Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part.
Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like we're stuck with the original vaccines.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-vari...
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c...
8 months is incorrect. Here's[1] an article from 17 months ago about results from Moderna's covid-19 trials for vaccinations dating back to mar16 2020. So it's been 21 months, not 8 (and that's ignoring trials of mRNA vaccines years earlier as they weren't for this specific virus)
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/07/hopeful-...
This is the answer for why not all annual flu vaccines need clinical trials.
Which one?
Here is a pretty good summary of the history of vaccine development.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/812621_1
While nearly all influenza vaccines generate similar antibodies, Covid and influenza vaccines generate significantly different antibodies
Influenza vaccines generate antibodies against influenza Hemagglutinin proteins targeting sialic acid receptors
Covid vaccines generate antibodies for (S) glycoproteins targeting ACE-2 receptors.
In short, we have 80+ years of experience generating antibodies for hemagglutinin, and much less for (S) glycoproteins.
Yes, we do[1][2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectivenessqa.htm
Going forward, the FDA has already said that a reformulation of the mRNA Covid vaccine would face a similarly shortened approval process.
>FDA says Covid vaccines that target new variants won’t need large clinical trials to win approval
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/covid-vaccine-fda-says-shots...
In order to save dozens of lives that might have been lost in challenge trials, we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives so that we could wait for more ethically-sound vaccine trials to complete.
If you (soft or hard) mandate a vaccine, and you kill someone with it, that's a lot of responsibility to take, if the vaccine didn't go through a full trial.
If the vaccines were as optional as eg. flu vaccines are, then a simple waiver would solve most of the issues.
(a 20yo girl died in slovenia due to jannsen vaccine not that long ago, and she got vaccinated, becase she was soft-forced by the government mandates (48 hour testing, far away from home, but unable to use the bus without a test, to go to the testing site, 12eur/test,...).
In a normal trial, you give half of participants a vaccine, and half of participants a placebo. Then, you wait around and see how many people in each group catch COVID naturally and get sick. Your vaccine works if fewer people who received a vaccine get sick compared to the placebo.
In a challenge trial, you give half of participants a vaccine and half of participants a placebo, and then purposefully expose them all to COVID so you don’t have to wait around for them to catch the virus naturally. As before, your vaccine works if fewer people who received a vaccine get sick.
A challenge trial gives you data which is more, not less, robust, because you’re controlling for more variables between groups. And we’ve used challenge trials to test vaccines in the past—just, never with a disease that’s nearly as deadly as COVID.
Any firestorm would result from a trial participant dying from the COVID they were purposefully given (which could absolutely happen), not from the vaccine. This has nothing to do with vaccine mandates.
Well, not me personally but a "five-member commission, namely, three doctors (neurologist, infectologist and vascular specialist), a pharmacologist and Zoran Simonovič, a representative of the epidemiological profession" has.
https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-conf...
> Minister of Health, Janez Poklukar, the head of the regional unit of the Maribor National Institute of Public Health, Zoran Simonovič, professor Borut Štrukelj from the Faculty of Pharmacy, Ljubljana and Maja Bratuša held a press briefing on the current situation regarding Covid-19 disease.
...
> “The commission unanimously assessed that there was a direct link between the vaccination with Janssen Johnson & Johnson and the tragic complication, i.e. the onset of the syndrome”, said Simonovič.
...
> Moreover, he said that he is to propose to the vaccine advisory group to stop vaccinating with Janssen in Slovenia, or to enable vaccination with Janssen only at the explicit request of an individual, who must confirm this with signature. “This means that the currently valid provisional vaccination protocol with Janssen will become permanent”, said Minister Poklukar.
Soon after, astrazeneca was slowly pulled out due to a few deaths elsewhere (not in slovenia), then a wife of our diplomat died in belgium (jannsenn), and the media talked a lot about the hospital procedures, and how she could be saved... then this 20yo girl (from the report) died from jannsen, and we stopped using jannsen too, then scandinavian countries stoped using moderna due to heart issues in younger people, and we're down from 4 to 1 vaccine, with huge mandates that indirectly force you to get vaccinated. ...and the antivaxxers are just waiting for something bad to happen with pfeizer, to show they were right about safety issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study#Vaccines...
If possible, basic efficacy testing is done on non-human models, either in vitro or animal models. For species-specific viruses, this is difficult and may be impossible. I'm not sure what if any such testing was done with the SARS-COV-2 vaccine candidates.
A basic safety test with dosages thought to be low enough not to present any risks. The goal here is simply to see what if any side effects occur. Any comorbidities, no matter how unrelated, are reported. Note that these may occur in a control / nontreated population, so the key isn't "individual was treated, had condition", but "there is a statistically robust difference in rates of co-morbidities between treatment and control populations" In normal circumstances, such safety testing may take a year or more, and data reporting are ongoing through drug development and use.
Efficacy is determined, where groups treated are assessed for whether or not the drug provides any measureable effect. Note that this can range anywhere from "provides 100% immunity from infection" to "cancer patient dies a horrible painful death 2 weeks after control group". (If you're familiar with cancer research, it is rife with very marginal "positive responses" to therapy. Yes, with some spectacularly better instances.)
Finally, dosing is dialed in to find out how much and how often to deliver the drug. That's how we're ending up with single vs. double innoculation recommendations, and/or boosters, and wait times between dosing. Again, multiple groups followed over time.
All of this takes time. Since COVID-19 has a course of about 1--2 months from exposure to resolution (you get better or you die), and vaccinations have a lead time of about 2 weeks after second dose to full efficacy, that's about four momths just to get baseline measurements.
A typical drug study might have as few as 30--60 patients, though many have more. In the case of the SARS-COV-2 vaccines, trials were much larger as I understand (I don't have data or reports in front of me, so don't take my comments here as significant.)
If there's earlier research to build off of (e.g., mRNA base models of solutions and methods) then some of this process can be based on earlier research, which helps.
But you're still looking at 6--9 months before a vaccine can be recommended with strong assurances even under highly expedited conditions. Given circumstances, health authorities might be willing to operate more quickly and with less data, but those decisions would have to be considered preliminary and subject to revision. Revised understanding around COVID-19 has been highly problematic around the world, leading to trust issues and opportunists spreading disinformation.
And once you have a candidate treatment, you've still got to produce and supply that, with manufacturing and logistics considerations, all of which were evident in the rollout of existing SARS-COV-2 vaccines (e.g., production issues, patent licensing, quality control, storage and refrigeration, cold-chain management, patient contact, scheduling, and follow-up, etc.).
It's complicated.
Source: Some ancillary PHARMA related work in the past, eccelctic interests.
One of those manufacturing / logistics consideration was "we need to make a lot of high quality, sterile glass that can withstand the temperatures that the pharmaceutical companies are saying they're going to be using for transport."
Corning was part of Operation Warp Speed - https://youtu.be/asDKBi5Ungc - they had to build a glass plant to make 0.5B vials/year.
I can deploy an app to Azure, tell it to allocate a server farm, databases, Redis, queues, etc... in 5 minutes too. But that's only because someone took years to do all the necessary work.
By tech you mean mRNA vaccines? How did those studies go about it? Why was it not a thing before COVID-19?
That risk of unknown effects was still there even when it got authorized for emergency use. Has it changed yet? Like... there was a vaccine based on old tech that has been used in humans for decades without side-effects that caused narcolepsy a year or two later, and we got lucky to have been able to make the association. It is not really only about what tech it uses, apparently.
It is quite interesting.
By comparison, (a) these vaccines have directly saved millions of lives (including saving at least tens of thousands of lives of healthy young men), and (b) infection by Covid-19 itself causes myocarditis at much higher rates.
It is likely that these vaccines have in fact prevented more instances of severe myocarditis than they have caused, without considering the large constellation of other dangerous chronic or fatal effects of Covid-19.
The risk/benefit calculations are stark here (in favor of universal vaccination, including for 15–25 year old men), and from what I can tell there is no evidence that the vaccines put children at nontrivial risk.
The smallpox vaccine causes roughly comparable rates of myocarditis, but that didn’t stop us from undertaking a worldwide vaccination campaign to eradicate the disease.
* * *
If there were like 100x more common serious side effects, we should maybe have a conversation about whether certain populations with low Covid risk or heightened vaccine risk should pick which vaccine to take based on potential side effects. But we are so far away from that kind of risk that it is hard to see the commentary from the anti-vax side as any kind of good faith conversation, compared to grasping at whatever straws they can find to spread FUD.
The basic summary is: these vaccines are extremely safe and extremely effective for people of every age. Please everyone get vaccinated. If you have had 2 doses >4 months ago, get boosted. Anyone who tells you that the vaccine is unsafe compared to catching Covid is either grossly misinformed or lying.
Life is deadly, but both sex and covid vaccine rank low on the death list, and high on the life list.
They face ~3 orders of magnitude less risk than elderly people (of whom ~1e7 have died so far), but it is still nontrivial and much higher than the risks from vaccination.
Small kids also spread Covid effectively. There have been a bunch of places with high vaccination rates where there were outbreaks in daycares.
> It has been said [the vaccine] reduces spread, but this is not what you observe
This is what you observe. There have been a large number of studies published examining the effects of vaccination rate on community spread showing that the reproductive number of the virus (at least the original and alpha/delta strains) is significantly depressed by vaccination.
With omicron, vaccine effectiveness vs. initial infection / mild disease is much worse than with previous Covid variants (though it seems that protection vs. severe disease / death is still robust), so we can expect to see significant spread in highly vaccinated areas, but still less and slower than among an unvaccinated population.
> The vaccine does not prevent spread of Covid. Period. The smallest amount of research proves this to be the case.
So what is the truth?
The vaccines significantly reduce the chance of infection given identical exposure. For those who still get infected, the vaccines reduce the viral load throughout the infection, eliminate or ameliorate symptoms, and shorten the time during which an infected person is contagious.
They do not completely prevent any spread of the virus (nor does any other vaccine ever created for any disease), but they make a significant beneficial impact on the rate of spread. They both cut the rate of secondary infections within each household, and reduce the amount of inter-household spread in the community.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
A few months after the second dose, 2 doses of the mRNA vaccines is insufficient to reduce peak viral load for breakthrough infections by the delta variant of the virus, making the vaccine less effective over time at preventing basic transmission and mild illness (the 2-dose vaccine was more effective with previous variants). However, a booster dose seems to make a significant improvement:
> By analyzing viral loads of over 16,000 infections during the current, Delta-variant-dominated pandemic wave in Israel, we found that BTIs in recently fully vaccinated individuals have lower viral loads than infections in unvaccinated individuals. However, this effect starts to decline 2 months after vaccination and ultimately vanishes 6 months or longer after vaccination. Notably, we found that the effect of BNT162b2 on reducing BTI viral loads is restored after a booster dose. These results suggest that BNT162b2 might decrease the infectiousness of BTIs even with the Delta variant, and that, although this protective effect declines with time, it can be restored, at least temporarily, with a third, booster, vaccine dose.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01575-4
* * *
For the omicron variant, there is still further reduced effectiveness of these vaccines on basic transmission and mild illness (only 70% effectiveness after a 3 shots; I don’t think there’s much data yet about viral loads), though protection against severe illness should still be robust (but reliable data about this will not be available for another few weeks or months).
In any case... from what I heard, the omicron variant is somewhat close to common cold, and that it causes mild symptoms. If that is the case, then this is good news, especially if this applies to everyone, or most.
If this omicron variant is indeed much less severe, then would it not be a good thing for as many people as possible to go through it and develop immunity?
Some recent findings and whatnot:
> How SARS-CoV-2 evolves over the next several months and years will determine what the end of this global crisis looks like — whether the virus morphs into another common cold or into something more threatening such as influenza or worse.[1]
> Yet researchers expect such gains to become ever smaller. Scientists measure a virus’s inherent ability to spread in an immunologically naive population (that is, unvaccinated and not exposed to the virus previously) by a number called R0, which is the average number of people an infected person infects. Since the start of the pandemic this figure has jumped as much as threefold. “At some point, I would expect that increased transmissibility will stop happening,” says Bloom. “It’s not going to become infinitely transmissible.” Delta’s R0 is higher than seasonal coronaviruses and influenza, but still lower than that of polio or measles.[1]
Might be of interest:
> That evolutionary path, towards immune evasion and away from gains in infectivity, is common among established respiratory viruses such as influenza says Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “The easiest way for the virus to cause new epidemics is to evade immunity over time. That’s similar to what we see with the seasonal coronaviruses.”[1]
and
> A more likely, but still relatively hopeful, parallel for SARS-CoV-2 is a pathogen called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Most people get infected in their first two years of life. RSV is a leading cause of hospitalization of infants, but most childhood cases are mild. Waning immunity and viral evolution together allow new strains of RSV to sweep across the planet each year, infecting adults in large numbers, but with mild symptoms thanks to childhood exposure. If SARS-CoV-2 follows this path — aided by vaccines that provide strong protection against severe disease — “it becomes essentially a virus of kids,” says Rambaut.[1]
and
> Influenza offers another scenario — in fact two. The influenza A virus, which drives global seasonal influenza epidemics each year, is characterized by the rapid evolution and spread of new variants able to escape the immunity elicited by past strains. The result is seasonal epidemics, propelled largely by spread in adults, who can still develop severe symptoms. Flu jabs reduce disease severity and slow transmission, but influenza A’s fast evolution means the vaccines aren’t always well matched to circulating strains.[1]
> But if SARS-CoV-2 evolves to evade immunity more sluggishly, it might come to resemble influenza B. That virus’s slower rate of change, compared with influenza A, means that its transmission is driven largely by infections in children, who have less immunity than adults.[1]
That said:
> “There may be multiple directions that the virus can go in,” Rambaut says, “and the virus hasn’t committed.”[1]
So I suppose we will see. I am hoping for something like common cold. Mild symptoms. I am also hoping to get rid of some of these mandates and this COVID-19 pass stuff in the future, but once it is in place, do you think it is likely that they will revert it? I do not know, but I hope they will.
