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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.
I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
That is absolutely not what the OP said, fwiw
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
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.
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)?
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 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/
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
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.
It's not a problem in any area with high vaccine compliance.
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.
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Going from 90% to 99% vaccine efficacy barely does anything, because our vaccine compliance numbers are so damn low.
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.
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.
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.
If left alone, yes. We are not leaving it alone.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
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.
No, evolution doesn't work that way.
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.
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.
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.
Evidence so far suggests Omicron has high rates of reinfection.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...
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!”
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.