Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week | Hacker News Reader

Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week

covid.cdc.gov

292 pointsjefftk377 comments

785 Omicron cases in Denmark, Dec 16 report for Nov 22 to Dec 7, Table 2, https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

  0% fatal, 0.13% ICU, 1.2% hospital
  4.3% Covid-recovered 
  76% double vax, 7% booster
  14% unvax, 2% single vax
  77% no travel history

Edit: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/18/politics/white-house-omicron-...

> Some of Biden's advisers are encouraging the administration to begin discussing publicly how to live alongside a virus that shows no signs of disappearing ... Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only -- as some Biden advisers have encouraged -- could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic's every up and down.

Edit2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633899

> The CDC’s Nowcast algorithm has some kind of bug, and the prevalence of Omicron nationwide wasn’t really 73% in the week ending December 18. Take that to the bank ... You will see this walked back. The CDC will explain what happened. The Twitter experts will have to walk back their initial tweets. The press will have to publish a new round of articles clarifying their prior wave of headlines. It might happen tomorrow, later this week, or some time next week, but it will happen. This result won’t stand.

14 deaths in UK so far, ICU and deaths are a lagging indicator.

Would be good to see category percentages for UK cases.

Because of COVID or with COVID when they died?

Why is it so damn difficult to figure out what’s really happening? I’ve read about 10 stories today all telling me I should be very worried about Omicron and not a single one has any data.

because it's a relatively new strain and it's hard to figure out to what degree previous infection plays a role. A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.

'A lot of people may have had covid without ever knowing it.'

If a lot of people had it and were ok, why the continued mask hysteria? It is beginning to seem like people don't want to move on.

Because even if a lot of people are OK and only a few die, those "few" still add up to hundreds of thousands dead people, when the entire population gets infected. Which sure sounds like a good reason to get hysterical. To say nothing of the issue of a catastrophically overtaxed health system and what side effects that will have.

From the top-down, metrics focused perspective, I agree.

From an individual, bottom-up perspective, most people don't have a high risk of death from COVID. The majority will avoid spreading any disease to others, usually by self-enforced quarantine. Some individuals will die, but all of us will die of something some day and we should come up peace with that.

The only top-down mitigation to death of a specific cause is legislation. For an endemic disease, legislation to avoid the spread of that disease must necessarily approach tyranny.

I've addressed the overtaxing if the health system I'm reply to a sibling. It is unclear to me that any overtax if the health system (which is, from what I can glean from the CDC limited, in the US, to a few states) is due to COVID directly rather than institutional responses to COVID.

> rather than institutional responses to COVID

I bet you a lot of fake internet money that when the fire is out and cooler heads prevail, most of the overtax was institutional responses to COVID.

We won't be able to know how true this actually is until years (perhaps decades) after this all calms down. There is simply too much pressure to maintain the current narrative and do true root cause analysis.

My local clinic is so overbooked with work, that I had to come in before they opened and stand in line. Even though I was in line before they even opened, it took me 2 hours to get some basic care (just a TDAP booster, wooping cough, for reasons completely unrelated to COVID19). Yeah, there was a line long before I got there.

This is a major story because all across the country, our health care system has been stretched to its limits. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 started, but this pandemic has only made our nurses and doctors even _MORE_ overworked than expected, as they deal with case-after-case of COVID19.

How much of that is due to changes in procedure (additional cleaning, more involved check-in, etc.?) How much of that is due to healthcare workers leaving the local area (e.g., for incredibly lucrative travel nursing positions) or the industry generally (due to burnout, unemployment incentives, vaccine refusal, etc.?) Finally, how much of the current situation is due to the "catch-up" effect of people who were unable or unwilling to have sub-optimal diagnosed in the midst of the 2020 hysteria and are now seeking treatment for more and more serious conditions?

There is much more at play here than the disease itself. Government, media, and institutions should be held to account for their role in exacerbating the situation.

A month ago, I had no problem getting a flu shot. Walk in, got the shot and left. Like 5 minutes.

This past week, COVID-19 cases are triple what they used to be and flu cases are doubled in my county.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problem. Same clinic, same staff, just one month apart with a sudden COVID and Flu surge.

It was even the same nurse who administered the two shots.

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And the receptionist said, sorry for the wait, we've had an explosion of COVID-19 cases. EDIT: "Overrun" was the receptionist's word actually. But you get the gist.

Fair enough. Out of curiosity, do you live in one of the areas the CDC lists as having a high COVID-related ICU bed occupancy?

https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html

Category D (60% to 69%) area.

There's no ICU at this facility I go to. Just a neighborhood clinic. But enough people are taking COVID19 tests that they're having issues keeping up.

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Everyone around me was in for non-COVID19 reasons. We all came in on maybe Thursday/Friday/Saturday, saw the 4-hour wait, and decided to come back on Sunday to stand in line before the clinic opened.

But the number of COVID19 walk-in patients was clearly big enough to cause all of us in line to postpone our health care (again, mine was pretty whatever, just a TDAP/Wooping Cough booster, the person in front of me had mysterious pains and the person behind me had a mysterious blister). So nothing "serious" mind you, but... there's a lot of self-selection bias here since we all came back another day.

----

Furthermore, the clinic has temporarily suspended its giveout of flu shots. Its really overrun right now and quite evident. I drive past it every day to work and I can see that its parking lot is completely packed.

The sign-in line took 45 minutes to clear after the clinic opened. That's just walk in, type in your name + problem into the computer, and sit down. A lot of us standing outside in the cold waiting just to get to the damn computer screen to sign in.

Thanks! I'm trying to build a mental model of how well that data corresponds to the "on the ground" situation. Evey datum helps.

It's likely unknowable, but I'd be curious to know how many of those coming in for COVID tests are being required to test.

We all know at this point the symptoms of COVID. It's a generally good idea (as well as the most comfortable option) to avoid the public when ill. Exercising a sick day or call-out option to rest and recoup seems more sensible and causes less risk to the public and the capacity of healthcare institutions than sending every case of the sniffles for a test.

> It's likely unknowable, but I'd be curious to know how many of those coming in for COVID tests are being required to test.

The data that's important is "percent positive".

When the covid19 cases are 5% positive or less, you've got accurate statistics. When its above 5%, then things get less-and-less accurate. That is to say: you want roughly 95% of people getting COVID19 tests to be negative, to ensure you're "counting" as many people as possible.

We're at 10%+ positive now. Which means our county is no longer with accurate covid19 counts.

---------

Its a local goal that's been emphasized. Test as many cases as possible so that we get as accurate a picture as possible. I'm not sure if this is applicable to the rest of the country. But we really do strive for 5% positive around here, and its kinda bad that we're failing that now... and is highly indicative that we're undercounting cases severely.

I mean... 4-hour wait times, amirite? If you've got (maybe) COVID19, and the receptionist says "4-hour wait before your test", will you really sit there? Or will you go home and just take off of work for a few days?

