The Omicron variant

And yet I've been in a room for hours with a couple of someones who got a positive 24hrs later and I didn't? Neither did another person. I currently know one household of five who got it last week and two are still negative on antigen and had a negative PCR.

As for the R0 value, measles is pretty much the most transmissable infection out there. It has an R0 of between 14 and 18 depending on the source measuring it. The common cold is around 5. Chickenpox around 11-14.

Please show me a credible source, not some "doctor on newstalk" either, that claims omicron gets within an asses roar of the R0 of measles. Any credible source I've read has it at between 3-5. That's a bit off even the lowest level R0 of measles. So on current credible data I'm calling bollocks on that.

Name one CP. Seriously, it's not even close to being a thing among viruses. Smallpox was with us for over two thousand years. Didn't get any less lethal. Same for polio. Rabies, pretty much 100% fatal and with us for three thousand years. Measles didn't get any less nasty, if anything one could argue it got slightly worse. HIV has been with us for over forty years and doesn't show any sign of getting less dangerous. Ebola looks to have gotten worse and it was no sniffle to start with. Even the "average" seasonal flu still kills roughly the same percentage of people every year and if it does mutate away from the average it's more likely to be towards lethality. The second wave variant of the 1918 flu was much worse than the first.

Another problem is looking to past pre vaccines and modern medicine pandemics. The viruses appeared to get less deadly over time. They don't. What happens is they burn through the population with no immunity and you're left with the recovered who have some immunity and the dead who are, well, dead. It runs out of hosts. The virus stayed the same. If it found another population with no immunity it would burn through them in just the same way.

All a virus "cares about" is reproduction. That's it. Lethality is a coin toss. This is even more so the case with a virus that exhibits asymptomatic spread before people get obviously unwell. It's already jumped to a new host so doesn't "care" about the previous. There's little selection pressure for it to not kill the sick host. If anything the selection pressure is to keep reproducing in that sick host trying to avoid the immune system. Those poor buggers who have died in hospital with this pox were in most cases weeks past when they infected others.

Yet for some reason, wishful thinking I suppose, it's become quite the mantra among people and sections of the media, even doctors(almost certainly not epidemiologists) coming out with this about covid when a microphone is in their face. We got very lucky with Omicron. On top of vaccines and better therapies for the sick of course. It could have become more infectious and more deadly.