system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
is the spread of COVID typical for a respiratory virus

i understand that there's no respiratory virus for which we have so much data as COVID 19, but what do we think: is this global pandemic pattern, with the virus and the Deltas and the Omicrons and etc etc and the rapid spikes in infection rates etc, something that happens all the time with your everyday harmless sneezy colds?

Followup question to 'yes' responses: are there other viruses that are following a similar pattern *right now* to COVID, like, are the infection waves etc correlated?
gpt
Flu follows a seasonal wave pattern. It spreads mainly in the winter. To make the vaccine and produce it in time we need to guess which flu strains need to be in it 6 months in advance. We do that with a worldwide network of scientists studying flu. We trace it as it bounces from northern hemisphere to southern hemisphere and back and make educated guesses about what strains to include in the vaccine for the next year.

Respiratory Syntactyl Virus (RSV) is a respiratory virus that many people get. Mostly it acts like just a minor cold unless you are very young or very old. It's one of the leading causes of hospitalizations for infants however. During the lockdowns for COVID the things we did almost eliminated RSV transmission. As we relaxed the non-medical interventions, lockdowns and such, RSV made a big resurgence.

The reason COVID's waves are so dramatic is that it's a new virus. The population was immunologically naive to it i.e. nobody had had it before. That's the situation you can have explosive growth in viruses. Back before the chickenpox vaccine came out schools would have little epidemics of kids catching it. Chickenpox is more infectious than even omicron (R0 \~12 is usually quoted. Some of the high end estimates for omicron put it's R0 at 10). Since the older kids and teachers were immune the size of these epidemics were small. All viruses have waves anytime there are large enough groups of people who are succeptiable.

Our "back to normal" with COVID is when it starts acting more like a flu. It will probably start causing waves every fall and winter (much smaller ones than the ones going on now). Since most people will have either had it or been vaccinated it, these waves almost certainly won't be as dangerous at that point. People will still die, but we won't be risking the collapse of our healthcare system because of the load.