I cannot get the vaccines for health reasons, but I am unlikely to get a medical exemption as my country is full of idiots. Other countries do give exemption to immunocompromised people, whereas my country prioritizes them. I wonder if I could get a religious exemption. But yeah, the vaccines might give me a flare-up of whatever I have, and I would rather not risk it. My immune system is in a tough spot with all the inflammations going on, on top of some autoimmune disease. I hope to treat some I can.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03619-8 (Beyond Omicron: what’s next for COVID’s viral evolution, 07 December 2021)
No, we don’t have anywhere near enough data yet to draw that conclusion.
What we know for sure is that it generally doesn’t cause hospitalization/death among people that have previously been infected by Covid or vaccinated. Which is generally true for every variant. And we also know that it has a significant degree of immune escape, causing a much higher rate of reinfections / breakthrough infections than previous variants.
It may be that it turns out to cause less severe disease even for the immunologically naïve, and many observers are hopeful that that turns out to be the case.
> cannot get the vaccines for health reasons
I would recommend you consult a physician who is an expert in your condition before making this decision.
For more explanation, https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2623/2...
The thing is, before the COVID-19, the world had barely heard of mRNA vaccines and suddenly there are billions of people vaccinated across the world in 2 years. I have no intention of denying that these vaccines have saved millions, if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.
But still, a skeptic part of my brain can't seem to 100% accept the fact, even though it might be a medical miracle. It's that scratch on your back you can barely not reach, and it stays itchy for days and months.
On the other hand, vaccines that use inactivated or dead viruses to incite an immune response has been known for more than two centuries, whereas this feels... different.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, none of the other answers to this question in this thread have been proper responses that directly answer the question, except the one about "changing priorities from do no harm to optimize for least harm" that seems to make most sense.
So, I'd love to have a direct answer, no analogies, no "imagine how worse it could have been without vaccines", no "disease X kills more people than Covid and mortality for mRNA vaccine for Covid is negligible compared to that", no shifting goalposts, no guilt-tripping for being skeptic, just a straight, direct answer to this question of the OP.
No remote way that it saved billions of lives. Covid is nowhere close to that level of mortality. The level of exaggeration that people have allowed themselves to succumb to over Covid is frankly quite alarming.
It seems that major news sources have decided to suppress any information that disputes the reductive and simplistic storyline that the vaccine and masks are the perfectly effective and only solution.
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/BANCEL%20STEPHANE...
Too much profit? Sure. I don't think the boosters are going to be what solidifies that issue for corporations though..
Some timing issue with selling? I don't see it.
Chances are these “boosters” will become a quarterly occurrence, even when the virus pose little to no threat (to an already vaccinated person)
How many times has someone lost their job to not getting the flu vaccine?
We've got enough data to reasonably assert that they're safe. That doesn't mean they aren't experimental.
Its like saying gravity is a theory. It sure is. That doesn't mean my phone won't break when I drop it.
In which case all medicine is experimental, because it's all being studied all the time.
(And it has nothing to do with the word practice getting a connotation of imperfect performance long after that phrase came into existence. :D )
have you forgotten about the people having heart issues after receiving the shot?
This is a very safe vaccine, far safer than getting covid (at any age) and that wouldn't make it 'experimental' anyway.
you also assume that if issues didn’t arise shortly after vaccination that issues won’t arise down the road, this is why we do lengthy drug trials and not “5 min express” approvals.
and if it’s so safe then how come the companies developing them still have immunity? if it’s safe and not experimental we can remove that and open them up to lawsuits right?
Yes and this means governments can quickly adapt to new variants by reformulating the vaccine, dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations, or dumping it, and buying new stock from big pharma.
Since developing nations will always have far lower vaccination rates than first world countries, the virus will continue to mutate and proliferate outside of America and Europe, ensuring new opportunities for revving the vaccine.
That's a sustainable business model for the first world.
A primary complaint is that “rich nations” hoard vaccines. doesn’t this exacerbate this?
With the prevailing scheme, in which rich nations fund high vax levels domestically, and allow poor nations to languish, the virus is always going to have reservoirs around the world in which it can mutate, thereby requiring new rounds of vaccination in the rich countries periodically.
The total cost of vaccinating the whole world in 1 year would be far less than the cost of infinite rolling booster programs. And yet, we do the latter.
Why? That's the secret sauce of the sustainable business model.
Most of the developed countries also used mRNA vaccines which needed low temperature refrigeration. Such facilities are cost prohibitive in poorer countries.
Beyond all this, there’s a significant worldwide population of vaccine skeptics who will not take free vaccines at their doorstep if available.
Vaccine hesitancy can’t be measured until a country has reached the point where everybody who wants to be inoculated has been, and there are still excess supplies.
Australia is at 90% and still increasing, with plenty of incentives still left to try.
The most effective drivers have been the new variants - delta and now omicron. Each time the infection rate has soared, the take up rate for vax has followed commensurately.
* the perceived scaremongering and desperation of some governments and media;
* Being a cancer survivor and not having clear, trustworthy research on effects on this subgroup (they're using genetic instructions to hijack our own cells and produce a foreign protein? That sounds really clever but it also reminds me of cancer)...
alarm bells were ringing, right or wrong. I'd welcome any information that helps with my concerns. It's a genuine wrestle.
There's no "level of testing" except for time. The fact is that we won't know what the effects of these drugs are in 10 years until 10 years passes. We can run studies and make educated guesses about what might happen in the future but they are just that - guesses. Given the numbers from the latest study in Israel (the study that was touted as requiring the need for boosters), the odds of a double vaccinated person over 50 being hospitalized from Covid after their "immunity waned" was 2 in 10,000. The chance of death was 6 in 100,000. The chances for younger people are much lower. Given that, how much of an unknown risk is it worth taking for a "booster"? Just how much lower than 6 in 100,000 is that chance worth? Everything we do in life is a series of calculated risks. The people who want to take that risk now, or multiple times per year for the rest of their lives should be entitled to do so. But to pretend that this new, experimental mRna vaccine is risk free because we ran a few short-term trials is absurd on its face. To mandate people, let alone infants and small children who have virtually no risk, to take an endless series of these experimental shots is madness.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And I suspect that countries which want to implement mandatory vaccination like Austria and perhaps Germany will force people to get the now worthless first and nearly worthless second doses of the original vaccine, because anything else won't be available.
First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020."
and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”"
Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
I’m going to wait for severity data from where I live, because that’s what matters.
I'm still waiting on proper large scale studies as well, though. It'll probably be at least a week or two until we get that
not trying to contradict here I think it will be less each year.
maybe governments will even start telling people their dirt and exercise choices are exacerbating this disease!
The number added each season is not necessarily the same number as the ones removed in the previous year - see the prevalence of really bad flu seasons for instance, which occur every 2-3 years or so.
No it's not, the study specifically mentions "the relative reduction of risk conferred by prior proven COVID-19 infection"
> “Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.”
There are these estimates that ~80% of SA had Covid.
If so - previous variants were 1/4th as severe - since 3/4ths of the cases went undetected... Right?
Why "BUT"? Shouldn't the second part be, uh, a good thing?
In this very specific demographic. Other countries will have different outcomes, as seen with the current state of the pandemic (looking at Europe, for example).
The worm hypothesis is practically a curiosity to solve later.
Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off.
Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting?
edit from the summary :-/ :
Vaccine effectiveness:
The two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination provides 70% protection against severe complications of COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation, and 33% protection against COVID-19 infection, during the current Omicron wave.
Reinfection risk: For individuals who have had COVID-19 previously, the risk of reinfection with Omicron is significantly higher, relative to prior variants.
Severity: The risk of hospital admission among adults diagnosed with COVID-19 is 29% lower for the Omicron variant infection compared to infections involving the D614G mutation in South Africa’s first wave in mid-2020, after adjusting for vaccination status
Children: Despite very low absolute incidence, preliminary data suggests that children have a 20% higher risk of hospital admission in Omicron-led fourth wave in South Africa, relative to the D614G-led first wave.Now the next question is what is the percentage reduction in deaths for Omicron vs prior variants. It seems like more than the 29 percent reduction in hospitalisation given the first death from Omicron was reported in Britain last week right?
Omicron cases are 'suspected' via a partial match in a PCR test (widely done), but this isn't definitive.
End result: There are very few confirmed deaths.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.18.21266496v... [2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...
Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.
If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.
Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.
So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.
With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.
Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/masonbissada/2021/12/03/scienti...
When the pandemic first started, people were flabberghasted about how FAST! the numbers were going up. Faster and faster, new records broken every day! Meanwhile, on a logarithmic plot, it was a dead straight line. It wasn't changing, not really.
People don't "get" this. Even now, two years in, people are clinging to constant factors.
I've had similar conversations with people who just don't understand Moore's law, Nielsen's Law, etc...
I had to use pictures to explain to IT network professionals that upgrading a 15-year-old 2 Mbps site office link to 4 Mbps is hilariously under-specced when the mobile phone in my pocket can exceed 1 Gbps while I'm sitting at the bus stop. They just hadn't "grokked" that their mental models are off by orders of magnitude. They're used to x*2 instead of x*10^2.
4 megabits! That would be considered fast 25 years ago.
The difference will be in timing; the people will have been infected more quickly, with the (severe) problems that entails.
If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection.
Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization.
From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated
From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron
Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics?
0: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas...
I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
Edit: The result of this, if you look at previous diseases that have plagued humanity (see Black Death), is a high initial death count when the virus breaks out, but the death rate declines as the milder variants spread and people survive them, building immunity to stronger versions, until eventually the virus mostly disappears.
Naively, you’d think selection pressure would decrease severity, because severity is not how viruses spread. However, if (some of) the same mechanisms that ar causing the virus to spread better are also responsible for (some of) its severity, then things may not really get better over time —unless our immune systems themselves adapt, but that generally requires a first infection…
But about the breeding ground, not really: If one day some super deadly variant evolves, it's not popping up in all of the infected hosts at the same time. It'd still need to infect everyone from scratch, and since we all have our guard up right now, it'd definitely have an incredibly hard time doing so.
I've definitely seen outlets postulating that the endgame for COVID-19 would be it doing exactly this— becoming way more contagious but way less severe, basically a just a kind of cold. These "final" variants would quickly spread everywhere, choking off the supply of new hosts for the more deadly variants, effectively achieving herd immunity.
Not necessarily[1]:
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
Viruses evolve according to evolutionary pressures. I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests - perhaps it's too soon, or even, who knows, maybe they are there and we don't know?
The common trope is that if the virus is too deadly, then it doesn't have a chance to find new hosts. This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pass it on.
Unfortunately, this is only a weak effect in Covid. Most of the spread happens well before people are very ill; in terminal stages of severe Covid, many people in fact would test negative for virus presence. So there is little evolutionary pressure on the virus to be less deadly - by the time it kills people, we are spent vessels from its point of view.
I suppose a mutation that makes it completely benign would be beneficial, as current rules on self-isolation curb the spread of strains causing symptomatic disease.
There are pressures that make it more deadly: a mutation leading to higher viral load is both more deadly and more transmissible. So unless the transmissibility increases too much (and virus is way too deadly), we might even expect the virus to become more deadly. This hasn't happened yet, thankfully.
An example I used elsewhere was the introduction of Myxomatosis in Australia, to control the invasive rabbit population. Over time, the local strain evolved to be more deadly, but with a longer incubation periods. This way, bunnies had more time to pass the virus around, then once that job was done, the virus was happy to kill them off.
On the flipside (and very long timescales), since some people appear to be genetically more resistant to the virus, you can expect natural selection to do its job. But since overall death rate from Covid is low-ish (no more than 1%, you'd say, and skewed towards older, non-reproducing individuals) this would take a long time.
Another hope is that, if the disease is less serious in children, perhaps immunity it built up during the usual period of childhood infections. There is another coronavirus, which causes a mild cold in children, but can be very serious in adults (apologies, I can't remember what it's called). Thankfully, a single infection gives more-or-less complete lifetime protection - so most people have it as children and never worry about it again.
In either of these cases, we're talking about generational timescales.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/07/scientists-fin...
PCR tests for RNA or DNA, that's not something a mutation can change. I don't know for Covid, but usually a PCR test targets something fundamental & stable. That might need to be updated with new variants.
The people who design the tests know which parts of the sequence are more likely to mutate, so they pick the more conserved parts. Also, most PCR tests check for 3 different parts of the sequence. Which is why Omicron can still be detected even if there is a mutation in one part checked by the test, since the other 2 parts still match (the so called S-gene-dropout).
I'm not a virologist by any stretch of imagination. Mutations seem to come in bundles; I'm just surprised that, given typical PCR tests only test for three RNA fragments, that we don't see mutations that evade it.
The main evolutionary pressure on Covid in developed countries is Public Health clamping down on it like a ton of bricks. A variant that quietly evades PCR tests, self-isolation etc. is set up for life.
A variant that infects more people from a single host (assuming everything else held constant) is a positive selective pressure. So increasing the contagious period is beneficial. But the length of the contagious period is inversely related to the timing and strength of the immune response. So we should expect the virus to become less deadly over time, assuming there's a hard limit to its ability to evade a typical immune system.
Do you have other examples besides Myxomatosis?
Quick nit: while this is true, SARS-1 was also not particularly transmissible before symptoms appeared, in contrast to Covid, which made control much easier (in addition to the much higher fatality rate causing everyone to take it much more seriously).
The adaptations that affect severity and those that affect transmissibility generally seem to be different. These are two axes on which a new variant can very in either way. The most successful new variants will tend to be highly transmissible (for obvious reasons) but also tend to be lower severity for the reasons gjsman gave in a sibling comment.
That's only a tendency though, evolution will throw up variants on all sorts of different points on the transmissibility and severity scales and may the most successful virus win. Yes high severity variants will tend to kill off their victims sooner, but if also highly infectious that might overcome that effect. In any case killing off victims still leaves a trail of devastation. It can take a while for all of this to play out.
If severity means the host dies quickly rather than slowly, there's obviously selection pressure and that mutation will die off relatively quickly vs the rest, since it won't have as many chances to spread as the less severe strain. E.g. SARS/MERS.
If severity means the host dies more often, but it still takes a long time to die, the selection pressure is much lower, and it will roughly spread the same as the less severe strain, all other things being the same. E.g. Spanish Flu.
That doesn't make sense. We have seen regular waves of flu, some being more pathogenic than others. There has not been a "direction" of flu strains becoming milder. So-called Spanish flu came after weaker strains.
