The stakeholders won't become any more IT proficient than they have become Accounting proficient. CTOs are IT proficient, and they are enough of the stakeholder.
Its milder than Delta but way more transmissible. The more people get this, more will be the chances of a new variant which can be more deadly/transmissible.
It’s possible, but most coronaviruses do not seem to have followed this in the past, nor flu-based viruses. More deadly variants usually don’t win it from less deadly in a selection process.
However it is important as the WHO recommends to do way more to export vaccines to countries that need it. Not just developed countries to prevent the chance of new variants.
If this is all so likely and rapid, why does this not happen constantly every single year? Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak when it seems like with so many humans we should see some super virus come up constantly.
It does happen from time to time, but it's usually not _quite_ right. In the last couple of decades, there've been at least four or five pandemic false alarms, mostly flu variants. In the event, none of them quite made it. But now that covid _has_ made it, minor variations on the already-very-dangerous-thing can be a big problem.
>Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak
why long? The EcoAlliance's gain-of-function (with the "Human Subjects Included" checked) NIH grant for Wuhan started in 2014, the human-specific DNA modifications of the virus were described in the EcoAlliance's 2018 DARPA grant proposal, and in the end of 2019 - voila!
With regard to omicron - we may be also witnessing the continuation of the same magic of the fast "gain-of-function" by the virus :
"By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints.
This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease."
I guess you're alluding to the "lab leak" theory. I can't say I know how serious it should be taken, but just this: If this really was a lab leak and China knows something we don't know, then I'd be really scared of their current behaviour of locking down entire agglomerations over two-digit numbers of mostly asymptomatic cases.
It's a good article, as far as I can tell - in particular as actually presents some evidence for reasonable assumptions. Though to be fair, it was known before that GoF research was conducted in the WIV (I believe) and there is not yet any evidence that the research actually resulted in this virus.
What's new to me though is how deep the involvement of US entities apparently was and how close to SARS-CoV-2 territory the whole endeavour came. So in this case, absence of evidence is definitely not evidence of absence.
Also that one of the drivers of shutting down the lab-leak theory was apparently commissioning the WIV to do GoF research! (Though I still wonder what all the other scientists supporting that editorial were doing.)
If those FOIA papers will be used for more investigations in the near future, thing should definitely become interesting.
I don't think this logic is correct. Viruses can not become infinitely transmissible/deadly; clearly there is an upper ceiling. Second, people gain immunity after infection. We'd expect the first variant that infects most people to win, effectively closing the door behind it.
But we're seeing evidence that Omicron provides some immunity from the more dangerous strains like Delta.
If we're worried about Omicron mutating to become more deadly, why aren't we worried about the other human coronaviruses doing the same? 229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1 that have been around for ages?
There's nothing magic about Omicron, its just a repsiratory virus thats relatively new to humans so there's not so much population immunity. And looks like we're rapidly getting exposed to it, so its about to lose its advantage.
I'm not sure its that different. For example NL63 binds to ACE2 just like covid. Its just less damaging.
Many viruses can attack multiple organs in the body if the infection is bad enough and the viral load is big enough to spread that far - e.g. see https://www.healthline.com/health/viremia