Its a natural behavior, but that's the sort of thing that leads to dramatic undercounts of COVID19 during these times.

Masks help slow it and keep it more manageable. If everyone in a country attended a giant “get covid” rally in their neighborhood many hundreds of thousand or maybe millions would die as the hospital system would be overwhelmed despite omicron appearing to be less likely to require hospitalization.

Right now the hospitalization number is already too high, and is putting massive strain on nurses. When Ventilators and ICU beds run out people die that normally wouldn’t.

It’s not so much mask hysteria as hysteria of a large number of people refusing to protect themselves or their communities from the virus or spreading it.

It would not be a problem if unvaccinated people simply agreed to not be treated by a hospital when they get covid. That will never happen. So wear a mask to slow the spread.

The whole 'hospitals are overwhelmed' thing is getting old now. A few do get overwhelmed, but everything seems to work out and you don't hear any more about it.

So enough with the fear mongering, if you're not high risk, go get Covid and be done with it.

Oh, and we're not refusing to protect ourselves. Our bodies already do that, it's called an immune system and when I caught Covid all the little immune workers showed up and took care of business. You don't need the vaccine unless you're high risk.

And another thing, before vaccines the hospitals and their staff were doing just fine without the vaccine, yet some were fired later for not taking it. It's insanity and it's profit and politically driven hysteria.

Masks keep us from spitting on eachother. They help.

A healthy-as-a-horse family friend caught Covid (unvaccinated because he didn’t believe Covid was a real thing), no risk factors other than being in his 50s, and died on a ventilator. Probably would have died anyway, but in his case he died because the ICU staff was overworked during a local wave and his vent tube clogged and no one noticed. Now his (also anti-vaccine) widow is considering suing the hospital for malpractice.

Now, obviously the above is anecdata, but there’s a real chain of causality from the standpoint that if my friend had been vaccinated, this probably wouldn’t have happened. If the people within his immediate social circle were vaccinated, this might not have happened. If his community at large was vaccinated, not only would he be less likely to catch it, he would be less likely to end up in the hospital, and even in the hospital, he would have received more attentive care.

You can’t just hand wave away the societal impact of having a novel virus circulating through the community. And even if you want to shoulder the risk yourself, what about the impact your contribution to spread has on other people? Where’s your obligation to your community at large?

I met another person, friend of a friend, last week, who can barely speak above a whisper. She caught Covid (runner, vaccinated), and ended up with lung damage. It was two months before she could walk around without being winded. She did everything right, and still ended up severely harmed by Covid.

Now, one can turn around and say, “well, look, the vaccines were pointless!”, but obviously that’s ridiculous- it’s just the law of large numbers. The data clearly shows that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely to get sick, end up in the hospital , and die of Covid. If everyone around you is vaccinated, it’s less likely you’ll need to depend on the vaccine to make the odds work out in your favor.

There’s all kinds of aspects of life where we collectively decide to look out for each other for the benefit of all. It’s frankly shocking that so much death and pain is handwaved away as “getting old now”, and even more so that it’s political.

Edit: I realize there’s no changing anyones mind here, so I could have saved my breath. But I think it’s worth calling out that the arguments put forth in the parent post are just ridiculous, and if we applied the same logic to drunk driving, or smallpox, or personal property rights, people would think the argument was ludicrous.

The important point you make is that he was 50s and in good health. That should alarm everyone. People who are 50s and in good health should NOT be dying on vents. Why anyone over 40 would refuse vaccination is a pure tragedy and nothing but. It breaks my heart to hear these stories.

You and I stand on opposite sides of the fence. Neither one of us will change the other's mind. I also will respect your view points, but I won't back down on personal choice. That's the main issue with the pandemic right now.

My ex-wife knows two people who've died after taking the vaccine. One at the 2 week mark and the other the day after. She also knows a body builder, in excellent condition, who ended up on a ventilator from Covid. He was in that condition for months and has less than half of his lung capacity now. Those two would be alive if not pressured or forced to take the vaccine. And that is one category of people (dead from vaccine) that gets hand waived by the numbers, as if those people meant nothing. We all have stories...

I had Covid and recovered nicely at 51 years old, as did my ex-wife at 50. So there's another counter story. And I never said or advocated that vaccines are pointless. They absolutely work for the purposes of reducing severe illness and chance of death. I encourage people who think they're in a high risk category to get vaccinated, but not everyone needs it. But that's what's being pushed right now because if we can just vaccinate everyone, it will effectively go away. No, it won't. The vaccinated get Covid and spread it to one another because they don't get sick enough to stay home. I didn't have the energy to go any where. I had to get in bed and nap every two hours.

Why can't you show the data and allow everyone to make a choice? If you want to talk numbers, it's very rare that you'll end up on a ventilator or in the hospital from Covid. And don't talk to me about the collective good. People don't give a shit about me or you. I get one chance at life and I'm making choices for me, not for strangers. And I won't blame anyone else for doing the same thing.

My condolences to the loved ones of all who've died from Covid and the vaccine. I encourage all to make their choices without consideration of outside influence. It is your one life and you must do what you think is best. It's better to die free than live in collective chains.

Good luck and godspeed.

I eagerly await our world where my personal choice allows me to drive drunk down your street, because people don’t give a shit about me or you, and I get one chance at life and I’m making choices for me, not for strangers.

Likewise, I’m going to stop allowing minorities to live in my apartment building - I’m making choices for me, after all, not for strangers.

Let’s get rid of ALL vaccine mandates for the same reason, I’m sure you’d agree that we would be better off if everyone got to decide whether they got a measles shot or not (btw, measles deaths are on the rise for this exact reason). Maybe we shouldn’t have mandated polio vaccines?

I eagerly await the removal of consumer protection laws, because I can make the decision for myself about what is safe for me.

No more hand washing for restaurant staff - that’s an infringement on their personal choices. Ditto with food storage guidelines - refrigeration is expensive. Gotta do what I think is best

“Better to die free than live in collective chains.”

Ridiculous argument, and one that AGAIN if we made about basically any other societal rule that is for the collective good, we would be laughed out of the room. After 800k deaths in America alone, for sure, personal “freedom” stands above everyone else’s welfare.

That's exactly what we need to be questioning. Keep asking questions and pressing for answers that make sense. We need to move on.

>why the continued mask hysteria

Is that pro-mask hysteria or anti-mask hysteria?

I'm not sure it matters. Hysterical people do not make good choices. When the hysterical people who run the system do nothing to calm their hysteria or the public's, the result is chronic unreasoned decision making, rapid flip-flopping, and the overall appearance of bad faith.

The knee-jerk reaction to bad faith interaction (from all people) is "I don't know what, but not that." The knee-jerk response of the powers that be to mutiny is to exercise more power. The feedback worsens the situation.