> All modern seasonal flu variants are descended from it.
I don't think this makes sense either. The more serious strains of flu we've had in recent decades have for example included contributions from bird and pig viruses.
Viruses can pick up genes from lateral gene transfer. Basically in the process of copying their own genetic material while replicating, they might inadvertently copy some extra genetic material that was just lying around in the host cell, and it gets incorporated into their genetic code, producing recombinant strains. Further, just as animal strains can jump into humans, human strains can jump into animals. So for example in 1968 the H3N2 flu lineage started in birds, jumped to humans where it recombined with 1918's H1N1 making human H3N2, and then jumped into pigs to make Porcine H3N2. Indeed there's evidence that H1N1 started out as an avian strain that jumped to humans and swine around the same time, but this is still an open academic debate.
It might still trend towards that over time, but it will probably be slower at it than other viruses, and thus the 'it gets milder over time' aphorism about viruses doesn't apply as strongly to Covid-19.
Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely.
This may (may!) be what we’re observing with Omicron. In any case, we’ll know much more in a few weeks.
Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up.
With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.)
From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.
How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?
When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out. As it dies out, and people go outside, variants that are milder will thrive because people won't lockdown as easily. This can repeat forever until eventually the virus is completely benign. Of course it's all based on randomness so it's not exactly predictable what will happen.
When everybody goes inside, all the variants stop spreading. The pressure is the same on every variants, so there's no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.
Any variant that is able to co-exist with (rather than kill) its host during a full lockdown has a significant advantage. We co-exist with several coronaviruses already.
But it is — this will not be the response to a variant that doesn’t cause an increase in hospitalizations or deaths.
A given response exerts pressure on all variants, of course. But a milder variant may be able to spread widely before a more lethal one shows up and ratchets up lockdowns.
Except this doesn't happen, otherwise COVID would have already stopped spreading. Our social response to COVID isn't adequate enough to stop its spread. We can't get people to actually lock down or stop transmission.
And then it goes on because measures are reduced, and zero-covid never was a goal... would even go so far that some few countries pretty successfully did zero-covid strategies and stopped their virus, though sure, that is a pretty futile thing if the world is not "globally" doing this and you are likely not isolating forever/completely - so we just start to live with it.
Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.
There's going to be a negative correlation between severity and something like "velocity" of infected persons.
If a virus that would make make you very sick is contracted by someone who's vaccinated - They will now be in the 2nd category you describe ~'Sick, but not sick enough to stop them going out' -- They're now giving mobility to that virus that it would have otherwise not had (If they weren't vaccinated and were feeling too sick to go out and about)
So by usage of vaccines that only prevent severe symptoms, we pervert that normal negative feedback loop of virus spread and instead set the parameters to be more likely to propagate severe virus' that would usually keep you sick at home.
No, not _all_ transmission. Neither _all_ symptoms.
But prolonging the inevitable is still useful, in that it slows down the number of hospitalizations on your march towards the inevitable.
Most hospital systems in the USA are stressed to severe levels. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 even began, and the increased workload from COVID19 is clearly causing problems.
------
Slowing things down gives more time for the old patients to leave the hospital, meaning doctors/nurses won't have to work as hard.
Very much so, and my post was carefully worded to refer to evolutionary selection pressure, and not any kind of agency on behalf of a virus.
I assumed the audience here would get it.
As an aside, there are much kinder ways to voice this kind of concern that don’t drip with contempt; consider taking a less accusatory tone in the future? That might trigger fewer downvotes the next time the reading comprehension module needs coffee.
First, evolutionary pressure will select for a lower dormancy period, i.e. a lower time to contagion. This is because a variant with a shorter dormancy will spread faster than one with a longer dormancy period if both are present in the same population. This is also exactly what happened with the Delta variant, which is asymptomatic generally for a shorter period[1] than the original variant, because it replicates faster.
Second, the usual process occurs for the usual reasons. This may be happening with Omicron.
[1]: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
A new variant need only replicate slightly faster to dominate (eventually).
There was a passage that suggested that virus evolutions happens all the time which sometimes gives us a super severe strain. But usually these super sever strains don't evolve into even more severe strains - generally they evolve back towards the "baseline" severity and the severe strain burns itself out.
From that, I had hope that the Delta variant of COVID was one of these outlier super severe strains and that all subsequent evolutions would fall back but it's not looking like that is the case when omicron was found.
I have been basing a lot of my virus information from Tomas Pueyo. Here is my source:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-omicron-qu...
In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a week before the person shows severe illness
It takes far less than death to reduce spread. People who feel sick stay home from work (not guaranteed, but with enough frequency that it matters), don't go out to eat, don't wander around and go to parties, and so on. Any time they're sitting home, they've hurt the chances that their variant is the winning-est variant.
Again with the caveat about dormancy periods for Covid.
Also, those who do not get symptoms (that is, most who catch covid) do not spread the virus in general, which is why it's now called "presymptomatic" spread.
Didn't we learn anything from Plague Inc?
Every single press title the last two years can be related somehow to a single Game. New variants, new mutations, spreading faster vs killing more people, ... All these tradeoffs are quite well modeled.
Building a resistance to vaccines ("the cure") is also one areas where your virus can evolve, and -to be honnest- I prefer it to fight vaccines than to develop a "total organ failure" mutation.
As viruses evolve they generally have 2 paths of evolution – they either become more deadly, or more contagious.
The ones that become more deadly will kill the host quicker, and so won't have enough time to spread to others.
The ones that become more contagious are by definition weaker, they will spread to more people, but the effects will be milder.
There are some theories to suggest that pandemics (like the Spanish flu) ended because the virus eventually mutated to a milder, more contagious form.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-viruses-ev...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30734920/ (really good one)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7255208/
In short, we don't know and won't know until this is all "over" a few years in the future, at least.
no, that's cringeworthy fearmongering. the virus is fragile and falls apart relatively quickly outside the body. the main risk behavior is having long conversations in close quarters where you're constantly exposed to a warm airstream of live virus.
make no mistake, if covid menacingly floating in the air to catch you unaware were actually a meaningful method of spread, we’d have evidence all over the place being reported feverishly by those very same biased reporting sources.
I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation.
I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
If the patient is contagious before developing symptoms, the virus can spread very effectively even if many patients die.
For better or worse all that means is that viruses may evolve to delay their symptoms rather than overall peak severity if that's possible. It means still just as delay but with a good enough delay to spread.
I don't really see the selective pressure however for this virus to become more benign. It seems to have enough people to infect without it given how contagious it is. It doesn't really have to become more benign to allow even more spread.
Age and Date Data: [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...]
The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of viral hosts. The stronger viral variants literally die off in the hosts they kill, and can't keep spreading, whereas the viral variants that didn't kill their hosts before spreading their genes can keep replicating.
The majority of people with COVID do not die before spreading it to other people. That selection pressure isn't there for COVID, therefore there is nothing really stopping it from mutating into stronger variants. If it starts killing people like Ebola does, then the selection pressure for weaker variants might exist because a lot of hosts will die. Even in that case, it isn't a given that a highly fatal virus would mutate to become weaker. It could very well wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on.
All of this selection happens over evolutionary timelines, which span over many human lifetimes. If the virus becomes weaker, it could take many human lifetimes to reach that point.
From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:
> “Becoming more transmissible and less lethal are absolutely what’s best for the pathogen,” said Day. “But the problem is that it’s not always possible, and in many instances is never possible, to be more transmissible and also less lethal.”
> Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken.
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
There is no intelligence making this decisions, its just some random mutations, so we cannot predict what path the virus will take.
Well, how much of our own actual DNA is nothing but virus DNA that got stuck in there for nigh eternity?
Answer: 8%.[0]
[0] https://www.cshl.edu/the-non-human-living-inside-of-you/
A factor that comes into play is the following. Diseases tend to be less dangerous to children. When a new disease emerges, no-one has immunity to it, so there's plenty of adults who may get it more severely. But, after a certain point, the people being born are exposed to that disease when they are young, where it won't affect them as badly.
This can look like the disease getting milder, but it's just that after a while most people will experience it when young when they will get milder effects from it. And after that point they'll have some immunity for it.
29% LOWER THAN OG COVID
In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess if it can become the dominant strain, why are we still peddling fear about omnicron instead of hope?
Hundreds of millions of people, many of them with the power to set policy do believe them. Strangely enough, that belief seems to fall along a political divide.
Most of those people have long made up their mind to 'never listen to anything you (the health authorities) say ever again'. The lines in the sand were drawn ~March 2020, when the politicians picked their sides, and ever since then, it's not clear to me that any amount of data has changed anyone's mind since then.
Hydroxychloroquine.
Ivermectin.
Yeah, right. Peddling the lies have cause these individuals to get more trust. People want their false hope and false cures, and snake oil.
LOL. Because Ivermectin and HCQ somehow aren't Big Pharma products? Hilarious.
Why don't you research the RECOVERY trial? They tested plenty of cheap medicine, and some of it even worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial
There's no reason to believe in the snake oil salesmen. Just look at the good research that was done and pick out the actually useful stuff with positive results.
If Covid was only 40% worse than the flu and the cold, then this wouldn't have been a pandemic at all.
Also, one thing that possibly distorts this study is that a large amount of South Africans got only vaccinated in recent months. Given that the vaccine is most effective in the beginning, this might positively affect South Africans's resilience against Omicron and it's not clear yet (afaik) to what extent that skewed the stats.
Edit: after looking at sources again I’m no longer quite as confident that flu is significantly worse, but covid is definitely not 10x worse for kids: https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true
- vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload
- naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective because the body made immunity to the payload alongside the total viral shape
It was never a question of transmission. When we got news from Norway where 120 vaccinated negative tested people came into the restaurant for a couple of hours and at least 60 of them came out with positive omicron test - it became clear that we are fucked. Also, news from South Africa, where two people were quarantined in a hotel their rooms was across the corridor, and virus got from one to another, despite they never get out, just opened the door to take food and make tests.
So it looks like everybody will have this variant in the next year, except maybe people in distant places. The question was how many will get seriously sick and how many of them will die. Looks like numbers will be lower than expected.
Someone needs to check if masks and cloths over nose and face still have moderate effectiveness in densely populated areas.
This seems like a pretty big assumption TBH, and something that needs study. Is it better? How much? Why? How long does it last?
there is fundamental knowledge involved here that colleges teach, and its good to know what the expected outcome is and how the studies conform to that expected outcome
the studies are conforming to the expected outcome, which is good
We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.
If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
That’s likely what’s going on here.
Normally they approve based solely on safety and risk/benefit.
Sometimes products have limited approval for high risk groups, but for these reasons, not because of supply.
Pricing and availability is not their job.
I think that it subtly masks the responsibility of our bureaucratic system. It is literally killing people by preventing them from having access to a potentially effective treatment (that would be accessible if not for this legislation / bureaucratic burden).
Due to this I think that “banned for now” is more appropriate. It highlights the fact that our legislative framework bans medicine by default (it could allow them by default in another world, and then selectively ban medicines that prove dangerous / ineffective).
The medicine is not yet sufficiently shown to be safe and effective.
When was that ever forbidden, except on demonstrations?
Surely there must be other professions with similar rules, or cultural quirks to the same effect.
For me it is such a symbol, too. But there are women who say it means something different for them and they want to wear it out of their own free will. And I am not the one telling them what they have to think, because you know, that would be opression?
edit to your edit:
And the swastika is a perfect example, too. Because the swastika is thousands of years old and the Nazis are not and just occupied it. So someone who wears that symbol might do it for way other reasons, than because he likes the Nazis.
(less likely in europe, though, but more likely in india or mongolia for example)
And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. In contrast to that, the kind of numbers I believe we would have seen or experienced... makes all our fighting about masks and mandates and lockdowns seem pretty irrelevant. I doubt we can even fathom the difference.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I saw an estimate of projected deaths from COVID in a scenario where mitigations were taken and in another scenario where none were taken. It was the difference between projecting 300k to 600k dead in the US after more than a year, and 2 million to 6 million dead in the US.
Aside from that, most countries are not even on pace to triple vax their population by end of winter, so letting it rip is a not an option. The countries currently led by populists will lock down just like the rest, only later and with more deaths.
Food for thought: Has China changed their pandemic strategy? Why not?
Everyone I know in tech that was in SF has moved out of SF.
And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be screaming to get rid of them. Instead the force all the (mostly vaccinated) "servant class" that brings them deliveries, makes their food, and checks out their groceries to wear some nasty mask all day and when these tech workers are called back into the office "but still wear masks" they all scream about it and continue to work from home. ... because wearing a mask for an entire workday absolutely sucks.
Our response to this virus requires a hell of a lot of privilege when you really start thinking hard about it. Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class and transfered massive amounts of wealth in to the pockets of some of the richest people in the world. But hey! We are saving grandma!
Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves.
You know what actually decimates the working class? Catching COVID. Taking unpaid time from work, because they fall sick. Crippling medical bills, from trips to the doctor, or heaven forbid, the hospital. Lingering damage from long COVID. Strangely enough, the 'reopen everything' political movement also tends to oppose things like worker protections, mandated sick days, affordable healthcare, taxes on the rich...
Is that theory or do you work a blue collar job?
I was in a work truck as 'critical infrastructure' and lived it. The company owners got richer AT HOME while we kept working. And then some layoffs after the pandemic forgivable loan calendar window expired.
I caught the 'rona earlier this year. I have a Dr. letter saying so. Now white collar woke-from-home wants me to keep them 'safe' by wearing a cloth mask and getting jabbed.
No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines.
Many of my blue collar friends feel the same way.
Getting bossed around by chicken shit triple vaccinated white collar workers too afraid to go into the office. They expect all expendable service class workers to do their bidding while they all “take this serious” huddled up in their fancy homes.
And if we are talking about what I want, I want "expendable service class workers" to be paid twice as much anyway. If that's not enough to make up for a mask requirement, then I'm sure there's some alternative we can figure out.
I sincerely doubt most white collar workers are “essential” so they should never have been allowed to work during the pandemic, even if they could do so from home. It wasn’t right to let non essential people work no matter where they worked, period. Everybody non essential should have been on the government dole.
