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This is why the “omicron is milder” malarkey is wrong. It infects people three times faster than delta. So while there are less people (for now) in intensive care, there will be massive numbers of NHS staff who have to self isolate. And it’s still a crisis if there is a massive overload of normal ward beds (milder forms of covid) rather than the ICU.

The dangers posed by accepting the widespread assumption that Covid-19 variants would continue to get milder in their impact was highlighted by epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse, of Edinburgh University. “The Omicron variant did not come from the Delta variant. It came from a completely different part of the virus’s family tree. And since we don’t know where in the virus’s family tree a new variant is going to come from, we cannot know how pathogenic it might be. It could be less pathogenic but it could, just as easily, be more pathogenic,” he said. This point was backed by virologist Prof Lawrence Young of Warwick University. “People seem to think there has been a linear evolution of the virus from Alpha to Beta to Delta to Omicron,” he told the Observer. “But that is simply not the case. The idea that virus variants will continue to get milder is wrong. A new one could turn out to be even more pathogenic than the Delta variant, for example.”

Omicron, Omicron, brace brace brace

If cases are doubling every two days, that works out to 99 872 on the 22nd December, and 399 488 Omicron cases by Boxing Day.