If we would stop trying to manage rapidly-evolving situations with to-down legislation, returned individual freedoms, and all took a deep breath, I'm sure the populace (who certainly don't desire the death of their friends and loved ones) could find a reasoned solution that is at least as effective as what we have now.

Or the response to anti-human policy is just "Not that", and the policymakers are scrambling for another way to shove it in.

There are, of course, people who are not hysterical on all sides. That some of those are capitalizing on the situation to enact long-desired changes (legislative or otherwise) comes as no surprise.

I suspect you are being downvoted because of your question about what it means to have died from COVID.

I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that.

However, 1500 people in the UK die on an average day. Remember back in the days we were able to point to the number of excess deaths in the UK? 14 people dead in 2 weeks is very near the noise floor. Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.

He merely asked for the number of deaths directly caused by Covid. Where do you get the idea that anyone is questioning what it means to die from Covid?

Directly caused is a very tricky question to answer on both the positive and negative sides. For example is someone who has terminal cancer who dies of COVID counted? Even though they are on a cocktail of drugs to treat the cancer they may well have lived for months or years later.

Similarly, someone with well managed diabetes, do we write them off as having a comortality even though they may have lived for decades longer by all available indications.

People on the “anti side” of the debate have been asking this for 2 years. It was a valid question then and a more important one now.

It is likely that a significant percentage of people are dying with incidental Covid infections. Depending on how significant, that completely changes the dynamics.

Well, you can estimate the probability of someone randomly selected in the population testing positive for covid at a certain point in time. The probability of "dying with Covid" should be similar unless there is evidence of a bias.

Sloppy formulation of mine, its an upper limit i think.

> I agree this is a trope which is trotted out by vaccine deniers and even those who said that COVID itself was a hoax before that.

As you can see from this[1] Freedom of Information (FOI) request, the ONS makes a distinction between "Involving COVID-19" and "Due to COVID-19".

> Unfortunately what we would like to know is how much longer these people would have lived without COVID. I suspect this is not knowable.

It's also interesting to see in that FOI answer the average age of death is higher than the average life expectancy in the UK. It might give an indication of whether people are being taken to meet their maker early.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Anti-vaxxers exploit methodological deficiencies to push their agenda. People that should be improving their methodology exploit anti-vaxxers absurdity to maintain status quo.

Excess mortality is an useful metric. It's flaw being that our habits completely changed due to social distancing and lock down and has to be addressed somehow.

> Because of COVID or with COVID when they died?

I'm afraid this question is impossible to answer due to uncertainty but...

I - Outliers like immunodeficient and morbid obese could be excluded.

II - If you want to know the probability of someone dying due to having COVID you can use the Bayesian theorem to find it giving that you have (1) the incidence of people dying that have Covid (2) the incidence of any kind of death, (3) the incidence of Covid (lack of testing is an issue).

14 total is very low, the UK was averaging over 100 deaths per day in October.

Know any comparisons vs delta??

19,137 Delta cases in Denmark, also from Table 2 in same doc.

  0.07% fatal, 0.11% ICU, 1.5% hospital
  0.9% Covid-recovered 
  50% double vax, 3% booster
  44% unvax, 3% single vax

That table is extremely useful b/c it tells us it's still too early to tell. Had just a single of the 785 omicron cases died (like maybe they got an unrelated stroke while in the hospital), then that would change the numbers from 0% IFR to 0.12% IFR (i.e. above Delta).

Also, noticed that ICU rate is 3x higher with Omicron (which might also be related to the lack of enough observations).

That said, I really hope IFR is much lower, given all the vaccines, boosters, and previous infections.

> ICU rate is 3x higher with Omicron

Sorry, that was a typo on my part, Omicron ICU should have been 0.13% not 0.3%, fixed now after double checking the source doc, thanks.

The Delta-Omicron ICU rates are similar in this Denmark sample.

What may be of interest is that the proportion of vaccinated people is more important with Omicron cases. It may mean that the vaccine is less protecting against ICU as the rate are similar, and that would be worrying. But we are going to have to wait at least 2 more weeks to get a better picture.

Compared that to flu data from 2018-19 season [1]:

28,908,721 flu cases:

0.09% fatal, 1.3% hospital

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

These numbers are very difficult to interpret without knowing the base - how much of the population is in each category.

Also booster vs double vax - is that just that the shot is more recent, or does 3 shots make a qualitative difference?

> how much of the population is in each category

Denmark population is 5.8 million people, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/denmark-popul...

> booster vs double vax - is that just that the shot is more recent, or does 3 shots make a qualitative difference?

Probably the former. There are many papers which show declining efficacy each month. Mass-vaccination campaigns in each country probably means that # of shots can be used to determine recency.

does it really matter? you have a choice to get the vaccine.

i think these numbers should end the pandemic completely. we have a virus that’s contagious. if you take available medicine it won’t kill you. that’s baseline where we were 2 years ago

Unless your employer mandates it …

Get some shoes and walk away.

Unless you’re 50 with a mortgage, then it’s not much of a “choice”.

Yeah, I just might. Others aren’t as lucky.

Hopefully those get thrown out in court

One scenario is that Tuesday's winter solstice speech will make a case for "grave danger" which could provide justification for U.S. courts to uphold OSHA mandate, domestic travel bans of unvax, and other unprecedented NPIs. Meanwhile, reality will continue to provide data on actual vs. narrative danger.

I think there's a good possibility you're correct, but I'm also holding out hope he instead says we need to stop looking at cases as a focus of concern.

Given his recent message of doom and gloom, chances are you're correct. I just hope people start actually start following the science and work to eliminate all of these people

Of course it matters - if you had the second vaccination recently you should wait till around 5 or 6 months to get the booster, but if the booster makes a qualitative difference then you should get it right away.

If the booster fades after a few months then that's important to know as well.

Against delta, the early research showed 2 doses + boosters to be more effective than the original 2 dose series ever were. For instance, [0] shows them being 20x more effective compared to the control group with two vaccine doses (which corresponds to something like 60x better than someone completely unvaccinated)

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

Yeah, but it is really too early to tell. The cases in that update are largely in young people (age <= 65) and it takes about a week from symptom onset to end up in hospital. That data seems to be as at 9 Dec, even if the hospitalisations were high the data would not necessarily show them.

South Africa, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/s-africa-...

> Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave ... Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.

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

> The researchers found that Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infects and multiplies 70 times faster than the Delta variant and original SARS-CoV-2 in human bronchus, which may explain why Omicron may transmit faster between humans than previous variants. Their study also showed that the Omicron infection in the lung is significantly lower than the original SARS-CoV-2, which may be an indicator of lower disease severity.

If the Hong Kong report is accurate, could regular nasal washing slow viral replication, e.g. in early stages of infection? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620312

The Spectator Covid Tracker for Omicron is interesting: https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/south-africa

80% of SA has already been infected and thus has some measure of immunity and prior culling, as well as an average age 1-2 decades younger than most developed nations

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-18/deaths-da...

