, so does the virus.

would make its hosts so ill that they wouldn’t have much chance to spread it around as they’d be incapacitated

That's more to do with the lag time between being infectious and getting sick. Very serious illnesses with a small window there are not as serious as something like this that's highly transmissible before the host realises they're ill.

@LynxGiftsetAndSocks

I think mutations get weaker and weaker as they change

So yes still very infectious but not as likely to be seriously ill

That's just not true. Viruses don't always mutate to something weaker. I have no idea where this came from. West Nile, Ebola, both mutated to more deadly strains

@2bazookas

Nope. Viruses of this type are MORE likely to become progressively weaker and eventually end up as (for most hosts) a short -term recoverable illness, like influenza. Like flu in future covid may still kill /damage hosts whose health is compromised in some other way, but has little or no longterm effect on the young and fit.

We'll learn to live around it, like we do with flu. Routine periodic vaccination for those at most risk. Sensible health precautions for the rest. A week's misery if robust people catch it.

Eventually, research will produce some treatment which saves the lives of those infected(as has already happened with HIV). We're already on that road with a new treatment for covid patients.

Not so long ago, AIDS was a death sentence. It's now very survivable to normal lifespan.

You are not correct. This type of virus doesn't necessarily become weaker. It is some spurious factoid that keeps being bandied about. Ebola and west Nike became far more deadly. The lambda variant is considered the most deadly so far of the Covid mutations. It just is less transmissible so has not taken off quite so badly. But it was a later variant from delta and of course alpha

Significant mutations tend to occur in immunisuppressed individuals whose immune system is unable to eradicate the virus from their body. This is why vaccination is a good idea. The virus doesn’t get chance to replicate sufficient times for variants to arise. It’s the number of times it replicates that increases the chances of advantageous mutations.

I would say in your scenario that if loads of people have been infected with omicron, such that a mutation arose from omicron, then we'd all be pretty well immune to the new variant given our omicron exposure (since the variant would be based on omicron, so our antibodies would at least recognise some parts of it). In your scenario, it's the variants arising from other parts of the world that we need to be concerned about.

Chris Whitty has said we won’t go back to square one. Anyway, we can’t control it so I think let’s deal with what’s in front of us and boosters are effective against Omicron for vast majority of people

Viruses don't necessary mutate and become less dangerous. They don't have a career plan. They mutate frequently, sometimes the mutation is less transmisible and that strain dies out (the various mutations between delta and omicron for example), sometimes it's more transmisible and the virus is very successful. The worry is that a highly transmisible strain like omicron bumps into a more dangerous strain, or one on which the vaccine isn't effective, and the result is a more dangerous + more infectious strain.

However...the UK isn't the only part of the world where this might happen and developing countries which don't have adequate vaccine programmes are also a big risk. That's where the idea that until everyone in the world is vaccinated the problem isn't solved comes from.

The more deadly issue is complex. A virus that quickly passes from one host to another and is infectious before the symptoms start can kill every host. It will die out eventually because it runs out of host. Similarly a virus that is super infectious but only causes mild disease may infect the whole population so quickly it has no time to mutate thereby creating a population with very high immunity to that variant.
Then the virus has no where to go so will only move around the non immune population - very young and very old. Like so many other endemic diseases it becomes a niche threat.
If Omicron turns out to be a mild infection, in a population with a high level of natural/vaccine partial immunity it may cause a large number of infections quickly then burn out quickly without causing too much death and destruction. But will leave the population immune to that strain. Low levels of residual infection means less likely hood of mutations. For the uk this would be the perfect solution. Unfortunately not a permanent solution while immunity is low in the rest of the world.

Maybe we should all party on Christmas Eve and the whole country simultaneously gets Covid between Christmas and new. Come January end of pandemic for the uk.
It may be a rather simple naive view but I’m getting to the stage that I’d happily take one for the team.
disclaimer - I have survived Covid twice.

Angrymum the problem is that if everyone has it simultaneously then there'll be insufficient staff to maintain essential serviced. Chaos.

Baystard viruses are not classified as living organisms. They replicate within human cells and not by combining with other viruses. So I’m not sure you will get two different variants combining to produce a super variant. They are however “competitive” which is why some of the more lethal variants haven’t become dominant.
A variant that infects within a couple of days thereby triggering host immunity will have replicated and moved on before the slower more dangerous one has got going. The slower one is killed off by host now primed immune system, that was triggered days beforehand, before it has a chance to infect the cells.

True but we may be heading that way anyway.

We will have to abandon self isolation if the situation arises. If chaos is to be avoided what else can we do.

viruses are not classified as living organisms. They replicate within human cells and not by combining with other viruses

angrymum they literally do combine, it's called recombination. It's one of the ways in which viruses mutate (the other being random). Two viruses in the same cell swap segments of RNA. So if you have one patient with two strains they can basically swap bits of code and produce a new variant. If one is very virulent (dangerous) but with low transmissibility, and one which isn't very virulent but has high transmissibility, you might get a new variant, and it might be very virulent and very transmisible, or it might be neither very virulent or transmisible. But it could be either.

@nordica

A mutation that completely escapes immunity from vaccinations and previous infection is unlikely to happen suddenly. Even if there was significant change to the virus, we wouldn't be back to square one. And the vaccines are relatively easy to tweak - although of course it takes some time to do that and then produce enough doses.

If the "vaccines are relatively easy to tweak" why are the the current vaccines including the "booster" all based on the original Wuhan epitope? Not even the Alpha variant, or the Delta variant, and Omicron has many more mutations.

Have you heard the phrase "don't borrow trouble"?

Thankyou it is a long time since I did virology and did think it was possible but didn’t want to commit myself. I stand corrected.
I do think that omicron is the variant that will be the hardest to control. But if you have natural and vaccine immunity will be ok.

There is no chance, as in a probability, that anyone can give you. Partial vaccine escape is always likely (and has already happened), total vaccine escape is very unlikely, but it is a possibility. We could re-engineer the vaccines to target a new coronavirus (not just SARS-COV2) and have vaccines relative to administer in 60-100 days. Mutations could also happen which made the virus much milder, which is the normal path, at the same time it could become more lethal with an unfortunate set of mutations.

I don't entirely disagree angrymum but I think omicron wil be the least of our worries if we don't get the rest of the world vaccinated.

@HardbackWriter

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

Do what you can to stay as safe as you can, and want to, as things are right now, but don't borrow tomorrow's trouble too.

This gave me great comfort thank you and is so true xx

If the "vaccines are relatively easy to tweak" why are the the current vaccines including the "booster" all based on the original Wuhan epitope

Because this was the first generation of the vaccine the invention of the wheel as it were, and the generation and roll out of a tweaked vaccine, however easy to make (compared to the phenomenonal effort of the original) will be an enormous undertaking and requires careful decision making as to the right one to go for. But it looks like pharmaceutical companies are zeroing in on Omicron.

Oh and the video of a woman collapsing in the street from Covid is fake

So were any number of other images - the scary thing is just how many have been found (and I don't imagine for an instant that this covers all of them):

factcheck.afp.com/covid-19-real-images-wrong-context