Omicron No more than a cold ?

[Citizen's Nephew]

My very basic and non professional level of understanding based on what I've read and heard is that this would be the natural life cycle of this sort of disease.

That there is only so much that it can mutate, that it would eventually weaken itself. The higher the transmissibility of most diseases the weaker they generally are.

With vaccines, new treatments and perhaps, fingers crossed a milder variant spreading then is this the next phase in the pandemic?

We certainly can't keep closing businesses and having massive handouts from central government each winter.

I'd like to think out of this horrible disease comes reform for the NHS, the extra funding it needs and better working conditions and wages for its staff. Robust plans for future pandemics and a continued boom in the research and development of new treatments for all diseases.

Imagine cancer treatments had the funding and energy that covid has had.

I think this is a really good post, especially the part about extra funding and resources. This is especially true when the biggest hit to the NHS over the next 10 years will be the long-term effects of Covid 19. That's the key part for me. That's the difference between Covid 19 and a cold virus. They may both present similar risks (although the risk of respiratory complications is significantly higher for Covid) for a lot of patients but unlike a cold virus, there's a sliding scale of immune responses in a wider variety of people. This would mean that for those who are predisposed to autoimmune triggers then Covid is a massive contributor and it's in these people that high risks of developing autoimmune diseases i.e.neurological diseases, that we should be preparing our services for in terms of long-term, chronic conditions.

None of our politicians are even talking about it let alone preparing. They're kicking the can down the road as they usually do with everything that's going to hit us badly in the future.

We're not training doctors, nurses, and other medical staff in anything like the numbers we're going to need them. We have no recruitment policy. All these positions and all this training should be free. The money that's been wasted could have been invested in people and training. Science has been politicised and the politicians have been weak. The media badly report the data and confuse the public and then we end up with the nightmare of conspiracy on social media. I've said before it's a mess and the real travesty is that nobody wants to be the one to say 'we got it wrong' in certain areas when that's exactly the kind of candid discussion we need to move forward.