Nice to see natural immunity being recognized as a talking point, although the Danish sample shows prior infection is much more protective against Delta than Omicron.

What percentage of US and UK have already been infected?

1/3 of americans as of a few months ago

https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...

That's as of end of 2020, before the big waves this year (IIRC more people have died of Covid in the US in 2021 than in 2020).

More recent CDC estimate suggests the total number of infections is closer to 146 million[1]. I'm not sure how they are handling repeat infections, but nonetheless it sounds like their model has the US population at higher than 1/3 infected.

1 - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

We know that natural immunity (don’t forget it’s not forever - it doesn’t protect against sufficient mutations) is going to happen so the idea that it isn’t recognize or wasn’t recognized is incorrect. What we are concerned about is how many people have to die from a preventable disease while this herd immunity naturally comes to bear.

It isn’t recognized in the sense that you can show a vax card to get in a restaurant or on a flight, but not proof of previous infection.

First, this is not totally accurate -- you can board flights with literally no proof of anything, and international travel often does permit an affidavit of prior infection.

Second, just get a vaccine, jfc. Been infected? Great, now you're even more immune. Do one easy thing for your fellow humans. Can't? Plenty of documentable, obtainable exceptions. Won't? Fine. Don't avail yourself of the luxuries which are the result of humans working together to build something. Easy.

Why not base policy on science and data rather than an apeal to "unity"

I believe some countries do recognize it (Germany maybe?)

Yes, definitely the case in Germany.

Yes, in EU people who have recovered from Covid get the EU digital certificate.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/coronavirus/eu-d...

But France revoked the Passe Sanitaire and mutated it into a Vaccinal Pass, meaning you can’t get it using a PCR test or a previous infection, only the vaccine will be accepted.

You need to get one booster shot after your infection in France to get a pass (instead of two shots for the usual vaccination course). That has always been the case.

In France you get a pass for ~6 months after covid recovery, then one booster shot is indeed required.

But with vaccination, you get a pass for ~7 months, then (from Jan 2022) you also need a booster shot...

https://www.gouvernement.fr/info-coronavirus/pass-sanitaire

The prime minister announced 2 days ago that the Passe Sanitaire will be changed into a Passe Vaccinal, meaning PCR tests won’t be able to get it.

Perhaps to discourage 'covid parties' or other purposeful contractions of the virus.

As far as I know the US is the only country that for some reason doesn't think it matters if you are recovered. Israel, EU, others all seem to recognize it. Why the US does not, is not clear to me.

The problem in the US is that it became a political issue and both sides don’t want to lose face by ceding even an inch

True, about so many issues.

Other nations aren’t owned by pharmaceutical companies.

In my country it is if the infection is less than 6 month ago. And count as a first vaccination, so you can only take half a moderna after a prior infection.

Which makes sense for a lot of reasons.

1) Allowing a prior infection will lead to idiots having COVID parties to get tested.

2) Natural immunity is more variant-specific.

3) Tests are binary, but viral load determines natural response. The amount of viral load and natural response you need to fight off future infections and the amount to trigger a positive result are almost certainly not the same concentration.

4) Tests, unlike needles in the arm, have false positives.

>2) Natural immunity is more variant-specific.

How is it more variant specific? The gene therapy shots only expose you to the spike protein, whereas natural infection gives you exposure to the whole virus. As we see with omnicron, this variant has evolved so that the spike protein is the most changed aspect about it.

The spike protein, even through Omicron, is the most stable part. Your stupid body can pick up on any feature of the virus, and any other identifier is worse than the spike protein against the natural waves of different variants. Even if Omicron is worse than against natural immunity (something I would not concede, but will for the sake of this sentence) you're likely to have gotten COVID more times naturally than someone who was vaccinated over the past year.

Since there is literally no downside, get the fucking vaccine.

> Since there is literally no downside

There are downsides for recipients of bad batches.

Public VAERS data is reporting inter-batch variances where 90+% of adverse side effects are happening in 5% of batches. VAERS data is noisy, see site videos for more discussion, but extreme inter-batch variances across all three vendors is not expected. EU regulators have previously expressed concern about inter-batch manufacturing variance.

http://howbad.info

Tried to access that site, and my internet provider (AT&T Fiber) marked it as a spam site and wouldn’t let me proceed unless I added it to a whitelist in my router. Very odd.

> http://howbad.info

Wow. People die and get seriously ill but it seems stupidly irresponsible to assume some correlation between that outcome and a vaccine batch absent other sorts of analysis.

I entered mine and i see: the longer ago i got the shot, the higher number of deaths and serious illness. I.e. The correlation seems to be higher number of deaths as time increases.

What makes you think I didn't get it?

>any other identifier is worse than the spike protein against the natural waves of different variants

Source?

In Germany you can. I am sure that's true for many regions. However, the granted protection status doesn't last as long as full vaccination.

The virus is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. Pretty much everyone will eventually be infected (if they don't die from something else first).

https://www.sciencealert.com/delta-variant-means-we-can-rule...

Measles is way more infectious and does achieve herd immunity at around 95% vaccinated.

Question is, can we get 95% immunity to Covid, as opposed to “benign but still infectious”.

The measles vaccine more or less protects you for the rest of your life, although a single refreshment might be sensible. Flu and covid vaccines would need constant adaptation and you will never reach that in a globalized world.

Yes, plus the Covid vaccine doesn’t seem to give much immunity against infection and spreading, so the whole game is off.

What can prevent it? Certainly not the current vaccines.

Current mRNA vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease and death of all widely circulating variants, including omicron

> highly effective

Varies by # of months since last dose, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE

Dec 20, https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/20/omicron-3-vaccine-d...

> COVID-19 vaccines will not be enough to withstand the Omicron variant, warned the CEO of BioNTech, the German company behind the mRNA vaccine produced with Pfizer. "We must be aware that even triple-vaccinated are likely to transmit the disease…It is obvious we are far from 95 per cent effectiveness that we obtained against the initial virus."

I was responding to the above question about preventing death not infection.

He's talking about preventing infection.

>> What we are concerned about is how many people have to die from a preventable disease

> What can prevent it?

Thus my answer.

The CDC estimated that 45% of Americans had been infected as of September 2021, so probably closer to 50% by now.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

That's insane. The # here in Ontario, Canada is just over 4%.

To the coronavirus, that sounds like an opportunity.

To a suitably changed virus any population of a certain size and density is an opportunity.

4% is the estimate or known cases?

Known cases, positive test results only. But even if you doubled or tripled you'd be nowhere near 45%.

Assuming 2x or 3x is a reasonable factor between reported cases and total infections. US current official CDC estimates are 4x, and Canada has a lower testing rate (almost half) than the US. Earlier on, US estimated infections were 10x the reported count. Some studies for other developed countries have estimates that approach 30x. IMO, 8x doesn't seem like an unreasonable WAG given this.

