Thread by @AlexandraErin

And the reason is: contagiousness matters more than lethality. It matters in terms of how fast the virus spreads, how far it spreads, and -- counterintuitively -- how deadly it is.

The less lethal disease can kill way more people if it is better at transmitting itself.

https://twitter.com/1siyyy/status/1478195575149449219

This is what kills me (and one day, might actually do so) about people who are saying, "Rejoice! Omicron is milder and faster spreading, and that's a good thing, because we're all going to get it."

Milder plus faster spreading == more people dead.

Consider the difference between a sniper with perfect accuracy using a weapon with a low rate of fire and who is not even firing at the maximum rate, vs. somebody with a fully automatic rifle or a machine gun going full "spray and pray", shooting wildly in a vague direction.

The sniper could hit with every shot, kill with every hit, and still kill fewer people than the person with the machine gun who is only hitting with a very small percentage of the rounds discharged.

Each of the sniper's shots is deadlier. But the machine gun kills more.

And maybe you're thinking "Okay, but this is a flawed analogy because when we're talking about diseases, everybody missed or winged by the machine gun becomes immune to bullets, so to speak."

Except that's not for certain? And you can be "winged" and suffer massive trauma.

Omicron is a machine gun. Its accuracy and ratio of shots fired to kills is being compared to slower, more accurate weapons being handled with greater precision, and on that basis, we're being advised to walk into the machine gun fire. We're told by some it's a good thing.