If the privileged white collar work-from-home crowd got the same complete shaft the common working class folks did, none of our response to Covid would have happened. Because out here in the real world there are a hell of a lot more problems than exactly one damn respiratory virus.
The part about forcing non essential people to be paid to not work is confusing and I don't think I understand your point but sure I'd take that deal??
Do you know why?
Because people he meets can no longer see what happens to your teeth when you can't afford a dentist. [1] [2]
Another took full advantage of stimulus and unemployment payments, because with her comorbidities, and lack of health insurance, she didn't want to get seriously sick, or die at her shitty McDonalds job.
The person you're spiting the most by not getting vaccinated is yourself, followed closely by your relatives and coworkers, followed by the rest of your community.
Most of my extended family caught the 'rona' last year, and had beautiful doctor's notes attesting to this fact. Those notes did not stop all of them from catch it again this year. My grandfather (who missed out on getting sick the first time around) nearly died from it, and my grandmother was not in a good way. So much for acquired immunity. If they weren't all vaccinated, it's likely I wouldn't have a grandfather today.
[1] I believe that the technical term for this is 'meth-mouth', but you don't actually have to take any meth, cocaine, or heroin for your teeth to end up looking like that.
[2] And also the obvious reason that he doesn't want sick people to breathe on him.
A mask for cooking is probably a good idea in general.
If you support these mask mandates you support fully vaccinated employees wearing masks 8 hours a day 40 hours a week. All nothing more than security theater to make the most fearful feel “safe” and provide an easy way for lazy government to look like they are “taking this serious”
I support ones that make a meaningful impact on spread though.
And where I live there haven't been any mandates for vaccinated people anyway.
That's the problem, not everyone can be vaccinated.
* all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
I thought there was scientific consensus that being overweight is detrimental to health.
I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred.
Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns.
Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa...
Quote:
“National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection.”
https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253
It's a small sample, but it was done on data available in 2020, which was before vaccines were available.
Small sample size, but even similar result is somewhat surprising -- I would've thought the 2nd infection would be weaker.
It's not that much larger -- I guess reinfections are hard to find -- but surprisingly this found that ICU admission was higher for reinfections.
And as for knowledge, step into a hospital, and you'll see plenty of medications being used to treat actual cases of COVID. Doctors don't just put an oxygen mask on your face, and wait for you to die. You'll find a bit more knowledge there than you will in a deraged InfoWars rant, or a Joe Rogan podcast.
Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn't have 190 million monthly listeners. [1]
[1] If the most popular podcast[2] in America is your definition of 'eradicating' discussion, it's certainly an odd one.
[2] Or, if you're looking for variety in your media, you could always tune in to AM radio. Or the biggest television news syndicate in the world.
Everyone knows Paxlovid is safe and effective too, but you aren't allowed to take it yet.
"Do the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants Fluoxetine and Fluvoxamine Reduce Mortality Among Patients With COVID-19?" – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"Mortality Risk Among Patients With COVID-19 Prescribed Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants" – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"Mortality risk is confirmed to be significantly decreased among patients with #COVID-19 prescribed SSRI antidepressants, and particularly #fluoxetine, and fluoxetine or #fluvoxamine, in a large (n>80,000) US observational study." – https://twitter.com/HoertelN/status/1460309793558646785?s=20
Dr. Farid Jalali's track record on accuracy of statements on the pathophysiology is excellent. Here's a thread that outlines how and why SSRIs work to reduce illness in COVID: https://twitter.com/farid__jalali/status/1440876997182300169
Platelets and serotonin are involved in the disease. Serotonin tends to cause inflammation, clotting, and vasoconstriction. A significant feature of COVID-19 is elevated plasma serotonin. (Here's an almost random source for this: https://twitter.com/ivanajpavlovic/status/146071264917663334... ... another: https://twitter.com/__ice9/status/1345194722055385091 ... these are tweets, yes, but they link to papers.) Platelets have serotonin transporters and serotonin receptors. SARS-CoV-2 does a lot of things; One of the things it does is that it kills platelets by inducing necroptosis (source: https://twitter.com/DrKoupenova/status/1418558896390688776?s... ). This releases the serotonin inside them, causing other platelets to clot. SSRIs block platelets from picking up serotonin produced and secreted by enterochromaffin cells in the digestive tract; This is the source of the platelets' serotonin payload (more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterochromaffin_cell ). If an SSRI is taken early, platelets will have reduced serotonin payloads, which limits the serotonin-induced damage to the lung.
I had no idea about any of this until recently.
Another thing I had no idea about: Serotonin is metabolised by the lungs. https://twitter.com/ablative_sasha/status/144016208428566528... — and COVID-19 damages the lungs. It's a bad feedback loop involving way too much free serotonin.
There are other things at play but this is one of them. SSRIs work for a lot of patients, have a significant and confirmed benefit, and a mechanism of action that makes sense.
I've also seen pretty substantial claims / results that arginine, N-acetylcysteine, and melatonin seem to help. The best way to dig up those scientific results that do exist on it is actually to search Twitter for it. Try to find reliable-seeming scientists that are linking to actual papers and are careful in not suggesting too much.
[0]https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/monoclonal-antibody-therapy...
That’s why the mRNA vaccines aren’t super effective for it.
That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
We already know one such thing - bird flu (H5N1 - 50% mortality). Luckily it doesn't pass from one human to another. But scientists already built a version that presumably can (gain-of-function):
> (2019) Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. ScienceInsider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research.
https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controvers...
There are virologists and immunologists currently exploring the mutation-space of SARS-CoV-2 for nearly all potential mutations that produce a viable virus capable of infecting human cells. Based on that mutation-space, they're trying to determine if a vaccine regime can exist which can counter all possible mutations of SARS-CoV-2. So far, it looks like it's possible.
Here's a presentation about the work being done at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0
Well, that would be just awesome! Any chance for similar pan-effective vaccines for other viruses?
It would be pretty cool if COVID-19 ended up having the silver lining of enabling a step-function improvement in vaccine technology.
We did not had that many and I'm not sure but I assume COVID is one of the most studied ones.
Due to our modern technology and the high capital damage.
Certain predictions were expected through pref pandemics like expecting COVID becoming 'normal' like the common cold.
It is important to not forget the little details, and to avoid speculations based on broad statements (e.g. the vaccines "rolled out" and we got "more variants"). The vaccines started rolling out to very specific locations and we got variants everywhere.
And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.
Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.
FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1]
Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
No, evolution doesn't work that way.
The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid.
The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population.
The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent.
Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them.
The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans.
Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
this occurs when a host is coinfected with two or more viral strands of differing origin. most often virus of close familial lineage do this, but that isnt exclusive.
the mechanism is molecular promiscuity during replication, there is a jump from one strand to another in proximity, thus recombining.
cocirculation is required for this to occur, high frequency of co infection is required for recombinant mutants to occur with predictive certainty.
like the gatekeeper and the keymaster, we should avoid allowing delta, and omicron to contact each other, and surveil the sequences closely.
Tell the Black Plague its strategy of killing 30% of is suboptimal. Or to the species driven to extinction by a disease. “Inanimate object, that was suboptimal to your existence!”
We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
In any case I'm no longer thinking this has a clear end date, just a gradual fade into memory, the exact length of time it takes undefined/unclear.
Only in places that continue to consider covid the only problem society should focus on. It might be hard for some to imagine but we cannot continue to put the world on hold for exactly one specific form of illness.
For one thing, we've created a pandemic of untreated mental illness. All these people I see walking their dogs at night on a rainy day alone on the street wearing a mask with foggy glasses are gonna have a hard time getting over this... All the people who haven't left their house in two years are gonna need some help. People have lost their minds and it is gonna take a while to heal.
But rather that the current vaccines aren’t effect for because omicron is substantially different from the original covid strain used to develop those vaccines.
The same thing happens every year with the flu.
The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild.
From today:
> lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-afr...
> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.
It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
The UK provides some estimates of seroprevalence in blood donors (thus a skewed sample): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-... (Figure 3). These estimates aren't quite what you are looking for, but one test is sensitive to previous infection and estimates 20% previously infected, whereas another test is sensitive to (infection OR vaccine) and estimates ~100%. Basically, in that population, pretty much everybody has some kind of antibodies.
To answer your question, I would say that SA doesn't look particularly unique.
If you don't correct for it, it's easy to see "10x as many cases but few deaths" just because cases went up so quickly that deaths didn't start yet. Of course, this can be corrected for, and I'd expect a good study to do so - but I would NOT trust a typical news article to make the distinction, nor would I trust it to skip the temptation to misinterpret the study for a more interesting headline.
“South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection,” she said. “We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.”
>By May 2021, the combined infection- and vaccination-induced seroprevalence estimate increased to 83.3% (95% CI, 82.9%-83.7%)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013
The delta variant surge didn't hit the States until after this study concluded, so one would expect the numbers to be quite a bit higher today.
There are not a lot of people out there still who are not partially immune at this point, due to vaccine, recovery or both. It varies by region of course, but it's certainly true in most parts of the US.
There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections.
The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.
- Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote.
- Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms.
- Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild.
The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because:
1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease.
2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all.
3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view.
I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
You mean succeeded? As in, prevented many people from dying, and forced the virus to mutate into Omicron, which is far less dangerous.
As for the vaccines forcing mutation, SA is only 25% vaccinated so that doesn't work.
Have the vaccines succeeded in preventing many people from dying? That is something for history to judge. There just isn't good enough data on vaccine deaths to judge that at the moment. The problem for COVID vaccines is that whilst they may some people from dying of COVID, not many life years are saved because almost all the COVID deaths are concentrated in the very elderly. Meanwhile vaccine injuries are a looming iceberg because they aren't being properly tracked or recorded. The number of random cardiac failures in athletes is well up this year and eventually people will stop being in denial about the reasons. The long term damage from this programme can be judged in five or ten years.
However, if Omicron does display Delta as it appears to be doing very rapidly, we can say that at most the vaccines were useful for maybe 6-8 months. Bearing in mind you aren't "vaccinated" until your second dose and there's a gap.
Please don't post this nonsense on HN. There's ample evidence for vaccines saving the lives of millions.
I would love to go through and debunk them all, but I don't have the time or the crayons, nor would I think it would be effective in changing your beliefs. You're too far gone.
It's disappointing to see complete lies like this on HN. Vaccines have been, and remain, incredibly effective in preventing hospitalization/death, even without a booster (although everyone should also get their booster).
It's not because the trials proved it - they didn't. At only ~64,000 participants the e.g. Pfizer trial was not powered to show any difference to deaths and didn't use hospitalizations as a goal metric either, only infections.
And so we're forced to rely on the testimony of the same people in charge of the program, where their data is often missing or deceptive in some way. For example Germany has been claiming nearly all cases occur in the unvaccinated. It turned out this wasn't true. Rather, they don't have data at all on the status of most cases, and then reallocate all the "unknown" column to "unvaccinated" because ... well, why not? No matter what they do, plenty of people will still take their word for everything. This was revealed by Die Welt and the response was nothing. They still do it, as far as I know.
The UK data is usually considered to be the best, as in, the most detailed. And there, when the data on deaths is studied carefully it turns out to be riddled with anomalies and problems that cast doubt on whether vaccines did in fact reduce mortality (the numbers are low enough that statistical artifacts can actually matter). For example, in the UK data vaccination reduces non-COVID deaths in unvaccinated people. Don't take my word for it, ask a professor of risk management:
http://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/12/possible-syste...
"Our research team have now analysed the ONS England November mortality data. We conclude that, despite seeming evidence to support vaccine effectiveness, this conclusion is doubtful because of a range of serious inconsistencies and anomalies", "The ONS data provide no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality."
https://garycornell.com/2021/07/28/the-base-rate-fallacy-x-o...
EDIT:
In the case of my numbers, I'm based in the US. I wish we had a high enough vaccination rate to worry about the base rate fallacy. I'm surrounded by rural areas who unfortunately don't believe in vaccines until they show up in the ER. We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end.
"We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end."
You have a surgical backlog because your hospitals have been firing staff. Former "heros" who, quite sensibly, observed that as they'd already had COVID they didn't need a vaccine for it, and who were immediately demonized and excluded despite the hospitals supposedly being overwhelmed. You might want to meditate on that and consider whether that's the expected course of action during a crisis or not.
Where I live, there is no vaccine mandate for hospital staff due to staffing concerns. Talking with actual local physicians, nurses and doctors are quitting in droves after seeing a huge amount of preventable death in the past few months, by patients who deny the reality of the disease they have, and whos families harass hospital staff about treatments that don't work (hcq/ivermectin/whatever the latest magic pill is now).
I actually am against vaccine mandates and don't think anyone who doesn't want the vaccine should be forced to take it. That said, if you don't take it, I don't want you in the hospital if you end up getting covid. Take hcq/ivermectin/whatever joe rogan is saying now rather than occupy a hospital bed, don't clog up the hospital due to your mistake.
This is not correct. We've seen quite a few hospitalisations. See the dramatic uptick in South African hospital numbers.
Deaths have generally occurred about 4 weeks after infection. Omicron was only reported to the WHO about 3 weeks ago.
The rest of your post is of a similar level of confusion.
I suspect that if this omicron had emerged in 2018 at least with the symptoms and lack of severe disease that we have seen so far…it would likely have been described as a virulent common cold and may have gotten an occasional news mention, but zero public and government panic.
I think the phrase “Look for the devil and you will find him” is going to describe virology and government approach to virology for probably the next decade. This is a shame, because it seems to create and feed tyrants at almost every level of government.
I see currently reported numbers of 75% and 81% for those rates respectively, which means unvaccinated people are over-represented by about 30% relative their percentage of the population. Now these numbers are still very new, and unreliable, have no confidence interval, and only for infection, not hospitalization. But I don’t think that difference would be irrelevant, unless it ceases to hold up after data is collected over the next few weeks.
Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
What selection pressure exists to make it less-deadly? It takes weeks for the virus to kill people and they are most infectious early on.
This is why island populations all get sick when a ship comes in.
But to the other commenter's point, if omicron DID get a more deadly variant that kills you after you've already infected other people due to presymptomatic spread, then why would that variant be likely to die out? It's already reproduced before killing the host
A disease that spreads before it's symptomatic may not face negative selection pressure for some individuals, but on the aggregate people wear masks, avoid contact, even entered lockdowns, are more likely to obtain vaccination, and so on.
