with omicron out there starting to appear to be less deadly (stay tuned for more data) I got to thinking: If a highly infectious variant appeared that really wasn’t that bad, what would the CDC et al. do as far as urgin people to avoid contact? WHat would you do? would you look to join a ‘omicron’ party to boost your immunity? I might consider it…and I’m fully vaccinated and boosted.
I wonder if the anti-vac wonks would accept getting such a variant to gain some immunity?
I think you’d have to balance an approach of letting it move through the population whilst still attempting to mitigate the worst effects.
i.e. a variant that inects ten times as many but hospitalises five times fewer still runs a risk of overwhelming healthcare in the short term. Even though you would very quickly pass through that wave it wouldn’t be pretty and boosters/treatments etc. would need to be distributed very quickly as well.
I suspect that is where we are at with omicron.
Well I mean no one goes to influenza parties to boost their immunity. If/when it falls to that threshold and health care capacity can manage it then I expect the direction to be no direction.
Why wouldn’t you just continue boosting your immunity with medically recommended schedules of vaccines and boosters and transmission-reduction protocols instead?
Getting vaccinated and not infected provides better individual protection, less risky side effects, less personal-life and work disruption, and better public-health outcomes than getting infected.
You’d really rather not let any virus run wild, because even if it’s not very dangerous right now, it could mutate to become more dangerous. And if that mutation happens to coincide with yet another increase in contagiousness, then you’re in trouble.
And the chance of such a big-trouble mutation is higher, the more virus there is reproducing in the wild.
Relevant xkcd
I wouldn’t rule out that anti-vaxxers would go for it. But it’s certainly not rational to imagine that there’s less risk in any actual virus than there is in a vaccine.