Data seems to indicate omicron milder, more transmissible, hospitalizations low
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If the above hypothesis is true, that doesn't necessarily make Omicron "milder" than Delta. Omicron would be infecting people who would not be infected by Delta, so in those people (some disease) is more severe than (no disease). I have not yet seen evidence one way or the other regarding severity for a first infection in a non-immune person.
That is to say, "Omicron is milder!" could be an artifact of Simpson's Paradox.
https://www.news24.com/health24/medical/infectious-diseases/...
A virus probably doesn’t ‘care’ that much about a 1% host death rate in the short term.
It’s also quite obvious, mechanistically: COVID doesn’t lose many infections by eventually killing the patient who, by then, is obviously sick and most often in the hospital. It gets 80%+ of retransmission even before symptoms appear, removing all evolutionary pressure from the later stages.
I doubt the top epidemiologists are spreading myths.
The "unusual" cases where covid is causing death might not be enough, no. The fact that it causes people to stay at home however could be.
Do any of them have names? (Either the viruses or the epidemiologists)
And that’s supposedly because… these common cold viruses were just too quick to kill their victims, at first?
But viruses spread in the real world not some hypothetical lab. In the real world as viruses become deadlier they tend to provoke a much larger response from governments and populations, both in terms of prevention and vaccines/cures/treatments. That's why there's a lot more money spent on potential HIV vaccines than on vaccines for the common cold. Being deadlier is a distinct disadvantage if you're a virus trying to survive for the long haul.
But those viruses don't generally spread very fast because of their severity.
Prior to that, it was both very deadly and very contagious. Those facts were not hurting it.
Those attributes did not make it evolutionarily weak unless you count motivating people to make vaccines.
What is your point?
In other words, the high-level theory is that more severe viruses either kill their hosts, or make them so sick that they stop interacting with other potential hosts. A form of social distancing, if you will.
In both cases, the virus is triggering some form of behavior change in its host that reduces its reproduction, providing evolutionary pressure towards milder viruses.
One could argue that the development and wide distribution of a vaccine is just one form of host behavior change, and should be factored in.
Something with a mortality rate of 30+% and kills children at orders of magnitude higher rate than COVID has is far easier to convince the world populace to vaccinate for than something with 1-2 order of magnitude lower CFR.
So you can most 100%, certainly say, it was eradicated because it is so deadly. If only say 0.5% of people died from it, disproportionately the elderly those with comorbidities, eradicating smallpox would have been a hell of a lot harder to get worldwide vaccinations on board. A hell of a lot.
It's honestly too early to tell what the characteristics of Omicron are, there's just not enough data. Some anecdotes look positive, but mostly what we're seeing is the media going nuts trying to say something when the responsible thing to do is say nothing and wait.
But there is a lot of data, it is just hard to interpret, even for experts (which I'm not): It is currently summer in South Africa, but there was a summer wave last year. "Around 60-70% of South Africans have already had a Covid-19 infection" (from another comment). Age distribution. How fast omicron is spreading and why. How many are vaccinated (once, twice,...). How many breakthrough infections. Delta and other variants are spreading faster than the previous mostly due to higher viral load. Omicron seems to have has higher viral load. Omicron also binds to ACE2. What is the typical delay between infection and hospital / ICU admission. Some of this is discussed e.g. in https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-were-...
I understand that the media doesn't just stay silent. What I'm missing from them is in-depth and up-to-date info, with error bars. They can do that for weather forecasts, they should also be able to do this for omicron.
Because this version is more transmissible, and (theoretically?) causes your body to create antibodies that are effective against the other variants, this version of the virus will cause more people than ever to have antibodies without as much risk of death or long-term illness. People will either get the vaccine, or their risk of contracting covid will go up.
They didn't mean "has kicked in", they mean it's starting to.
That's the trick. Delta already appears to be very, very transmissible. If Omicron's growth is due entirely to improved transmissibility, then it would have to spread in a non-distanced, vulnerable population at an implausibly high rate, comparable to some of the most transmissible viruses ever studied.
However, if Omicron's improved spread is partially through immune escape, then its growth could be explained through reinfections and breakthrough infections -- people who are largely immune to Delta are contracting a mild case of Omicron. That does not make the variant inherently less deadly, since it's not an apples-to-apples comparison on the ill populations.
It will probably be some time yet before we have reliable statistics on the severity of Omicron in the never-infected, never-vaccinated cohort. In the meantime, there's reasonable cause to be concerned for vulnerable people (elderly, people with lung conditions, or the immunocompromised) who are partially relying on low community infection rates for their personal protection.
> Data which looked at hospitalizations across South Africa between 14 November and 4 December found that ICU occupancy was only 6.3 % – which is very low compared with the same period when the country was facing the peak linked to the Delta variant in July.
Did they account for previous infection or vaccination status? What if a lot of these are breakthroughs/reinfections. Considering excess deaths in South Africa, their national data on number of cases is sort of, doubtful [1].
Further, they seem to have observed mainly a population under 40.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/unpacking-south-africas-excess-d...
The "Seems to indicate" verbiage means that these are early findings, expected to stay the same, but may change over time.
And the elderly and morbidly obese have already been removed from the sample.
What’s the vaccination rate in SA again?
See: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Sout...
But also
> Around 60-70% of South Africans have already had a Covid-19 infection since the start of the epidemic in March 2020.
https://www.news24.com/health24/medical/infectious-diseases/...
Right now there is a big dichotomy. The majority of the epidemiologists and scientists say things are going to be bad. Then we have mainstream media going off of clinical notes. Still those notes don't square with increased hospitalizations of the very young.
We are probably right in the middle of Simpson's paradox and only time will tell.
The poster's bio on the right clearly states that they're a senior vaccine R&D scientist, and they've been posting well-sourced and cogent analysis of the pandemic since it started. This isn't just some rando on Twitter.
If you just looked at something raw like hospitalization/infected, like I see being used, you don't get a meaningful comparison, since much of the population now has some form of immunity compared to delta.
The most interesting would be comparing hospitalization/infected for unvaccinated at some older age, like > 50yo.
It took months to answer that for Delta vs the reference... And everyone said Delta was less lethal than the original strain and surprise it is not.
We'll see if the governments will ease these restrictions now that it's becoming more and more clear that there's no reason to panic.
It sounds like you're disagreeing with this logic (from the phrase "excuse government over-reach"), but you haven't elucidated.
But then the purpose of politics is showmanship, not effective action.
Thankfully they weren’t total flight bans, but flights are the only way in, and they required quarantine. This worked until Delta.