There's a stronger behavioral response to a more deadly covid than there is to one that is entirely harmless. It's not just death that reduces rates of transmission, and it's not just sick or symptomatic people who avoid contact.
You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right? We still wiped it out.
Smallpox, Measles, Polio. We've wiped out diseases before, and we can do it again if we so try. I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases and are so pessimistic about this subject...
It seems unlikely that many cows caught smallpox, given the prevalence of cowpox. Cowpox is a different disease, and was the first vaccine, after which the very concept of "vaccination" is named. Milkmaids had long been known for their immunity to smallpox. If smallpox had been in cows, milkmaids would have been known for universal smallpox exposure instead.
> I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases
Not a good look.
That conferred immunity to smallpox. Which makes it about as "different" as Omicron is to Delta or COVID19.
In any case, Cowpox is case-positive proof of animal reservoirs of smallpox.
Sure, that's fair.
> In any case, Cowpox is case-positive proof of animal reservoirs of smallpox.
Huh? No, it isn't.
UK eradicated Rabies. I'm pretty sure we all agree Rabies has substantial animal reservoirs, right?
So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines.
The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going to end this way.
There's a lot of diseases we've eradicated. Surely something will come along that you don't have an excuse for.
Leprosy is bacterial and treated with antibiotics. Same with bubonic plague, if that was next on your list.
I believe COVID19 continues because we have a ~60% vaccination rate in the USA, which is far below the needed vaccination rate to slow down the spread of the disease.
A lot of these other diseases brought up have substantial 95%+ vaccination rates, or treatments that can hamper the spread.
No disease is equivalent to another. Smallpox and Measles had much higher spread R0 / replication rates. Others are bacterial. Cholera is water-borne and solved with other methodologies.
Efficacy dropped to 60% vs Delta, and drops again to 30% vs Omicron. Boosters seem to rise back up to 90% vs Delta and 75% vs Omicron.
That's why so many people are talking about boosters: it has a measurable impact on transmission for Omicron (and Delta).
Also, IIRC Sinovac’s Coronavirus vaccine is an “old style” inactivated virus vaccine, and the J&J one is an adenovirus vector vaccine. They are not as effective as the mRNA vaccines.
Measles is 3x more infectious than even Delta.
Current vaccines are 95% effective against the original strain, 60% vs Delta, unknown vs Omicron.
You boost the vaccine however, and you're back to 90% efficacy vs Delta, and like 75% vs Omicron.
Its all about R0. If the efficacy (and compliance) is above the 1 / R0 rate, then eradication is possible.
As its "efficacy times compliance", the number we wish to maximize is the smaller number. Efficacy may have dropped to 60% (double shot vs Delta), but a 3rd booster brings the efficacy back up to 90%.
Compliance however, is stuck around 60% in the USA in general, and a large number of people are refusing to get the booster. As such, compliance is the number we need to work on right now.
--------
Going from 90% to 99% vaccine efficacy barely does anything, because our vaccine compliance numbers are so damn low.
It's not a problem in any area with high vaccine compliance.
If left alone, yes. We are not leaving it alone.
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker viral variants is stronger viral variants killing their hosts in droves, thus preventing the stronger variants from passing on their genetics to new hosts.
That selection pressure doesn't exist, because people are not dropping like flies due to COVID. The virus is free to mutate into something stronger because there is little pressure to stop it.
In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time.
There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At some point we should see an equilibrium reached with the coronaviruses, and the hope is that it'll be as mild as seasonal colds. Omicron could be a significant leap in that direction.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-hea...
There isn't consensus in the scientific community about that.
Counterexamples: polio, rabies, avian flu in human hosts, Black Death.
It isn't clear what category COVID19 will end up in.
Feel free to provide an example virus if you think I'm wrong!
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/26/1413339111?wit...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-why-some-deadly-...
https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.00694-10
Covid related links have saturated any searches on viruses in general, and the doom&gloom "reporting"is at the top. There are a lot of papers and examples of what I'm talking about, though, it's just irritating to get at.
Gain of function research gives us rapid and repeatable demonstrations of vital evolution. Viruses that don't kill their hosts and develop more and better mechanisms of infection or evasion of immune system defenses outcompete other variants. There are a lot of examples in animal viruses, but Sars and hiv are examples of recent relevance.
To be clear, I'm not making the claim that this happens to all viruses - evolution doesn't work like that. A virus that leaves you mostly functional for a few months before it kills you is not at all an unlikely scenario. Viruses also exist concurrent with other variants, and they can mutate rapidly. There's no hard and fast rule, just influences and constraints that can manifest as trends.
In my opinion, the ideal outcome for sars-cov2 at this point is that a super mild variant evolves that will confer robust natural immunity while spreading fast enough to prevent the spread of other variants. It could become more deadly - I hope it won't, and what we know of virus evolutionary pressures in humans hints that we could get lucky.
Indeed it would be nice if a less severe strain out competed current COVID, but such a thing has never happened before (as far as we know) - and as you point out there is no selection pressure for mildness when death/disability occurs some weeks after the infection has been cleared.
If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
Then yes yes I will take that.
No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all.
Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted)
Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence.
That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.
One doesn't exclude the other. People don't see an end with natural evolution, so the vaccine was/is the main focus for a long time.
I was initially assuming you were excluding kids or other people ineligible to get vaccinated.
But with Omicron, it's literally like we're back to March 2020. Norway (with 81% vaccination rate) went from normality to full lockdown in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's coming everywhere else during the next month or so.
We need to treat Corona the same way we treat the flu and we should start now.
As an example the current number of hospitalizations here in Denmark is about 50% of the worst period for the 2017/18 flu.
The thing is that various governments have neglected hospitals and health care, that is the real problem that must be dealt with.
People scared about hospital capacity should be asking strong questions to their politicians about why they squandered 2 years of peoples short life with zero new capacity.
The public shouldn’t shoulder the failures of politicians nor these “experts”.
The narrative may have evolved but that was more due to the virus evolving rather than some conspiracy driven by Pfizer and Moderna to sell more shots. More people being vaccinated benefits everyone, not just the pharmaceutical companies, and saying otherwise is a bit paranoid.
I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.
EDIT:
To be clear I already had COVID and didn't have any serious symptoms so the argument about a hospital bed doesn't necessarily apply to me. Beyond that I actually got vaccinated, my question centers around the disparity of treatment we are giving individuals who are vaxxed and those who are not if both are capable of spreading. Further it brings in the question of vaccine mandates if they are much less effective then we were led to believe.
You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.
Why are you (and others) thinking that since vaccines aren't 100% effective it doesn't help protecting other people ?
What kind of dissonance cognitive gets you there ?
Why are you blind to the fact that a vaccine that mostly works still help reducing infections and why do you equate that to "vaccines don't work to protect others (since some vaccinated people can still infect others) so I shouldn't get vaccinated" ?
How come you are working from a yes/no, full-or-nothing angle ?
A glass of water won't 100% quench your thirst when you haven't drunk in a long time so you won't take it ?
A lot of people believed they were. I've spent some time arguing with people that the punishments for not taking the vaccine were too extreme, and that government-supported firing of people from their jobs was a bad idea.
It was extremely common for people to argue that the vaccine would cut down on transmission (which is basically saying infection) and end the pandemic. Without that pillar it gets quite hard to justify the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Australia. Not sure about the rest of the world but I assume there is a similar story.
In the US the politicians know a law mandating the vaccine is a non-starter. So, instead, they encouraged and supported employers threatening their employees. I guess it's ironic that everyone is quitting everywhere anyway.
In the USA? Yes, they were. There was no mention of a future need for boosters. There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
Now, certainly, some media outlets may have been irresponsibly or ignorantly misinterpreting all this and pushing the narrative that it would make everyone immune. But that's not the CDC or WHO's fault.
> There was no mention of a future need for boosters.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Things change.
> There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
You must have been reading some really watered-down news, and not actually reading what public health officials were saying.
Or at least they did until omicron. Unfortunately 2 doses of the existing vaccines are pretty ineffective against omicron. 3 doses make the vaccines work better - but I’m honestly a little concerned.
It wasn't for lack of need.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...
> But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
The ships weren't for COVID patients, they were for non-COVID cases so that hospitals could focus on the overflow of COVID patients that they were better equipped to handle. Turns out that at the beginning of a global pandemic, not a lot people opted to go to the hospital even if they needed to because of fear of infection.
That is absolutely not what the OP said, fwiw
If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death toll would likely be much higher than what we'll probably end up with when all this is actually over, given our current path.
I'm not thrilled with how the past two years have gone, but it could have been much, much worse. It could also have been much better, if it weren't for people using the virus to score political points.
Even with a mix of vaccines and natural immunity, I don't think we can rely on natural immunity to solve this. That just doesn't pass the smell test.
There is zero excuse to push lockdowns, masks or any of that nonsense at this point to “protect healthcare”. Healthcare should have been “protected” by now if this is supposed to be a normal thing
Gaining herd natural immunity implies a lot more death. Also natural immunity wanes after a while, and variants can work around it.
So no, it's not the only way, nor is it even a certain way at all.
The rapid slowdown of infections is FAR below 100% of people.
What do you think I meant by this? Do you think I believe that the rate of infection will keep going up literally exponentially until it hits 7 billion then turn flat, or do you think that by my usage of 'inflection point' maybe I had more nuance than that?
But that’s wrong. Growth stalls out much much earlier. It’s just not right to call disease spread exponential.
Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
>Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
Well, in typical Dunning-Krüger fashion you're lecturing us laymen about the wrong use of "exponential", but it seems that you are the layman when it comes to epidemiology modelling.
Diseases of course spread in an initially exponential phase, not logarithmically as you boldly claim in another comment.
Epidemiologists talk about exponential disease growth all the time, here's one example : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6962332/
That said, from what we know about random graph models, once the transmission rate passes a certain threshold, the cumulative number of eventually infected individuals will NOT scale exponentially as the transmission rate increases.
You're speaking about initial growth rate though, not convergent size of the once-infected population, which is definitely exponential and relevant if you care about minimizing simultaneous hospitalizations.
Epidemiologists do frequently use exponential growth in discussions of theoretical spreading, but they are not correct. It does not fucking matter. They’re just wrong. Is the long term spread of a disease exponential. No. We can say this with 100% confidence. Why? Because they do not increase exponentially over time. They QUICKLY hit ceilings and inflection points.
This is the problem. If you call a system exponential because it looks like that at the beginning, your estimates of the middle and end will be hugely off. Massively wrong.
It is obviously apparent looking at Covid that it does not spread exponentially. The impact of this understanding is enormous. In an exponential model, a virus that is twice as infectious could be expected to infect 4x as many people over the same period. If the model is logarithmic, twice as infectious will likely result in LESS THAN TWICE the number of people infected.
Scary predictions that a small increase in spreading will exponentially increase the number of infected people do not hold up against observed real world data. We should be cheering on a more spreadable but less deadly disease. Scale matters, of course, but we aren’t seeing anything like that.
If you want to come back to this in one year and check to see if omicron infected even twice the number of people that delta did over the same time period that’s a bet I’d surely take.
No it's not, if delta infected say 1b humans and omicron infects 4b humans deaths can easily be offset by a lower fatality rate
With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
Half as deadly on the other hand is a big deal. It’s not just deaths, it’s also hospitalizations. If you imagine the bell curve of outcomes, the deaths are the small tail on the right and the hospitalizations are the fatter bit on the right. If you get to move everything to the left a bit, you remove the biggest chunk of the population from getting hospitalized in the first place.
The op didn't state marginally could you please share where you are getting this from?
The first publicly confirmed death globally from Omicron was reported just yesterday (source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread...
Given that the South African study discussed in this Washington Post article included 78k people, none of whom died if the above Reuters article is correct, doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases of Omicron from 15 November 2021 to 7 December 2021 (source: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room). At the time the Reuters article was published we were 6 days after even the most recently reported of those South African cases.
I wasn't trying to present the global denominator - that is far higher than 78,000 since it includes all countries, not just the 78k reported in the South African country.
Covid takes about 3 weeks to kill. The Omicron epicenter in SA has a much younger demographic than in western countries.
With Omicron, not from Omicron. It's an important distinction.
"the first publicly confirmed death globally from the swiftly spreading strain"
However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.
>>doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis.
If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language.
The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.
For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!"
There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!"
Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
This hasn't been my experience, in fact the British government's SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) was advising the government to lean on the press in order to increase 'the perceived level of personal threat' early in the pandemic[1]. I really do think the use of behavioural psychology to encourage compliance with government policy is one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the pandemic that future historians will correctly give more importance to than we did at the time. In all honesty this isn't so much a criticism of how the British government acted during the pandemic but how it acts in general. This institutional bent towards the manipulative is partially what led us into the unmitigated disaster that is the War on Terror in my opinion, consent for which largely stemmed from a state of fear among the general public made worse by poor journalistic norms.
>Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
I've not seen a single bit of serious journalism along those lines, it's either been 'COVID is going to kill us all and it's the plaguebearing hordes of the unvaccinated who are to blame' or 'The government is turning totalitarian and it's the fault of out-of-touch bureaucrats that need to be removed' (the article I linked is very much a member of that species). I've come across very little in the way of sober analysis, almost every piece of journalism I've come across on the topic carries some kind of moral judgement against $group in it. The point I'm making is that moral judgement sells and feels good to dole out to people you don't like, but it also robs us of a little humanity every time we do it.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit...
If they’re used correctly, P95 and P100 face masks can reduce the likelihood of being exposed to coronavirus by blocking contaminated air particles. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises against people in the US using face masks because most people who aren’t trained medical professionals may not know how to fit them properly, and the risk of exposure in the US is so low to begin with.
masks provide no added protection in most common situations where they’re used, but provide much political leverage, which is why they’re popular. same with (non-sterilizing) vaccine mandates and other arbitrary public restrictions. these are political wedges, not effective public health measures. if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status. we’d also be policing private behavior (family/social gatherings) much more invasively, rather than public behavior (grocery stores and restaurants).
