This was my first thought too “we won’t lose Mane, Salah and Kieta now”… I think we may be wired differently than the rest.
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Same here. Switzerland forbid incoming flights from South Africa yesterday. Despite of this, one flight coming in from there landed today. The passengers weren’t tested, weren’t put in quarantine, nothing. Only a few hours after their arrival, they were asked to test themselves (insert facepalm pic).
Although there hasn’t been an official case detected yet, I’m sure that with this kind of complacency and incompetence, the new variant has already arrived in Switzerland too.
(Strange name, Omicron… but I suppose it’s better than B.1.222.4422-48029347)
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Sir Patrick Vallance saying how important it is that we have robust contact tracing so that we can detect clusters in the UK of the new variant.
Good luck with that in a nation where there have been between 30,000 to 50,000 cases per day for the last 20 weeks.
And a track and trace system set up by Dido Harding
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We can only hope. A variant that spreads like wildfire and displaces Delta while producing significant antibody response, but produces mild symptoms would be an astonishingly benign turn of events.
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Christ. If they wanted to panic people, Omicron is the right name. Sounds like something James Bond would be needed to stop.
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Well fortunately, everyone here is very diligent about masks, social distancing and taking necessary precautions.
Oh, no. Wait. It’s exactly the opposite of that.
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Tbf, some people need a kick up the arse.
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???
FIFY! 
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Since they announced the emergence of this new variant, I’ve been hoping for this. It would be a really ideal outcome.
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The name is originally derivated from the Phoenician term Ayin, for eye, which then became the fifteenth letter in the Greek alphabet. This was it’s hieroglyph at the time in the Phoenician alphabet:
In other terms: Big Brother is watching you. 
Isn’t this the ideal scenario for the virus as well? A virus that kills its host isn’t ideal for its own survival.
feels kinda weird talking as if Virus Lives Matter but hopefully you get my meaning
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It isn’t, but only to the extent that humans are able to provide evolutionary pressures that make causing the host harm disadvantageous. I am not sure that we have seen that yet.
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Other than influenza, hard to think of a viral pathagen which became less deadly over time. Polio, smallpox, measles, HIV etc. all remained pretty much the same. For me there was some danger SARS-2 might morph into something closer to SARS-1, which was very deadly. Not that I have any basis for that belief. COVID doesn’t seem to me deadly enough for a variant that is less deadly to catch an advantage. It seems so far that the virus’s mortality and morbidity characteristics have remained about the same while transmissibility variation has been privileged. Guess that makes sense. And I suppose one that can evade existing immunity would also be privileged.
We wouldn’t really notice a virus that had evolved that way though. Consider the rhinoviruses that cause the cold, or most of the herpes types. Possibly even the ones that cause warts. When they emerged, quite possible they were more serious, and now we barely care about them.
Just conjecture. For smallpox, influenza, polio, etc. Centuries of evidence. Mortality/morbidity characteristics don’t change much. Human’s don’t gain longlasting immunity. Too early days with COVID but likely similar situation. We won’t know for a few weeks with Omicron but likely not so different from Delta in terms of those stats. More transmissible? Delta already pretty efficient in that way, and look at what it is still doing in central Europe.
Very hard to know what has happened with mortality in the long term for viruses, because the period for which we have data is also the period in which we have made radical adjustments in our capacity to treat. But we know there are many virus types that we have fairly benign interactions with, which may have once been comparable to some of the ones we think of as killers.