I’m not worried about the Delta variant the way I’m worried about the Omega variant.
“Omega” is the name I’ve given to the variant of coronavirus that may well evolve if we don’t stop the pandemic, and which would have the capability of killing most of humanity.
One of the things that has prevented current covid variants from doing this is their inherent limitations. For example, they largely spread through airborne transmission. But Omega would live on objects in the open air at room temperature for weeks. It would spread more rapidly in the body, and it would disable more of the immune system in the process. It would survive typical food processing techniques. It would easily spread to other animals—pets, livestock, birds—and back to humans.
In other words, it would be far more lethal and spread far easier than even the Delta variant. And if it escaped into the population, the results would threaten all human life, much as The Andromeda Strain threatened life on earth in that 1971 movie. But it would be far harder to stop because it would not be contained to a small facility in the Nevada desert. That’s in part because it could evolve anywhere on the globe where humans already are infected by covid.
It is critical to stop this infection as quickly as possible, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.
As Dartagnan notes in Republicans freak out because the delta variant they fostered is killing ... Republicans (21 July 2021):
Let’s be clear on something: Variants to the COVID-19 virus are caused by allowing the virus to continue spreading among the unvaccinated, giving it more time and opportunity to mutate. The more unvaccinated people there are, the better the chance of a variant developing and spreading. That’s what led to this delta variant that’s now ravaging the vaccine-refusing Republican population in this country. In simpler terms, Republican intransigence and political pandering created and abetted the conditions that led to the spread of the delta variant and encouraged an environment that allowed it to flourish.
That same vaccine resistance may lead to other variants. If it led to an Omega variant right now, we would not be discussing the issue in another year.
It isn’t just fixing this one pandemic, either. We need to use this pandemic as incentive to create a much more robust response to infectious diseases. Our knowledge of viruses is just starting, and we could easily see other viruses come from nature or just evolve within the human population.
There are an unimaginable number of viruses on earth (one estimate put the number at 1031).(See “Welcome to the virosphere” by Jonathan R. Goodman in New Scientist, 11 January 2020.) One recent study alone revealed about 75,000 new virus species. (“Thousands more viruses discovered” by Michael Marshall, 15 February 2020.)
By the way, this renders moot the debate whether SARS-CoV-2 came from the environment or a lab. Even if we determined it was an enhanced virus from a Chinese lab that was intentionally released into the environment, and then we somehow plugged that hole, it would not protect us from a random naturally occurring virus that made its way from animals to humans—which is a proven route of creating a pandemic.
We are awash in viruses, and we need to be able to handle them. A study by Chris Buck at the National Cancer Center in Bethesda, MD, looked at fragments of DNA from human and animal samples and turned up DNA for over 2,500 new viruses. Many of them belong to families of viruses we already know about, but over 600 didn’t resemble any known virus family. (From the same article by Michael Marshall.) From this point of view, the covid pandemic was an engraved invitation on a gold-plated card to start developing a system to identify virus threats and develop responses before those viruses visit.
Unfortunately, right now we are giving covid a head start in creating an Omega variant by letting it proceed in humans while vaccinations are readily available to just about anyone in the U.S. And the only thing stopping us from pushing out that technology to the rest of the world is the normal political and business constraints to delivering anything.
This is why I think our government should take stronger steps to get people vaccinated in this country. There are plenty of vaccines to go around. The government needs to quickly pass a law that cuts off funds for people who contract covid if they failed to get vaccinated. Set a timeframe (like the end of August) and notify each person in the country that they will be on the hook for the full costs if they don’t take prudent steps.
This law should stipulate that neither the government, nor any other organization (including health insurance companies) will be responsible for covering the costs of covid care or treatment unless that person has either received one of the approved vaccines or has a valid medical reason (such as suppressed immunity) that prevents them from doing so.
This will put every person who has not been vaccinated on notice that they aren’t just taking the risk of getting sick with covid. If they need serious medical treatment for covid, such as a hospital visit, they will need to cough up, personally, the entire cost.
The vast majority of people in this country who refuse to get vaccinated for covid are Republicans or Republican sympathizers. Republicans don’t care about others until they are going to experience a personal cost.
The incentive from this proposal doesn’t even come from having to bear the cost. The incentive comes from confronting them with what they are actually risking. This becomes a decision where the individual has to take responsibility for their future. Very few things are scarier than responsibility.
Shouldn’t we just mandate vaccinations? We may get to that point, but I don’t see a federal mandate. What’s the constitutional basis? What’s the legal basis?
You might get that action at the state level, but it’s unlikely any Republican-led state is going to take that step. And that’s exactly where it’s needed most.
Corporations and schools might demand vaccinations, but that’s only a fraction of the population. And this depends on thousands of individual decisions by those institutions to make that requirement.
Demanding financial responsibility, however, can be done at the national level. A federal law can relieve all parties of responsibility to pay for care to those who have not been vaccinated. This is relatively simple, and it would be very effective at persuading a large segment of the Republican population to take the vaccine.
Once we have dealt with the covid pandemic sufficiently, we need to start working to prevent the next viral outbreak and prepare our response to it. The covid pandemic to-date was horrible, but it isn’t the Omega variant.
Humans long have considered whether we are the only form of sentient life in the universe. Statistically, this is almost impossible. But efforts to locate extraterrestrial civilizations have so far come to naught, despite efforts as far back as 1900. (See Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Wikipedia.)
There’s a reason for this. Most civilizations don’t make it. They blow themselves up with nuclear weapons, succumb to an AIDS-like disease, or get smashed flat by an asteroid.
Well, possibly, that’s overly cynical, but you see where I’m going. If we plan to make it as a species, then we need to be a lot smarter than this. We need to be smart enough that when a pandemic breaks out, the vast majority of people on the planet pitch in to stamp it out. And we can’t afford stupid leaders. That means that we cannot afford to elect another Republican to the White House, because we have proof Republicans are not bright enough to lead the country in an existential crisis like an Omega variant.
Listen. The dinosaurs survived on earth for about 175 million years. For comparison, the human and chimpanzee lineages split within the last 8 million years, and homo sapiens (modern humans) are thought to have developed about 300,000 years ago.
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for more than 350 times as long as modern humans. From their point of view, the term “human” is synonymous with “failure”.
If we are going to show those dinosaurs how it’s really done, then we need to get up in the 200-million-year range. To do that, we need to be far smarter than we’ve shown with covid.