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[quote=Anonymous]Let's not jump the gun.

[i]Limited data impede any firm conclusions about the threat posed by omicron and whether it can evade immunity[/i]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/29/how-bad-is-omicron-variant/

[i]
“Omicron is like the song ‘One Piece at a Time’ by Johnny Cash, where he puts together a car from stolen bits of lots of different cars. It is made of mutations that were somewhat successful separately in other variants, but together it is hard to say more than it looks weird,” Neuman said.

Scientists don’t want to get ahead of the facts: No one knows yet how this variant behaves in real-world situations. But if it has a high degree of immune evasiveness, vaccine makers will have to revise their formulas, something already in the works at a preliminary stage. This would be a major setback in the world’s efforts to emerge from a pandemic soon to enter its third full year. The other possibility: Omicron could go the way of alpha, beta, lambda, gamma, mu and other variants that had worrisome mutations and a period of notoriety but were driven virtually to extinction by the more transmissible delta variant.

South Africa, now late in its springtime, was experiencing a low level of viral transmission before omicron appeared and started a cluster of infections. That cluster could have represented a random superspreader event rather than a clear signal of greater transmissibility of omicron.

Experience offers some hope that omicron could fade as a threat. Other variants — for example, mu — have appeared with mutations that are known to lower the potency of antibodies. But that immune-escape advantage was not enough to overcome a relative weakness in other mechanisms that enable infection. So when the mu variant appeared in Southern California, it generated headlines for a week or two before being crushed by delta.[/i][/quote]

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