I searched Canada's official resources, but I couldn't find anywhere that they publish their own estimates.

2x-3x anomaly would show up as distortions and fluctuations in both test positivity rates and in ICU/hospital rates. There's no such anomalies in the Ontario data, not since the first wave in March/April 2020 when testing was extremely limited. I pull the data daily from Ontario's public data API and graph and track it in a spreadsheet, I'm pretty familiar with what's there.

There is a lot of variability in numbers due to testing rates.

Singapore and British Colombia have the same number of people (~5M). Singapore tested every suspected case and only recently stopped that. They have strict measures to enter the country and have had quite strict covid restrictions (and still do!) such as no dining in, masks in all public spaces, etc.

BC had some restrictions, but no where near Singapore. Mask adoption was good but not consistent. Currently very few restrictions.

Yet Singapore reports 280,000 total cases and BC 225,000.

I’d suggest BC’s number is likely double what’s reported, if not 3x.

Can we have the numbers in cases per 100,000? And maybe an explanation why BC's numbers are supposed to 3x higher than what is reported?

Populations are comparable. And just what I said - BC had less testing, that’s why they had fewer total cases. Either that or restrictions and masks don’t work because Singapore was better than BC on both counts. They had a “circuit breaker” for a while where you couldn’t leave your house in 2020.

Wouldn't you need percentage of positive test to draw any conclusions of the impact the number of tests has on reported cases? And the testing strategy?

Yes you would. I don’t have the energy to dig that data up or even know if it’s available, but suffice to say that Singapore would quarantine and test entire housing blocks, I’m going to guess Singapore had much more extensive testing.

Singapore had effective contact tracing and at least in the beginning would do mass testing to trace each and every case.

That wasn’t the case in BC.

Good, so it is reasonable to assume the BC underreported more then Singapore. Still quite a stretch to claim it is by a factor of three, don't you think?

Well the 3x was entirely pulled out of my ass, so yes, it’s a stretch.

But just based off the entirely different approaches I’d think BC is at least 2x it’s reported numbers?

But you’re right, you could dig into number of tests, how tests were triggered, etc and come up with a much better estimate.

It's easy to plot test positivity vs known cases and see how they co-relate over time. Apart from the first wave in March 2020, test positivity has tracked fairly well with case numbers here in Ontario. There's been enough testing capacity since at least Sept 2020 to track at least 4000 cases a day.

And if there's significant cases being missed in testing, they'd show up in hospitalization and ICU statistics. And there's been no anomalies there.

There is a group of people who really want to consider "natural immunity" as equivalent to vaccinated. But here in Canada at least the previously infected are a very small percentage of the population, at least in a way we can confirm with test results.

Also in Guateng, ~75% of adults are vaccinated. That's better than most parts of the US and even a lot of places in Europe. There's just more <18 year olds in SA.

You are making an assumption that is dubious . Please link to the study or statistic by a reputable source that we, South African have had 80% infection rates.

i literally linked a citation at the bottom of the post

> If the Hong Kong report is accurate, could regular nasal washing slow viral replication, e.g. in early stages of infection? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620312

There is also evidence that certain mouth rinses reduce infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab [1] though without a trial it’s hard to know how that translates to real world transmission.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/10/3/272

That first quote makes the same error as your initial comment! The Omicron wave grew faster, and with faster growth, a greater proportion of your cases are too recent to have been hospitalized

No it's not. All indications are that omicron is much milder.

I really am not sure why you got downvoted. Here is a NYMag article that supports what you're saying: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/and-now-for-the-good...

It hasn't been a month since the Omicron variant was reported to the WHO. All the indications could point any way and we wouldn't have solid evidence yet - it takes time for the disease to play out. NYMag can't magic solid evidence into existence when it doesn't really exist, especially from a week ago. This is the same sort of thing as got the "its just a flu" type mutterings while the pandemic was ramping up.

It might be a lot milder, and that would be nice. But if it turns out to be about the same then the speed of its spread is scary.

Those are good numbers. Early, yes, but good.

Not great, not terrible.

3.6?

Why is the unvaccinated number so much lower? Is the population highly vaccinated?

Unclear why unvax Omicron infection is 14%, when unvax Delta infection is 44%, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633440

These numbers stack up, if the vaccine is effective against Delta but not against Omicron. The bulk of people being infected with Delta would then be unvax, while anyone is fair game for Omicron infection, backed up by the 14%unvax/77%dvax correlating with 80%+ dvax population in Denmark.

Because vaccine effect on Omicron transmission is very weak.

Yes, 80% vaccinated three months ago: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1036136246/covid-denmark-eu-r...

According to Table 2 their sample had 8,199 unvaccinated and 9,269 vaccinated. It seems odd that more cases were found in the vaccinated people, can anyone suggest why? Statistical anomaly?

Edit: I misread the table, I thought column 1 was number of subjects. The replies explain well why the # of cases would be larger for the (larger) vaccinated population.

Consider the extremal point: If 100% of people are vaccinated, then all cases are breakthrough cases, and 0% of cases will be in unvaccinated people. At some point, the raw count of breakthrough cases crosses over and exceeds the raw count of unvaccinated cases. This doesn't mean the vaccine is ineffective, of course!

It's because many more people are vaccinated. Assume 100,000 people are vaccinated and 10,000 aren't. If the infection rate in vaccinated population is 5%, and in the unvaccinated population is 50%, then out of 10,000 infected people, 5,000 will be vaccinated and 5,000 won't.

A couple years ago vaccines prevented almost all people from getting sick. Not anymore.

You need 90%+ vaccination rates to start seeing herd immunity, which is what we have for things like MMR.

Does a prior infected person count toward herd immunity? I have Dr. letter of my recovery.

I heard those who had it and recovered have sterilizing immunity. Is that better or worse than the vaccine non-sterilizing immunity for getting us to herd immunity?

Anecdotal, but I got my first bought of covid in Feb. 2020, and it was very flu-like for me. I've had 2 more infections after that (one, didn't even know, and the next was like a mild cold). In South Florida, we barely had a lockdown.

How do you even know it was COVID? It could have been any number of flu/cold? In feb 20 there was no way to get tested for it

The complete loss of smell and taste, was never a flu symptom to me before.

In the Denmark numbers above, only 4.3% of Omicron infections were Covid-recovered, compared to 77% being double-vax, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633285

For that to be meaningful you need to compare the per capita rate of vaccinated and prior covid infected. That’ll show you very roughly how much protection each provides in a way that’s comparable.

With hardly more than 10% recovered, total, vs almost everybody vaccinated that's not much of a difference. Very well within the range of methodical difference like in which group those recovered and vaccinated are counted and so on.

Why don’t you get the jab? It would be strictly better to have both.

