It’s gonna get way worse

Omicron seems to be less severe than previous strands, so it’s actually a good sign

The infectiousness of it though. It’s an exponential multiplier. We had better hope it’s *much* less severe in order to compensate. Jury is still out on that.

True, but the next strand will hopefully be even less severe, and so on. Omicron is a step in the right direction, a problem right now that hopefully will be less of a problem in the future

Sorry to jump in so late on this... two thoughts come to mind.

It's been a couple weeks since you two discussed this, and the evidence does indicate that Omicron is less severe than previous strains. While there is the multiplier to consider in terms of impact on health care resources and potential deaths, most people will recover from it. And covid had a pretty high recovery rate to start with. So hopefully this is something that will contribute to the ever elusive herd immunity.

Also, isn't there zero evidence to suggest that the next major variant will be less severe than Omicron? For example, the next variant could be way more severe, but less transmissible. Granted, I haven't read a ton of material on this subject, but I'm reasonably sure there's no way to predict what will come next. All we can predict is that there will be another variant. Hopefully Biden will wake up and do something more effective to protect us against it than he has done with Delta and Omicron (as he promised he would!)