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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Whoa. Smashed through the vaccines. 74% of a vaxxed+tested 117 person holiday party got Omicron from a single person who visited South Africa and tested negative multiple times.

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Yeah it is pretty dire news really. Recent experience in Australia demonstrates that vaccines, especially when fresh, work really well to control the spread of Delta. But it looks like Omicron just cuts straight through that protection.

A silver lining here is that none of 70 odd people infected were hospitalised. It is plausible the vaccines provided protection from hospitalisation here, but there are better ways that will be measured in coming days/weeks.

Omicron looks like it might have changed the nature of the infection from a lower respiratory infection to an upper respiratory one leading to less serious infections. Let’s hope they are right.

Do you have a source for this? Everything I've read about omicron until now is "we don't know".

It was in news. It is indicated, meaning "looks like it, but we need more data to confirm thoroughly".

As Noah Smith wrote: [0] > it’s easy to delude ourselves into unreasoning optimism in the face of an onrushing threat. It will still be weeks or even months before we know for sure whether Omicron is a step in the hoped-for transformation of Covid into yet another common cold virus, or whether it’s just another deadly super-variant. But interestingly, there is now some research showing a possible mechanism by which Omicron might be both more contagious and less harmful. A new study from the University of Hong Kong shows that Omicron replicates much more quickly than Delta in the upper airways, but much less quickly in the lungs, where Covid does its real damage.

The study: https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...

[0]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/omicron-update-inflation-u...

Previous research from Hong Kong mentioned this information.

Spreads less in the lung, much more in the nose.

Not: this is lab info ( = no human protection kicking in. The title is kinda sensational because of that)

https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...

Indeed. Unfortunately theres a 2 week delay between a peak in infections, and the peak in hospitalisations. So we'll find out the effect of todays caseload in 2 weeks, unfortunately omicron has a doubling time of between 1.5 and 3 days, so 2 weeks from now its gonna be much worse.

I really hope the info about lower hospitalisation rates is correct (across all age groups), or hospitals or gonna be smashed with cases.

it could actually be even worse : because of the large number of vaccinated people, it could be very possible that the variant actually spreads more on vaccinated people than non-vaccinated ones (saw a stats on that, but the numbers were too low to prove anything). ADE is still a very possible scenario.

How does ADE come into this when it's just about transmission? From what I understood, ADE is mostly about severity of illness, and the severity looks to be down across the board.

i could be using the wrong term. Saw a researcher's work on that (aka : vaccine inducing easier spread of omikron) and thought it was the same as ADE, but i could be wrong.

Even more of a silver lining, according to South African data (and the median age <40yo at this party), it is likely there would be no hospitalisations regardless of vaccination status…

No, stay calm. Here in South Africa the spread is higher than in any other wave and we also have very low percentages of vaccinations. But even so hospitalizations and deaths have been negligible.

When hospitalized it's usually only for a quick stay, and deaths are basically at the same levels as for flu.

The hope now is that it really spreads and becomes even milder, while protecting against the more deadly strains by displacing them.

I agree. For all we know, it seems covid has mutated into a common cold virus.

1 in a 100 people hospitalised is not the common cold. Those are still worse numbers than the flu. Sure, it probably won't make you very sick, but at a population level omicron is still a disaster.

The Health Minister reported that South Africa saw 1.7% hospitalisation in the second week of the omicron wave vs. 19% hospitalisation in the same week of the delta wave [1]. Hoping the trend towards milder disease continues to pan out.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/s-africa-...

I’m really confused that no one being hospitalized is “just a silver lining”.

This should be a surprise to no one. The vaccines are designed to prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death.

Unfortunately the media has harmfully claimed that the vaccines are “less effective against Omicron” because of the reduction of prevention against any symptomatic disease… which they were never designed to prevent.

> which they were never designed to prevent

But that they did reasonably well for the previous variants, and we could greatly benefit from that

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