Herd immunity counts nothing against delta or omicron. The endemic state, a permanent balance between immunity vaning and reinfection, that's not herd immunity. Natural immunity is just as temporary as vaccine immunity, give or take a few months.

"Natural immunity is just as temporary as vaccine immunity, give or take a few months."

Citations needed for that claim. Based on the articles below, natural immunity seems to be vastly longer lasting...

Lasting immunity found after recovery from COVID-19 https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...

Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9

The concluding para from your Nature article says the opposite of what you're claiming, and supports the person you're replying to:

"the persistence of antibody production, whether elicited by vaccination or by infection, does not ensure long-lasting immunity to COVID-19. The ability of some emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants to blunt the protective effects of antibodies means that additional immunizations may be needed to restore levels, says Ellebedy. “My presumption is, we will need a booster.”"

Its a confusing conversation because theres different levels of immunity.

I think the bone marrow cells are indicative of long-term protection from severe illness. They have long ramp up time from the point of latest exposure.

Blood boosted antibodies will be there to thwart an infection and continue to be there to prevent reinfection but the body turns off the pump because it becomes a waste of resource without an active enemy.

So the lifecycle of a (non-boosted) person going through endemic sars-cov2 will be slow activation followed by an afterburner which will tend to get you through a wave. Or you can try to time a booster to get you through a wave without getting triggered by the actual virus.

So in a sense, there is evidence long term "slow" immunity which is less effective at preventing transmissions and so allows for waves which indicates a certain lack of immunity by another defintion. I think that leads to conflict because of fuzzy definition on either side of the conversation.

Anyway that's my mental model of this whole thing. Any glaring holes?

There is plenty of evidence of natural immunity decaying. It will likely never (not in a lifetime) fall to a level equal to an entirely unprepared immune system, but the same holds for vaccine effect: immune system responses are a log decay, with various nonlinear effects applied (thresholds, saturation, the occasional rare ADE and so on) to different aspects that are of different importance for different viruses so that the observed curves look a bit different in each case. Yes, for some viruses, even what's left after a century is enough.

But those details are completely besides the point for endemic state, endemic state is endemic state wether reinfection, on average happens every quarter or wether it happens every five years. The only difference is that anything larger than a few months will lead to massive seasonality, and longer cycles will lead to a larger severity spread. This severity spread will be the decisive factor in the question of revaccination thresholds (maybe higher than current flu shot habits, maybe lower, maybe about the same), but there are far too many uncertainties to bother with concrete predictions.

What we do know: a year or two from now there won't be any vaccine-only immunities left, everybody will either be vacc+infection or infection only.

> There is plenty of evidence of natural immunity decaying

You said something like this in another thread, but I've yet to see sources for this. Can you provide some?

It wasn’t that long ago that the scientists were suggesting 70% was sufficient. Is it that >90% is required when the vaccines don’t effectively impede transmission? Is it possible 100% would not be sufficient?

Yes it is, it depends on the efficacy of the vaccine and the transmissibility of the virus.

The 70% number was often mentioned when the original variant was still predominant end of last year. Alpha and Delta are just so much more transmissible. The vaccine was never said to prevent all infections by serious scientists

70% would have been workable for the original or 'wild type' strain. Delta and Omicron are many times more transmissible.

It's been clear for a long time that even 100% won't make the virus disappear. Yes, back in the early days when we didn't use the greek alphabet yet eradication was a reasonably possible best case outcome (though not really likely, given the transmissibility across species.

Look at how prevalent pre-delta variants are now: no, they have not disappeared because almost everybody had delta, they have disappeared because of vaccine shots combined with moderate (compared to 2020) NPI. A virus strain does not simply disappear because there's a new one in town, it keeps replicating until it runs out of hosts. And virions are certainly not defecting to a newer, more glorious flag (like humans might do)

Most vaccines never had 100% effectiveness, especially the flu vaccine.

CDC changed their definition in Sept. 2021, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...

> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

The CDC's definition has been out of date for years. It turns out that to a large degree sterilising immunity was a myth with only a tiny, tiny fractions of vaccines actually achieving it. [0]

Most just achieve enough reduction in transmission to end or prevent outbreaks by bringing the r0 well below 1.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz...

How convenient that the article, in effect, supports the current agenda of pushing vaccines on everyone. It does this through the angle of sterilizing immunity being unachievable.

It starts off with some Danish guy observing a measels outbreak in Scotland and how the people that had the measels 65 years earlier were not affected by the current outbreak. You can stop reading at that point because it totally ignores that critical part of the story. It then uses this observation as the catalyst for the 'myth' of sterilizing immunity of the measels vaccine. Then it goes into testimony from experts on how we can't prove an infection took place, blah, blah, blah... Right.

So here we go with the wiggle room that eventually justifies the Covid vaccine being given to everyone on earth. Never mind that 65 years later the old people didn't get infected with the measels. Their bodies must have had some seasoned immunity workers who remembered how they handled it last time.

It's never ending. "We don't have proof." "There's not enough evidence." "We can't quantify what defines that." But just to be safe, give this to everyone and punish those that refuse. I can't believe people actually suggest that unvaccinated people not be allowed in the hospital or should just suffer their 'bad decisions.' Really? Is that what it's come to?

‘Convenient’, or unsurprising because it’s just recording the current scientific consensus around vaccines and that’s the same thing driving current policy? Not everything is a conspiracy with malevolent intent.

For all the damage that COVID has wreaked, it’s providing a huge increase in the amount of attention, effort, and investment going into studying the immune system, vaccination, and infectious diseases in general. It’s not surprising that some older ideas and theories are being overturned or modified.

You’re also wrongly treating the vaccines’ effect on transmission as binary, either being fully sterilising or not. In truth they’re all able to reduce transmission somewhat from 20-50%, and that alone might be a good enough benefit to mandate full vaccination across the population.

I don't think the flu one ever did, and smallpox, rabies and Measels probably still do, though I wouldn't recommend testing it.

It's not a sustainable business, once polio was eradicated from territory, you lost all sales. New vaccines are more of what we'd call a subscription model.

Yep. That wasn't the goal for the Covid vaccine. It was to keep people from getting severe cases and preventing deaths. It works, but it should be targeted to high-risk individuals and not a blanket strategy that's not needed for the majority of the world's population.

It's obviously possible that this is a bad nowcast (as argued in Edit2 of the parent), but there are other possibilities.

I suspect the % of tests that are of asymptomatic people is much higher than a few weeks ago, because of travel plans and publicity around omicron. If omicron does produce milder symptoms (either inherently or because more omicron cases are breakthrough and mitigated by vaccination) then it could be that a higher proportion of omicron cases are now being tested (and some fraction sequenced), relative to delta, compared with a few weeks ago.

> The press will have to publish a new round of articles clarifying their prior wave of headlines. It might happen tomorrow, later this week, or some time next week, but it will happen. This result won’t stand.

