Thread by @Telegraph

❓Is omicron becoming the common cold?

Throughout the pandemic, scientists have hoped for a transmissible, trivial variant.

✍️Dr Chris Smith, a consultant virologist and lecturer at Cambridge University, investigates

Thread 🧵👇
telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…

📉So far, medics in South Africa estimate that the case fatality rate of their omicron outbreak is about 0.5% compared with 3% for Delta.

"Admittedly, it’s still early days...but these data do look very encouraging" writes Dr Smith

😷Is the virus, in the face of the measures with which we confront it, now adapting in a more benign direction?

"The answer is that it might be – and this is where history can help, because we have strong evidence that it’s happened before"

"In 1890 a pandemic swept the globe and the death toll was more than a million."

"It was put down to flu, but, in more recent years, scientists have pieced together various lines of evidence suggesting that it was instead caused by a bovine coronavirus"

✍️"The 344-page report on the outbreak, penned in 1891 by ‘Dr Parsons’, documents strikingly similar symptoms to Covid among those afflicted, and even talks about a post-viral syndrome eerily similar to long Covid"

telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…

❓So what happened in the aftermath?

Scientists suspect the 1890 coronavirus left in its wake a herd of immune survivors who then, throughout the rest of their lives, periodically caught the virus again, but the disease was never as bad as each individual’s first encounter

🦠"We suspect that the virus retreated into the background, acquiring some genetic changes along the way to facilitate its persistence in humans, to become one of four common cold-causing coronaviruses that we all periodically catch from the time we’re born to the time we die"

"This gives us an insight into a possible direction that Covid might be taking, with omicron" writes Dr Smith

telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…