I always think of this as putting on different pairs of glasses to see the world through different lenses. That is one lens. left-right is another lens.
There is no "the only lens that matters". There are many lenses which have different degrees of predictive power depending on what you are observing. You don't use a microscope to look at the stars.
To start with one, https://twitter.com/maxplanckpress/status/146668793563865497...
> if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status.
Ww are worried. Infection status is considered. Vaccination status is considered. You are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to minimize the covid problem.
You can fight reality with logic and interpretations and a different philosophical approach of the situation but facts don't care. Hospitals are regularly overwhelmed, people are dying when they shouldn't and the virus doesn't care about our psychotic or neurotic bouts. We know that if we do nothing it gets worse real fast.
I don't wear a mask because of my political beliefs. I wear a mask due to the abundance of evidence that it helps prevent transmission. If you assume my political affiliation from that not only would you be wrong but you know what they say about assuming.
No. Forcing people to wear a police badge or a yellow star or a hijab or a a beard in some places would fit that outlook but the first reason to wear a mask is a medical/prophylactic one. The fact some people (right or left) decided to associate that with political beliefs is another matter that has nothing to do with the inherent advantages that wearing a mask provides in some occasions.
you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid. the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them. we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
You are trying a weird (and childish may I add) apparent mirror strategy but subtly adding twist of your own making that weren't there to drive your point that Covid is not a problem:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Fixed:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged.
No need to get all conspiracy on that one.
> you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid.
They are overwhelmed and they shouldn't and they weren't 2 years ago. It'd be very weird that all around the world the hospital infrastructure just happened to show their limits at the same time and that it'd have nothing to do with the current pandemic but only with greed (I suppose you refer to the impoverishment of public hospitals). Occam's razor and all that.
Would you please wear a mask and get a vaccine or keep your distance a bit if you don't want/can't ? Thank you.
> the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them.
So what if they have a comorbidity ? It's still happening. There's a strong underlying current in anti-* that suggest to let people die and let selection plays its game. Are you advocating for that ?
Unfortunately for your weak ass arguments the virus does care about masking in the sense that it hinders its efforts to infect us. Vaccination is also shown to work.
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Ah yes, the media and the politics are manufacturing a crisis. Media do it to make money (or something) and politicians to their benefit (whatever that is).
You rather believe in a pharma-political conspiracy to manufacture a global pandemic than face the fact life is unfair and unpredictable ? You rather believe that behind the shadows there's someone that is pulling the strings over all this for their own political or financial gains because then it would make the world less scary, less unjust ? I am sorry, this is not how the world works. Things are fucked up and it's not fair and it's not (y)our fault but it is what it is.
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create.
People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.
There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains.
There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.
It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous.
If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest.
But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time.
The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.
You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
Evidence so far suggests Omicron has high rates of reinfection.
No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time.
Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
In decades maybe we get a mild covid.
> Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.
So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Clearly not how it works and not what's happening.
We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading.
Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ?
> That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past.
We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly.
We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu.
> Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants.
It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu.
Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take.
Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking.
edit:
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains
Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers.
Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ?
We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines.
And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.
Seriously? I thought flu vaccines were just a hipster thing: something you do to look cool, but they don't really matter much. In my country only 4% of people take them, and we don't have many flu-related deaths.
Too bad all those back-to-office-adamant employers completely ignore this. Like, OK, I get infected cause I had to commute to work and then you fire me/lay me off and I'm left holding the bag, financially and physically cause you really wanted to make your leasing payments "worth it".
Which reminds me that in the first lockdown, in my country, grocery stores workers were considered "essential" and were allowed to go to their workplace and work there.
The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Tech workers were classified as non essentials. That's why we got the whole remote thing. Other professions also got labelled non-essential and governments asked employers to put remote/wfh in place as much as possible and at some time made it mandatory. Being classified as a non-essential never meant you were de facto out of a job or prevented from working (Western Europe here).
> Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Wait, what ? Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
I won't say everything I am thinking but wishing people to lose their job because you think they are privileged and they are scared of covid is pretty fucked up. I am making €1750 net a month, in IT, I have a master degree. I don't feel privileged.
> The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Then follow your heart and go work in the service industry in a supermarket.
These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears. So yeah, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Very little tech work is “essential”. So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
It requires a lot of privilege to be scared of Covid.
Could you please provide some examples of how tech workers have been able to punish the rest of society ? As far as I can tell it's the public authorities who decide laws and public health policies. Tech workers can't even unionize and now they can lobby for WFH or lockdowns and are punishing the rest of society ?
> So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
I wrote it in my previous comment then deleted it but I'll finally put it here because fuck it: I did lose my job one month into the first lockdown because my n+2 non tech boss decided to use the federal budget allocated to my job to create a new job for her bestie. How am I privileged ? Why didn't being put on unemployment during lockdown erase my fear of covid ? While at the same time a family member of mine who is an artist lost her gigs but thanks to our welfare state she didn't lose an euro of income in the last two years and now she's setting up fires and stirring things up in antivax/mask riots in Brussels. Their world revolve around the virus, their only meaning in life is now to be against every health measures (and yes they are ordering covid online in the Netherlands rather than get a jab. Which FAANG employees is forcing her to do that, uh ?).
You may not like how the covid thing is handled but thinking it's tech worker's fault is wack and wanting to punish them for that is wackier. If anything, talk to your representative or your councilmen or something. They are the one in charge.
Not GP, but one reason is that they're advocating for restrictions that have severe detrimental effects (loss of employment) on others, but not on themselves.
Also, apparently, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated is already a giant no-no for some here so I'd like to know what restrictions are being advocated by who ? Surely it's not a `they` as in everyone though, right ?
That's incredibly quick in evolutionary terms. If COVID becomes milder, it may take many human lifetimes for that to occur. In the mean time, it can mutate into something stronger.
But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window.
I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...
Just as an example, if a new virus is only 1/2 as deadly but 3x as infectious the mortality rate would climb by 50%.
The point: perhaps we're hyper focused on "COVID is out to kill us senseless"
So no, COVID isn't out to kill us senseless. But nor is it out to maximise the length of time it can persist in the population. It's RNA. It's not out to do anything. It has no ability to learn. It has no awareness of the fact that it's in a host, let alone any preferences about what happens to that host. Don't anthropomorphise it.
Unless I'm missing something, this 'study' seems to do little more than support that understanding.
Ethical problems and risk of mutations make this a non-starter I guess, but I'm genuinely curious.
Hopefully there's no direct work on them for exactly those reasons.
It's not really about the "airborne vaccine" itself, its about the fact that the engineering that goes into designing something like that can be used to deliberately kill a lot of people.
Nonetheless, in your example it did. At extreme cost, though that was already understood when you said Spanish Flu.
> South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.
It could still be that among people infected with Omicron, there is a larger proportion of vaccinated people, due to vaccines being less efficient, but that's still a better yardstick.
Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker!
EDIT: Also, on a side note, the actual doctor who found Omicron said it was less dangerous. She even described it as "extremely mild." https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-inter... Needless to say, politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it.
Probably naive to think we could totally eradicate it within a couple of years, particularly as far as vaccine fearmongering is concerned. Would be nice to see it join Smallpox and Polio though.
That said, we've accepted an annual winter uptick in flu infections and we just tell people most vulnerable to get their yearly flu jab; less vulnerable folks can stay at home for a bit and manage the symptoms. If that's what we have to do for covid every winter then so be it.
I would still call that a victory overall.
You're picking an outlier as proof that its not seasonal. Others may say it's the exception that proves the rule.
I just did. There are no discernable spikes coinciding with cold weather for India, Brazil, the UK or Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season#Timing -> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/165/12/1434/125289
> In the Fourier analysis, the seasonality of influenza in Brazil was characterized by a semiannual pattern, peaking in the winter month of June (amplitude = 27 percent), with a second, smaller peak during the summer (January; amplitude = 13 percent; figure 2).
Accepted? I would call that normalizing as well. According to an estimate, about 290,000 to 650,000 globally died of the flu each year.[1]
Normalization means it's a problem out of mind out of sight. We stop demanding these problems to be solved.
1. https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-up-to-650-000-peopl...
Since we have 100% death ratio, show us your health history along with your verifiable ID. We are the ministry of Truth and Safety.
In all seriousness: We need to push back on robbing of civil liberties. No one cared to check for flu vaccine. It should be the same for COVID now that it’s getting weaker and it won’t end forever.
At some point, drastic measures start being worse than the disease. It doesn't mean we should ignore the few hundred thousand death.
Humanity declared victory over every single pathogen to date (eradicated, contained or seasonal) because we are still here and thriving. We should go on with our lives.
Here's LA County using overflow tents in 2018 because the flu season was particularly bad: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-flu-demand-2018...
So it's not like this is some new threat. "2 weeks to flatten the curve" came along with some understanding that hospitals would increase their resources. Instead, in many states, they've spent more time working out which unvaccinated staff to fire and how than they have increasing staffing levels.
[US Closing Hospitals At Record Pace During Pandemic - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz46ZQSRdRE)
So these politicians should treat this like an emergency and drive dumptrucks of money up to healthcare staff not working and get them back. Get nursing students. Do whatever it takes. Think outside of the box. This is supposed to be an emergency, is it not?
I mean, if it was an emergency and healthcare was truly an issue, why aren't those hospital tents and hospital ships docked in the harbor of every major city? "Lack of staff" is just an excuse in an emergency. You work around it. Make it happen. It's an emergency, right?
And if it isn't an emergency, why are we mandating anything at all? Shouldn't we all be going about our lives like we did prior to march 2020? If it isn't an emergency why are governments still using emergency powers to push mandates onto citizens instead of actually dealing with hospital shortages?
None of this makes any sense at all when you really start thinking about it. Absolutely none of it... Never did, never will...
We would have to completely redesign our current method of vaccination, then. We do not have a sterilizing vaccine for COVID (like we did for smallpox and polio). The current vaccines all use spike proteins to prepare a body's antibodies against the main infection tool of the COVID virus. This method indirectly prevents the virus from efficiently infecting cells in vaccinated hosts, but it does not and cannot eradicate the virus.
We don't actually have sterilizing vaccines for smallpox or polio either.
>The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells never get involved, a bit like an intruder smacking up against an electric fence around a building, leaving the security guards inside none the wiser.
and
>This is a very neat story. And it is “almost impossible to prove,” Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Oregon Health & Science University, told me. To show sterilizing immunity, researchers have to demonstrate that an infection never occurred—a big ask, considering that microbiologists can’t even agree on what an infection actually is.
If that is the definition used, yes, you are right. It is also basically useless as a term, as it is 'almost impossible to prove.' If you wish to use another term, we can do that. Instead of sterilizing, I could simply say 'highly effective.' Suffice to say, the mechanisms used by the COVID vaccine and the polio vaccine are very different. At most, the polio vaccine only included 3 strains (or variants)- the Salk vaccine, the first, only targeted type 1, but two more were added later over the course of years.
All of this is to say- the highly effective polio vaccine works because there are very few polio variants and people are immunized against them directly.
The COVID vaccine does not make one immune to the virus, or immune to the spike protein. The presence of the spike protein in the vaccine provokes an autoimmune response in the form of antibodies that will target that spike protein. This is somewhat effective, and a clever 'hack' that allows us a measure of protection. However, different spike proteins can be used by different variant viruses.
I am not antivaccine, and while autoimmune systems can be fairly complex, it is certainly worth discussing. Frankly I find the obfuscation and sloppy, ideological reporting to be frustrating. On all sides I see a lack of rigor and emotional attempts at control.
Would someone who is flagging this comment please, instead, respond to it? If it is so trivially dismissed, please show the rest of us.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind...
But that hope should not be treated as a fact like the headline does.
Another hope could be that omicron is actually not as virulent as delta, but only spreads so fast in South Africa, because people can get reinfected.
It's seeing a pretty explosive growth rate in Denmark.
https://sum.dk/ministeren/sociale-medier-arkiv/2021/december...
https://www.ssi.dk/-/media/cdn/files/covid19/omikron/statusr...
Even if it turns up to actually be true, the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true.
The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “it’s too soon to be sure”, then pay attention.
It’s too soon to be sure.
Although it's too early to be sure, it would explain both an increased transmissibility and a milder variant.
Also, it is similar enough to what i heard before from a conference about covid previous year.
It's actually a worldwide and European meeting ( so 2 times/ week for me actually) and it's a pretty good alternative for keeping company culture and bringing it somewhat online.
Yes, it's not required if you don't want to attend :)
Thanks!
So a more lethal virus during a pandemic must also be more transmissible, as it's actively competing for the same susceptible hosts with other circulating strains. If another strain gets there first, chances are it's going to prime that host's immune system sufficiently to prevent reinfection.
Which means it needs not just more lethal mutations, but also more transmissible ones. The probability of all of those coinciding seems low, as the former are more likely to arise in immunocompromised hosts, and the latter in circulation among dense populations, no?
No, it doesn't.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
> The claim makes a broad generalization about pathogens that’s not supported by science. It has been well-documented that pathogens can evolve to be more virulent. And many viruses, including HIV and Ebola, have in fact become more lethal over time.
As you note, smallpox disproves the idea that viruses automatically become mild. It had thousands of years to do so and carried a 30% mortality rate still.
If everything survives, the resulting community can live with each other and that requires a sufficiently mild virus. However that doesn't help predict the future, because you can't enforce the precondition of everyone surviving.
Indeed. And wanting something to be false does not make it false. People on both sides of this debate are far too eager to run with their preferred opinion and accuse anyone who disagrees of "misinformation".
"I don't like this paper, and I see arguments against it, therefore it is dangerous and wrong."
It's petty behavior.
Sure, for this immediate wave [more transmissible less virulent] is better than [more transmissible more virulent].
But that's awfully myopic. What happens after that?
Since mutation rate is a function of the number of viral particles, and more transmission means many more hosts incubating many more particles, we should expect to see more new variants, faster.
So the probability just went up that we'll get a new wave of a new variant that's [more transmissible more virulent] and will kill 10x more people than alpha through omicron will.
That's a probability and not a certainty, but life is probabilistic and our risk level just went up a lot.