Well since the doubling time of the omicron incidence seams to be below 2 days (worldwide result estimates between 1.4 and 2.2), even if it wasn't the case last Friday, Omicron has probably passed the 73% threshold since then so I don't think anyone would bother retracting their writings.

Here are more up to date numbers from Denmark in English and Danish: https://www.ssi.dk/-/media/cdn/files/covid19/omikron/statusr...

23038 Omicron cases in total. On December 15 44.1% of confirmed cases were Omicron.

The last page has a comparison with Delta on hospitalizations. It finds 1.4% of Delta infections led to hospitalizations compared to 0.5% for Omicron. However, this could be due to the fact that most of the Omicron cases were reported in the last week, and haven't yet 'had the time' to lead to hospitalizations.

There's also a lot more infected who has received two or three doses compared to Delta.

> There's also a lot more infected who has received two or three doses compared to Delta.

Might be. At this point I am not motivated to dig into the numbers any more. The important questions, in that regard, for those that are interested is: How many of these of confirmed Omicron cases are double, how many are triple vaccinated? How many people overall are vaccinated? How many confirmed Omicron cases are unvaccinated? Followed by looking at the timeline between positive test / Omicron confirmation and hospitalization and ultimately death.

I said it in 2020, in early 2021 and will say it until the day it changes: That nobody in charge is able to give weekly briefings based on hard numbers, properly explaining those I have close to zero confidence the people in charge have this thing under control. And this lack of explanation is one, IMHO the, root cause of the confusion and frustration out there.

What is more depressing was finding out that we simply don’t have simple, widely accepted and used standards for collecting and reporting data on infectious disease pandemics. The criteria and the metrics change from country to country and even from state to state or even by city in larger countries like the US, India and Brazil. You don’t even have a single, universally agreed upon criteria of what constitutes a death by COVID. And because of that some countries like Sweden probably over-counted deaths while lots of African countries probably under-counted them. It is all an unmitigated mess, compound by widely spread politicization and rent seeking behaviors. It will probably be decades of research before we know what actually happened those last two years.

> What is more depressing...

Is how nothing really improved in two fucking years. I am completely at loss how this winter is the same or worse than the last one - which itself was going down exactly like predicted a month into the pandemic...

I am growing bitter, misanthropic and hateful.

At this moment we are probably seeing second order effects were people that should survive the virus are instead dying because the known effects of chronic stress on immune competency.

On the other side, I believe that as with masks, lots of people become complacent after vaccination, because they had no idea their efficiency would diminish over time. This false-safety make them more reckless.

Making things mandatory, and manipulating people through fear instead of relying on personal responsibility and the natural instinct of self-preservation also made lots of people rebellious and distrustful, making mitigation behaviors an all-or-nothing affair among the population.

I disagree with this general sentiment.

Nobody gets manipulated through fear. It's incompetent policies, which always try to maximize economic impact in certain sectors and re-electability in certain demographics... instead of clear and continuous leadership, risking prevention-paradox disapproval in the population.

Lock-downs too late, too arbitrary; selective economic and social relief; corruption; ...

Fucking "personal responsibility" and "freedom(tm)" are the worst ideas in a pandemic, where the way out is inherently a collective endeavor. That thinking is exactly why we can't have nice things, now. 80% are for mandatory vaccinations here - bring it! Bodily autonomy gets limited by far lower approval numbers all the time (see e.g. abortion).

> Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only -- as some Biden advisers have encouraged -- could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic's every up and down.

At some point this definitely needs to happen. I don't know whether now is that time. But at some point, this thing is going endemic. Reporting purely on case numbers ad infinitum is just going to cause warning fatigue, and people are going to stop listening. Again, I'm not saying I think now is the time to make this transition. But I recall watching a nightly news report over Thanksgiving saying that in vaccinated adults, the rate of hospitalization with Delta-variant breakthrough infections at that point was... 0.0 in 10,000. That's not to say no one is going to the hospital; obviously that's not true.

But we run the very real risk of making people stop listening to the warnings. It's like those who live in hurricane regions; after years of hearing "better put your SSN on your arm so we can identify your body," and then evacuating - and coming back with nothing amiss because the storm missed you by 100 miles - they stop listening. And when the big storm does hit, they don't evac because they just roll their eyes and think "Oh, not this again."

Obviously you can't stop warning people about incoming hurricanes. And just like in COVID, there are serious complications with hurricane forecasting that cause overwarning to be necessary to some extent. But if there's a serious COVID variant that is actually a ruthless killer that arises, we will need people to listen.

I was reading yesterday that the Omicron wave appears to have already peaked in South Africa, just 3 weeks after its identification, and they expect it to peak here by end of January. That is significantly shorter than Delta. On top of that, they are finding the Omicron cases much milder than Delta. They seem to believe that Omicron has migrated out of the lungs and into the upper respiratory tract, where it is less dangerous but better able to spread. A researcher quoted in the article called it a "best-case scenario."

Yet we are still having warnings as if the apocalypse is about to come.

Again, I don't know what the right timing is for this, and until we figure it out I'm 100% on board with listening to the CDC. But - we don't report on the daily number of cold cases because the cold is part of life. And if/when COVID becomes something that is a mild upper respiratory infection for the near-entirety of non-immuno-compromised people, I think continuing to report daily on how many thousands of new cases we have serves no purpose other than continuing to stoke fear.*

And because this is important context for some sorts of people, I am an extremely progressive liberal who is steadfastly continuing to wear masks in public, and have been booster-ed for 2 weeks now.

*(This is a concern of mine because, as we know from 9/11 and the terror alert warning system that we now know was totally bogus, but had to deal with on the nightly news for years, there are elements in this country who are happy to take advantage of tragedies to stoke fear.)

Somewhat of a counterpoint: the CDC has tracked the flu through the flusurv network for almost 20 years now (starting 2003/4 season). Popular reporting on how the flu season was going has been pretty common, though obviously with much less intensity and ubiquity.

Especially in severe outbreaks it’s been normal to have this kind of warning publication, see https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/12/5776320...

Anyway I agree that we collectively at some point have to stop over-reporting on Covid, but I don’t think it makes sense to drop it back to zero. At this point even with vaccines and developing therapeutics it doesn’t seem likely to become less of a health concern than the flu any time soon

It's likely to get phased out with the midterm elections. Covid panic is no longer politically expedient.

So looks like - as expected - the Virus is getting "weaker" i.e adapting itself better to your host, without killing it, or is it to early to come up too a conclusion? I read the same report from different countries too...

Update: https://www.axios.com/cdc-slashes-estimate-omicron-proportio...

I am not a doctor, but the numbers for this varient seem encouraging.

Because hospitalizations, and deaths, trend later than infections, definitive conclusions are still some weeks away. However all the data coming out of South Africa is encouraging.

First, South Africa has about 25% vaccination coverage. With coverage skewing older.

