Mild

 No, the virus is not getting "milder."

Before omicron came along, SARS-CoV-2 was actually evolving to be more severe, says Bhattacharyya, of Harvard Medical School. "We're looking at a virus that's gotten progressively more severe over time," he says.

A study from the U.K. found that alpha was about 40% more likely to kill a person than the original virus. And delta was about two times more likely to put you in the hospital than the alpha variant.

"Omicron may be a small step back in severity. But it's probably more severe on its own than the original version of the virus," Bhattacharyya says. Becoming "more mild" hasn't been the trend or evolutionary trajectory, he says.

In addition, omicron didn't evolve directly from delta. It evolved from an earlier version of the virus circulating in 2020. And so omicron could actually be more severe than its ancestral virus, and it could be progressing toward higher severity, Bhattacharyya says.

And thus, there's no guarantee that the next variant to emerge will be milder. It could be the most severe yet.

"I think we don't really know what direction this virus is taking," says evolutionary biologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "We've learned that trying to predict the evolutionary trajectory of this virus is very, very difficult. If not impossible."

How did the "mildness" of Omicron evolve?  Well, America's bosses decided it was time to force people back to work regardless of the health hazard. America's political leaders, by and large, agreed with that. And America's news editors, by and large being of the same socio-economic class as America's bosses and political leaders decided they, too, were tired of being inconvenienced by worker safety concerns and that it was time to stop worrying so much about COVID.  So they started putting the word "mild" in headlines and the thing just mutated from there into conventional wisdom.

Can't go back now. Even if the next variant really is more severe, they've all figured out whose lives do and do not matter by this point.