It's not a miracle or anything close to that level of implied bafflement (devoid of being able to explain it rationally). We're excellent survivors overall, and a lot more than that. We're very skilled at resource utilization, we're relatively talented at conceptual thinking, we're competent tool builders on a planet ripe for it, we possess the ability to plan far ahead and understand consequences numerous steps out, we have memory capabilities that are quite effective across most of our lifetimes, most of our species is not particularly violent and is generally good natured & friendly (only a very small fraction of the population will ever commit serious acts of violence), we function quite well together in groups/tribes/cities/nations (compounded, shared outcomes), and so on. It's not particularly complicated, despite the doomsayers that will never stop existing amongst us (their mentality says more about them than it does the human race).
We should have prioritized health and Vitamin D in April 2020. At that time it was clear it was mainly affecting overweight people. Of course even almost 2 years later people still don't think that as a whole. They say comorbidities. Just say it like it is... it's mostly fat people. The news and society won't say that.
Also by some definitions America is “mostly fat people” so your point is not that meaningful to begin with.
The human mind can create symptoms very easily, especially if every day you get bombarded by social media and news about Covid.
> Also by some definitions America is “mostly fat people” so your point is not that meaningful to begin with
True, but I'm just saying this wouldn't have been an issue 30 - 50 years ago.
Globally that is one thing, but if that data point is in the US, then the baseline population is something like 60-70% overweight/obese to begin with. In which case, that elevation from baseline isn’t as significant as implied.
Citation for this? I've never heard this at all.
But still useful data. Thanks.
There's just no nuance in any conversation related to Covid.
Let me ask you a question. If weight had absolutely no impact on Covid then what expected percentage of Covid hospitalizations would be with overweight people?
Apparently though people's risk perceptions about COVID are wildly off base, by orders of magnitude.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
40% of US Democrats think COVID hospitalization risk if you're unvaccinated is 50%! Fifty percent! The real answer is less than 1%. Other polls have shown similar things for fatality rates, like estimated 16% IFR on average in France. It really makes me realize why people act in such extreme ways, if that's what they think.
COVID is to a large extent a total failure of our societies ability to disseminate accurate information. Unfortunately this misinformation catastrophe is largely the work of the very same people who are constantly complaining about misinformation.
For a disease to make us go extinct it would have to be highly transmissible and have a fatality rate of close to 100%. Anything less than that, and evolution will produce a generation of humans that are resistant to (or otherwise able to protect themselves from) the disease, and from there the population will replenish itself. The great plague had a fatality rate of 30% and it didn't even come close to threatening our existence as a specie. (In fact, the resulting redistribution of wealth arguably contributed to the advent of the renaissance.)
While there can be recombinations of some similar viruses, that's not the common way that viruses propagate, and it's not mating. Point mutations are much more common. And if they do recombine there's no reason to (automatically) expect that the results will be the worst characteristics of both.
The probability of a more transmissible, more virulent strain just went down, not up. It certainly isn't zero, but "more transmissible less virulent" is exactly how viruses tend to evolve. Mutations are a dice roll and it there's no way to be sure of anything, but being a little optimistic is completely appropriate.
How does selection pressure work when the disease is spread by people with no symptoms?
You are forgetting about the most vulnerable group of all: immunosuppressed people.
They cannot mount a sufficient immune response, in severe immunosuppression like after a transplant event months or years after. In some cases the covid mortality for these people can approach 40% for young adults.
We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such. Or "whoever's not vaccinated dies of their own fault". Not 100% true.
We as a society must protect those most vulnerable.
Plus many of these people arguing to keep them around forever forget that actual living humans work at these businesses. It takes a lot of privilege to suggest employees should continue wearing masks forever to make a small set of extremely fearful customers feel "safe". I bet 99% of the "pro mask" people on are not in a place requiring them to wear a mask 40 hours a week.
"We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such."
Not arguing with you, just genuinely interested on how long you would advocate for mask mandates? Would you be willing to accept mask mandates in perpetuity?
This is still so hilarious to me. It's pretty obvious that some masks work, that is, n95 or whatever actual respirator masks. It's pretty obvious that other masks don't work at all, that is, 99.99% of masks worn by the public at large.
So a N95 mask works and covering your mouth with a bandana has no effect at all? Not even 10%?
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
This is the problem, isn't it? For how long will these mandates be in place for? Right now, it's clear that they won't end until populations start revolting.
That's not at all clear. My very cautious Northern California county dropped the mask mandates when cases started dropping this summer and only re-implimented them when cases and hospitalizations started to rise again.
I don't see any reason for them not to drop the mandates again when infection/hospitalization rates drop down to acceptable levels.
Define acceptable levels? And does this suggest we continue masking every winter when "cases surge"? There will always be a variant of covid. Always. It's never going away. Basing mask mandates of any metric, be it cases, hospitalizations or deaths means every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask.
We've been in this pandemic now for close to 2 years. At every single point, government rules and guidance have lagged recommendations from the experts. I'm confident that there is exactly 0 chance that any governmental body in the US is going to continue to mandate masking after it's no longer necessary.
At this point, in the states that have mandates? I'm honestly not sure. There sure seems to be no rush to remove them despite having low "cases" and hospitalizations not being an issue. And given none of these states have given a single hint as to when they will go away... who knows?
States that continue this are absolutely normalizing mandated masks. Vaccines were sold as the end of masks (and they morally should have been regardless of what politicians say). Vaccines are the best we can do. Mandated masks in a post-vaccine world makes absolutely no sense at all. What other target could a government reasonably set after a vaccine? "Cases"? "Hospitalizations"? Well... those will always be there. So do we just keep doing this forever?
And if you say "hospital capacity" shouldn't these governments have fixed that already? We gave them two years and it was an emergency so where is the hospital capacity we put our lives on hold for? I mean, its still an emergency right? Shouldn't people be super pissed that government hasn't dealt with the actual problem they keep saying we have?
Both of these may be widely available in the US quite soon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/14/does-pfizer...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/ 'Ivermectin is an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
We know that steroids work because they were studied, they definitely work, they're cheap and now they're the standard of care. Why didn't the anti-ivermectin conspiracy come for dexamethasone? It's left unexplained...
I think it depends on location. In key environments like public transport and supermarkets and other spaces that everyone needs to be able to access it seems reasonable to me that we might keep them for at least a 5-10 year horizon if that proves necessary. It just doesn't seem like a big deal to wear a mask, and it would cut down on the need for more restrictive measures like lockdowns.
My wife has a medical exemption from wearing a mask. She cannot live a normal life when the standard response to her being out in public is disgust, constant questioning, or outright rejecting her due to "in-store policies."
My father has been wearing a mask, but constantly deals with hyperventilation issues. He's working with his family doctor to determine next steps.
Some things are a big deal for some people. I support anyone wearing a mask if they so choose. I oppose mask mandates as a one-size fits all solution.
I expect my wife would have to strap her card over her mouth to satisfy the social pressure to conform. It's not in most people's imaginations that anyone else could suffer from something that doesn't bother them.
What about the fully vaccinated, boostered employees who work at these places? Should they also continue wearing masks despite being at virtually zero risk of major covid issues?
But yeah, no thanks. We didn't do masks in 2019 and we sure as heck shouldn't keep doing them going forward. Masks were a hack to get us to vaccines. They aren't something we should be keeping around anymore.
From start to end of October, cases per 100k, 7 day average
Glasgow -- 300->220
Edinburgh -- 210->250
Manchester -- 290->220
Birmingham -- 250->280
4 similar cities, two with mask mandates, two without.
And smaller ones
Aberdeen -- 267->330
Southampton -- 300->410
Perth -- 320->260
Hereford -- 290->580
So there may be something there, would need more data to really see, but it certainly isn't a glowing mandate for masks
Yeah... I'm sure all these studies done post-2019 are totally legit though.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
"At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were divided into a group wearing medical/surgical masks and a control group found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review found nine trials (of which eight were cluster-randomized controlled trials in which clusters of people, versus individuals, were randomized) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness. Two trials were with healthcare workers and seven in the community. The review concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI) (RR 0.99, 95%CI 0.82 to 1.18) or laboratory confirmed illness (LCI) (RR 0.91, 95%CI 0.66-1.26) (44); the certainty of the evidence was low for ILI, moderate for LCI."
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/337199/WHO-...
Interestingly the DOI does not show up
Here's some further criticisms:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1073440/latest.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01296
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/ja...
They saw a significant reduction in covid presence in communities with more masking -- even though total masking was still only 40% in those communities -- which is very much in line with all the other literature.
I literally can't believe people still pretend like masks (especially surgical/KN95s) don't protect people when it's completely self-evident since we've used them forever to protect people in medical settings.
They don't work, at all, across decades of research and dozens of studies. They're not going to magically start working for COVID when they haven't worked for the flu or any other respiratory virus in the past.
>forever to protect people in medical settings.
Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
Unfortunately, Tyler Cowen's blog has worse Covid commentary than even HN does, which is pretty impressive given the amount of HCQ/Ivermectin/bioweapon conspiracy theorizing here.
> Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
This is patently untrue.. you're not one of those "virus particles can fit through masks" people are you? As just one example of how obvious it is that masks protect against viruses in HCW from the last SARS outbreak;
> Although more research on universal masking in heath settings is needed, it is the expert opinion of the majority (79%) of WHO COVID-19 IPC GDG members that universal masking is advisable in geographic settings where there is known or suspected community or cluster transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
> 1. In areas of known or suspected community or cluster SARS-CoV-2 transmission, universal masking should be advised in all health facilities (see Table 1).
> All health workers, including community health workers and caregivers, should wear a medical mask at all times, for any activity (care of COVID-19 or nonCOVID-19 patients) and in any common area (e.g., cafeteria, staff rooms).
> Other staff, visitors, outpatients and service providers should also wear a mask (medical or non-medical) at all times
"Experts" supported eugenics, antibacterial soap, breakfast cereal, the food pyramid, lobotomies, and all kinds of other things on the basis of popular "consensus"
The people making those recommendations are experts in the field and have all read the relevant research. Weighting the good studies vs. the bad ones, measuring evidence, etc. They literally exist to give guidance on world health matters based on the spectrum of results from all these different researchers.
And here you are, telling me that in your opinion, we should ignore their assessment and only trust these few specific papers that you choose to emphasize. (At least you've stopped advocating for ivermectin now?)
A bit of a paradox to get people to rely on your opinion when you've previously said we shouldn't rely on opinions isn't it? Or is it just that you don't like the WHO's opinion on World Health issues because they might be in the pocket of "big surgical mask".
I'm not telling you anything in my opinion. I'm telling you what the empirical evidence says or doesn't say.
I have not stopped advocating Ivermectin. The empirical evidence shows that it is still an extremely cheap, safe, and correlated treatment demonstrated across populations of billions through a mechanism of action that has been well established.
There's literally no reason not to try it, and there's a reason it's part of treatment regimens across several countries. Its use doesn't involve eroding the liberty of the populace or solidifying absolute power of state. It has virtually zero side effects medically or socioculturally, unlike things like masks or vaccines that have zero long term data
Even if I disagree with TC on something, I still think he's pretty much intellectually honest, i.e., is not beholden to one political agenda or another simply because it matches his world view or completely unaware of competing data. And he often does a good job in striking a balance on ideology & practicality (State Capacity Libertarianism comes to mind)
However the comments section on MR are often a hot mess of cherry picking or misinformation parroted back by people trying emulate TC's style without anything approaching his intellectual rigor.
1) Were people in Scotland (with higher masking) being less cautious in other areas (washing hands, staying further away, etc)
2) Was the weather worse in Scotland, leading to more closed windows
3) Are people in Scotland more likely to be tested and thus more cases caught
The problem I have is that
The Scientific method comes out with great studies (wearing masks, all things being equal, reduces transmission)
That leads to a prediction (enforcing masks reduces cases figures)
That prediction doesn't hold out (Scottish cases figures)
So we need to revisit the prediction,
1) Does a mask mandate increase mask usage (anecdotally it appears so, but I only went to Glasgow and Manchester in October)
2) Does increased mask usage lead to other behaviours which would increase risk
3) Does increased mask usage lead to more awareness in testing
4) Do anti mask people go round licking door handles to try to spread covid to prove their points
These are perfectly valid questions, yet you can't ask them, because half the responses will be some idiotic cultish anti-mask covid denier, and the others will be some cultish mask worshiper
I'm fully vaccinated, so why should I? And when will the pandemic "be over"? Covid is here forever and ever. As long as we keep testing at the level we do, we will always find new variants and always see "spikes" of cases every single winter.
When, specifically, do the states with mask mandates remove them? Why not today? What makes a month better? Or a year? Or never?
Pushing for masks at this stage is arguing we wear masks forever. That isn't a world I care to live in.
There shortages of hospital beds across many states [0] If you want a full perspective on things, look further than your own state.
Unless you live in Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska, North Dakota, or Montana then everything is not going very well. Most people don't live in these states, and many of the states with loose mask mandates are not in that short list. A small are just about holding their ground, but about 40 states have seen a >= 15% increase in infections just in the last two weeks, and one of the least restrictive states for mask mandates (Texas) has increased by 80%. [1]
[0] https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
I also don't understand your assessment that we are reaching (or can reach) herd immunity: We're not there on the common cold or influenza, and it seems COVID mutates at rates that will keep it around as well. Early evidence on Omicron indicates that it in particular is better at reinfection than other strains, so I hope the data in the next few weeks confirms its milder nature, but reinfection provides even more opportunity for variants to emerge.
We're much better off than we were a year ago: The holiday spike is (so far) not as bad, deaths are lower than last year at this time, and vaccines are widely available. But we're not back to normal yet (probably never will be) and I don't think we're doing as well right now as we could be, and I think we can make a lot more progress before we declare this thing over and adjust to a new status-quo.
As for your experience, it is not predictive or representative given the ~800,000 US deaths. Especially because you live in an admittedly very cautious area.
Give me "unnecessarily wear a mask while walking the dog" and no deaths every day if my other option is "never wear a mask anywhere" and be surrounded by death.
The death distributions are very clear.
If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.
Long COVID is a big deal, and it apparently affects half of those who get COVID [1]. Furthermore, even double-vaxxed, while protected against hospitalization or death, are still at risk (reduced about 50%) for long COVID [2].
