Lurker > ZayKayWill

looks like a man trying way to hard to look like a woman

@ZayKayWill
i disagree with your signature

please dont assume my preferred pronoun

lmao

You can, actually. I can't be bothered to fish out exact numbers, but if memory serves, Alpha was somewhere on the order of 50-70% more dangerous than the wild type, Beta was ~20% more dangerous than Alpha, Delta was ~150% more dangerous than Beta, and Omicron dropped back to about 20-30% more dangerous than the wild type (while being 6 or 7 times more contagious). It's hard to pin down exact figures on that because treatment improved so much from the early days of dealing with the wild type to when Omicron became the dominant variant, but it's fairly easy to at least rank them, if not quantitatively compare them.

That information, however, is generally useless for laypersons because identifying a specific strain requires a more in-depth PCR test than the typical one (let alone the rapid tests that comprise the vast majority of Covid tests these days), so a given patient isn't likely to ever know anything beyond "I'm Covid positive." That really only comes up in doing things like wastewater testing to determine the relative incidence of a given strain in the population, which in turn informs public health agencies so they can (try to) respond accordingly.

That information is also only useful for determining relative risk: You cannot say that, because a patient has Omicron and not Delta, they will not die. Only that they're less likely to. Omicron being a less severe disease does not preclude it from being severe enough to kill the patient, which is going to be based on other factors. Those rankings are based on broad statistical analyses with large enough sample sizes to (hopefully) eliminate random variation in other factors (or at least reduce it to insignificant levels).