Until/unless Omicron has been proven to have less severe long covid symptoms, yeah I'm treating it with the same caution that I'd do with Delta.
[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/how-many-people-get-... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
Long Covid is not a defined term. It comprises everything from "post-hospitalization syndrome" -- which is something that has existed since long before Covid -- to "slight cough for a few weeks". If you're young (under 65) and otherwise healthy, you are highly unlikely to have anything more than a minor illness. Particularly after vaccination.
Here's a paper that might interest you:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
> In this cross-sectional analysis of 26,823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with [loss of smell].
In other words, in a large study out of France, the only "long covid symptom" actually correlated with SARS-CoV2 infection was loss of smell. All of the other various symptoms were associated with self-reported illness, but not confirmed illness.
This is a fairly strong argument that "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic. We'd probably see this more clearly if the various "long covid" studies didn't rely exclusively on self-reporting of symptoms, and mix together all levels of illness.
To combat this, perhaps we could swap the masks out with gags. /s
I'll happily give those odds a miss.
Without knowing your specific background, your numbers are probably much less.
E.g. ages 0-17, there's been 644 deaths. Across a cohort with ~75,000,000 people.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Getting infected with COVID does not.
Same thing with driving; we have a variety of safety precautions - quite a few of them mandatory - involved that help tilt the cost/benefit balance in our favor.
So they will buy carbon indulgences for your corporate trip to Bora Bora but not regular travelers?
You would need to compare the benefits of driving to the benefits of living a normal life, and compare that to the risks of dying from each.
Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits? What are you trying to say?
Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.
So many benefits.
Going to a live game has benefits. Do those not matter?
The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.
This is a ludicrous abuse of statistics. 11 fatalities per 100k people is 11 fatalities per 100k people's worth of trips. That is a few orders of magnitude less than executing 11 people out of every 100k who show up to a stadium.
> Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?
Covid-19 deaths are not randomly distributed. We've known this for nearly two years now.
Given the option, I'm not taking that bet. I wouldn't play Russian roulette even with a 2000-bullet revolver. Especially when there are pretty simple steps I can take to further minimize the risk.
(It would be nice to have more-- and updated-- data than this. If anyone is aware of a source, I'd love to know about it)
That's also discounting other (and possibly not yet known) complications from getting COVID. There might not be much of any, but we it will be some time before we know that so I wouldn't discount that factor in my risk analysis.
Serious measure to mitigate transmission rates still seems like a very reasonable practice, even for healthy people.
Thank-you for acknowledging the subjectivity of Risk Tolerance.
But keeping the panic dialed up to 11 for two years is very healthy.
Signed, someone who probably now has a cardiac neurosis.
As for the doctor that discovered it: Here experience with infected individuals is anecdotal data. She has not, to my knowledge, been involved in systematic studies. She is a general practitioner so here experience with this has been on the ground, primarily with the patients she has seen. Certainly this is useful but it is not a replacement for well-formed studies. Medical research and epidemiology are distinctly different activities from medical practice, even if many people involved in both have a medical degree.
"Most Omicron cases in US have been mild but most were vaccinated" from CDC reported on by CNN and MSNBC
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/health/omicron-cases-us-cdc/i...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-report-omicro...
There may be more but that was a quick Google search. You said "politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it." but that's incorrect
That being said there are a lot of people hand wringing about “we don’t know yet, we don’t know yet” in this very thread. Three weeks into it, and the evidence is almost overwhelming: it is not likely to be nearly as bad.
I followed the original covid news in early January and I fought against the narrative that it was “just the flu”. We would know by now if the news was bad.
That being said, folks should continue to remain vigilant in those areas where spread is prevalent.
I'm optimistic.
A version of Covid that is much more contagious, but less likely to be severe is a great way to get the immune system of the vaccine avoidant trained on how to recognize and fight Covid.
For those who have already been vaccinated, a mild breakthrough infection would serve the same function as a booster shot.
Except booster shots don’t infect other people.
And her experience is entirely consistent with Omicron appearing less virulent because it's infecting the previously infected and vaccinated who already have some degree of immunity.
The doctor isn't a psychic but how do _you_ know this
1. We know that break through infections are less serious than infections to the unvaccinated and uninfected. 2. We determine virulence by # of hospitalizations (or other serious outcome) / # of infections 3. If we add more infections that don't have serious outcomes (because they are break through cases) that greatly increases the denominator without affecting the numerator. 4. This is how you could have Omicron be just as virulent as the original but look less virulent to a doctor. (Because of the break through cases)
Does that make sense?
Unfortunately, in Bulgaria you see that the size of the deaths wave still follows the size of the infection wave.
The “no vulnerable people to die are left” hypothesis doesn’t hold. Those who survived survived because they were lucky, careful or vaccinated. It’s not true that the virus burned through the population and the remaining are the immune or resilient survivors.
If they lock down again, they'll lock down every single winter from here on out. Lockdowns in a post-vaccine world are complete madness.
A few months back I was in Bulgaria, where the majority of the population is antivaxx virus deniers mask sceptics. It’s true that mask free virus free worry free life is much better, it was liberating to be in Bulgaria. However, at the same time everyone knew someone who died from covid. Much more than Turkey, where I have been since the start of the pandemic.
The situation we are in is not a choice. The virus is real, the damage is real and we can’t simply refuse to play. We can but a lot of people will die and I’m not convinced that this is the way to go.
I bet, when the things start getting real with other issues like the global warming, the inconveniences will create similar reactions. I appreciate the drive, the desire for freedom and convince but these things happen to people all the time when they fail to address the slow moving issues beforehand.
Everything we’ve done in the last two years is not caused by the virus but our reaction to the virus.
PS: eventually even the most hardcore fearful will have no choice but to move on. Omicron is not the last variant and Covid will be with us forever. Expecting every member of society to treat Covid as if it is the only problem from here on out is not going to happen.
Get your vaccines. Stop being scared and move on. It’s quite literally as simple as that.
We will eventually move on, the idea is to do it with least damage possible. People moved on from the plague, the black death ve will move on. It’s just doesn’t need to lose so many people in the name of conspiracy theories and inconvenience.
The handling of the situation is different everywhere. It’s a management issue, not really a virus issue.
The way you talk scares me more than the virus. It is so authoritarian and creepy. So many of my tech worker colleagues talk the same way. It’s abuse. People that talk your way are the kinds of people that commit grave atrocities in the name of some cause you are 100% bought into. You do not have the moral high ground you think you do. Stop now before you let very evil people use you to commit very bad things to your fellow humans.
You’ve already allowed your government to destroy our kids, caused old folks to die alone in care homes, gutted the working class, transferred enormous amounts of wealth to the richest in society, and divided the population in a way never seen before. You are committing great evil and you foolishly believe you are doing it for a proper cause. You aren’t.
Covid ends when you personally decide it does. Covid has no feelings. It’s a virus. It does virus stuff. It’s a part of nature just like earthquakes or tornadoes. We have very little control over it. Accept that and move on.
End your fear and Covid is no longer a problem. It is literally as easy as that. Nobody has to “accept” the virus requires them to sacrifice their very short amount of time on this earth unless they allow it to. And anybody who tells them otherwise is not to be trusted at all, for they have nobodies interest in mind.
You know what’s part of the nature? lions, crocodiles and sharks and yet I’m not going to let them eat me. Earthquakes are natural too and you build accordingly, actually the evil governments even implemented building codes for it. 20 years ago I survived an earthquake that wiped out the neighbourhood because the previous governments couldn't bother to be evil and authoritarian over building standards.
What's up with this obsession with naturalism and personification of events?
We don't need any further mitigation strategies. Vaccines were the only real mitigation strategy we ever had.
Sometimes I feel this is what people want when they say we should be listening to "medical and scientific" people. They want us to build society around the advice of exactly one profession to the exclusion of everything else.
It takes way more than just a very narrow expert to run a society. For two years we've handed the keys over to exactly one form of expert and completely ignored every other form of expertise.
These "medical and scientific" folks you talk of can yell "not enough" until they run out of air but that doesn't mean we should listen to them. Of course they are gonna say "it isn't enough"! That is their job! That doesn't mean we should to listen to their advice.
It may come as a surprise to some people but at some point you have to move on from covid no matter what these "experts" say. There are vastly more problems with the world than one specific form of illness.
This blind adherence to a small set of "medical experts" is completely myopic and is resulting in a cure that is much worse than covid ever was. We've had a vaccine for a year. You can mix & match boosters at this point. Party is over. Covid is here to stay. Move on, people.
>“Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.” [1].
So, to actually make the comparison we'd need to compare new Delta infections with new Omicron infections time-matched, comparing people who were seronegative to start with. This would be really hard to do in South Africa since there is a high proportion of seropositive people.
All viruses are severe if you have no immune protection from them. A small number of people die from the cold every year. The only thing that matters is how severe the infection is given the immunity you have.
Comparing the severity of the viral strains on some objective scale, if that’s even possible, is at best an academic curiosity. Severity comparisons only really matter in giving us an accurate idea of how likely severe illness and death will be so that individuals, families, and public health officials can make any changes necessary.
These numbers show (as one would expect) that prior infection makes you less likely to get Omicron, and that prior infection with more recent strains does so more effectively. (Which might be because they're more Omicron-like, or because the infection was more recent. I'm guessing more the latter.)
Google doesn't run its data centers at 5% capacity for the same reasons ICUs don't.
For a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison they should be comparing omicron hospitalization & fatality rates to those of non-omicron variants over the same period of time. It doesn't look like they've done that, and I'm not aware of a study that has systematically done this (yet).
It would certainly be a holiday-season gift if we shifted to a more virulent but less serious variant, but I'll hold out for a bit more information before I completely buy into that narrative. That can be difficult: people want to believe some good news here. Heck, my initial gut reaction was to push back against your objections but my career has trained me to resist that sort of thing. It won't be good for the erosion of trust in the media if they've jumped the gun on this and Omicron doesn't turn out the way we hope it will.
> For individuals who have had COVID-19 previously, the risk of reinfection with Omicron is significantly higher, relative to prior variants.
Just because you disagree with something does not make it "misleading". The question of prior immunity is not unknown, is an obvious question, and in fact is mentioned in the article and discussed in the study.
The title accurately reflects the contents of the study. I have many issues with Washington Post's coverage of Covid, but this is actually fair.
No research paper stands alone, and we never have all context on a given question. You disagree with the conclusion for reasons -- that's fine. Make your arguments, and see if you can convince people. That's how science works.
Few headlines work without context so what we want is for them to choose the most obvious, pertinent context. I think we all care a lot more about what Omicron means to us now, not what it would have meant if it were the main variant at the start of the pandemic.
And, of course, anyone who cares about the topic should read past the headline.
Plus, this combination could be a lot WORSE for the hospital capacity situation.
Even if the virulence/severity is only a fraction, the severe consequences will still grow exponentially, just further to the right on the curve.
Meanwhile, the curve will grow a lot faster to the top of the graph because the greater exponential growth among both the unvaxed and the vaccinated.
So, higher percentage of severe cases and lower transmisability would be less bad — fewer sever cases and much greater trensmissability is almost the worst case.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/covid-vaccinat...
For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to normal behavior after vaccination, and (iii) the vaccines inhibit the other variants much more than Omnicron. So Omicron gets more opportunities to infect and spread. Of course, all this is just conjecture and could be true or false.
What matters from a practical point of view is that, Omnicron is less severe in the general population today(for various reasons), as compared to the original strain back in 2020.
I think it is misleading. AIDS is much more survivable in "the current situation" because of various drug advances we made in the past few decades. Does that mean 2021 AIDS is "less severe" than 90s AIDS? I guess you could claim it's technically less severe, but the wording definitely suggests it's something about the virus, rather than the environment.
* variant "D" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive
* variant "O" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive and 0.2% of the 80% of the population that is seropositive
The takeaway is "good news everyone, variant O is less severe!"
b) we are about to find out, and find out hard.
Per this site's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Sadly at least one patient has now been confirmed to have died with Omicron," Johnson told reporters [2]
This sounds batshit crazy, because it is, but in the UK, if you die from something unrelated while infected with SARS-COV-2, it's counted as a COVID death. [3] The key word in Boris' announcement is "with".
1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fo...
2: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread...
3: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-co...
This wasn't a press release fyi.
The end result is discussion that advance little in the Shannon information sense, but maximally clarify every individuals social net.
Initially reported Omicron cases in the US predate knowledge of Omicron, confirmed cases are from November, and today's story of 13% of samples in Washington state likely being Omicron is based on test data from a week ago.
0 or 1 deaths being reported so far as caused by Omicron is still consistent with "Omicron is roughly as bad as previous strains, and will result in a lot of excess deaths."
I think Boris' statement is accurate, but you're right; our reaction to it needs to be taken in context. The media and government will talk non-stop about vaccination and treatments, which are incredibly important due to the reality of the pandemic, today. But, mentioning weight, eating healthier, exercising, critically analyzing your own risk factors (with the help of a doctor), etc; out of the question.
I wish I could scream at our leftist leadership right now: Managing fear is wildly important. Every spectrum has extremes. On the extreme right we have vaccine denialists; that's unhealthy. But on the extreme left, we have the opposite [1]; people who are so afraid of this thing they can barely live their daily lives, people who isolate, become depressed, and even kids who are so impacted by at-home learning and impaired social lives they commit suicide. That's blood; the rightwing media and government leaders spill the blood of people who won't get vaccinated, and the leftwing media and government spills the blood of people so caught up in the fear of this thing they neglect their own mental and socioeconomic health.
A (leftist) friend just told me three days ago: "Every other human is a threat."
At this point, we need to heal. Vaccinations, treatments; absolutely. But far more importantly, we gotta put COVID behind us, even if its still here. That responsibility falls on the media and government leaders. Early in the pandemic, we (probably) overplayed the severity of the disease to convince people to isolate; we didn't know how bad it would be, so it was the safer, correct route. Today, I think we need to underplay it. Don't lie; don't obscure. But the fearmongering will destroy our society far faster than COVID does.
[1] https://twitter.com/drewtoothpaste/status/147012370236491367...
Suicide rates may rise in future, but all the available data says that they have not gone up yet. This is using real time monitoring data.
> Don't lie;
Quite.