Infections are up [1],but hospitalizations are flat, and so are deaths.

It's likely that the infection rate is grossly under-reported, especially among those without symptoms, as tests are (relatively) expensive. Annecdodally reasonably high percentages of asymptomatic infection is being detected in people being "randomly" tested (eg tested for travel and other-hospital reasons)

It is also crowding out delta, which is still present, but decreasing.

All in all travel bans may have been counter-productive (as well as ineffective) allowing time for more delta infections, and ultimately more deaths to take place.

It's still too early to be definitive, but this may indeed be the varient we all need - one which is super contagious, but also super weak, priming immune systems against earlier varient.

IF (and its a very big IF) this varient is non-fatal, then the faster and wider it spreads the better. We need to super-nova this thing, not a red dwarf.

[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

Encouraging why?

A month from now a new vaccine-escaping variant could emerge from some squirrel in Haiti that's a billion times more transmissible than Omicron and a thousand times more lethal than Delta.

The fact that this particular variant isn't an absolute catastrophe doesn't mean that a new devastating variant isn't around the corner.

But that has never not been true in every time and in every place. Why get existential dread about it now?

Clearly we should spend all our energy, always, worrying about the near-uncontrollable realms of bacterial and viral evolution.

First death from omicron in US wasn’t vaccinated per breaking news just now.

Lots of people died this week from flu and the common cold as well, so let's not freak out just yet.

I've heard that the Pangolin variant could be 10x more potent than the Haitian squirrel variant. Why is everyone still going out, lock us down now !

There's not yet any sign that it's less dangerous than delta, and a more infectious but equally lethal virus is going to kill a ton more people owing to the higher infection rate, especially among the unvaxxed or unboosted. It's a bit counter-intuitive, and we'll see what the real-world numbers bear out if you don't believe the models, but immunologist twitter's on the grim side right now.

> and a more infectious but equally lethal virus is going to kill a ton more people owing to the higher infection rate

Not necessarily, if the less infectious one was already infectious enough that nearly everyone was going to get it eventually.

There is a difference in mortality between everyone going to get it during the next five years and everyone getting it during the next five months.

Only to the extent that ICU shortages cause additional deaths. If the healthcare system can mostly handle the surge in hospitalizations, then it wouldn't make a difference.

Another factor to consider is that every one getting infected quickly, and partial herd immunity being established sooner, could expedite the repeal of COVID control measures, and the dissipitation of the climate of fear, which are both incurring significant health, quality of life, and economic costs.

The World Bank estimates that COVID and its associated policies has already pushed 97 million people into extreme poverty. UNICEF says "Schools still closed for nearly 77 million students 18 months into pandemic": https://www.unicef.org/lac/en/press-releases/schools-still-c...

In the US, fentanyl overdoses during the pandemic have surged to become the leading cause of death for the 18 - 45 demographic: https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/fentanyl-...

Scientists have long known that social isolation is deadly, and if there's one thing that COVID control policies increase, it's social isolation.

You're ignoring all the cases of PTSD and people leaving healthcare professions in all this. 18% of US healthcare workers have already left the field. [0] Nearly 1/4 of healthcare workers show signs of PTSD. [1] I don't know what the overlap is, but these are serious things regardless.

---

[0]: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/about-1-in-5...

[1]: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/burnout-alcohol-ptsd-...

This is yet another factor to consider yes. But this pales in comparison to the number of people whose mental health is being adversely affected by the lockdowns/social-isolation/climate-of-fear. Look at scope of the global mental health epidemic:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/23/pandemic-hits-...

I disagree. The fact that this is affecting healthcare workers makes it worse, because it reduces our ability to deal with the virus in the first place.

Any back of the envelope calculations showing how you reach the conclusion that this is worse than the harm the COVID control measures are doing?

How much harm do you think operating with 20% fewer healthcare personnel would cause? Put me down for that much.

Keep in mind, this isn't just 20% fewer people to deal with COVID, it's 20% fewer people to deal with, well, everything, for years to come. I'm sure someone's done the calculations on what the consequences of a decimated healthcare system are, if you want to go look for them.

I don't know, how much harm do you estimate that causes? Obviously it's harmful, but what we need to do is compare it to the enormous harm of lockdowns and other COVID control postures, some of which I've documented.

I don't see where you've documented anything any more thoroughly than I have. This is a web forum, not a policy paper. You gave your 2 links, and I gave you mine.

How much worse do you think everything you've listed would be if we had started with 20% fewer healthcare personnel? Well, guess what. That's how bad it will be from now on, because we couldn't all cooperate to take measures to ensure the healthcare system didn't get overwhelmed in the first place, and doesn't continue to get overwhelmed.

On the face of it, your example is dwarfed by mine. Healthcare workers make up only 0.5 percent of the population. That means the direct mental health effects of limitatons on civil/economic liberties via lockdowns are going to impact 200X more people than the direct mental health effects of more COVID ICU cases on healthcare workers.

That's why I asked how you could arrive at the converse conclusion that lockdowns are net beneficial for mental health.

Another factor to consider is that unusual strain on the healthcare system lowers the average level of care. For example right now, most planable surgeries are postponed. This is not without risk either.

> owing to the higher infection rate

This. Just to emphasize the point: As long as the number of cases continues to rise, the situation will become more and more threatening, even if the falatity rate when infectied is low. It just takes longer. But it is harder to get it under control.

In other words: a low infection rate combined with a high fatality (per infection) rate would be better than a high infection rate combined with a low fatality (per infection) rate.

I'm really afraid it will mutate into something more serious as well as being as virulent as it current is. That would be really really bad.

I keep thinking about this. If you combine the probabilities that the virus will evade vaccines along with it mutating to be deadly, the combination is probably a very small number. However, Omicron is spreading all over the world which increases the chance this happens.

And this being an RNA virus it can and will change again, and what the parameters of that next version will be is anybody's guess.

That is not what typically happens though. There's no reason to expect it. It would be an anomaly

Except that happens all of the time, there's plenty of reason to expect it and it wouldn't be an anomaly.

From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:

> 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.”

[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270

That's not the norm, that's the unexpected anomaly

No, that's the norm. The people that are repeating the 'viruses evolve to become more benign' line are about 40 years behind the times in terms of science as it is currently accepted.

Viruses evolve to spread as efficiently as possible, what happens to the host after they have spread is from a viral evolution point of view utterly irrelevant. So they can and do evolve to be more lethal. Maybe it takes a bit longer before you die but that's perfectly fine.

> No, that's the norm.

How is the norm for viruses to continue to become more lethal? That does not align with anything I've ever heard. That link doesn't even claim that, and that's a baseless "fact check" done by a mathematician acting as a false authority.

> How is the norm for viruses to continue to become more lethal?

The norm is for viruses to end up somewhere in the middle, but chances are that the lethality is still very high. The whole idea that viruses evolve to be less lethal simply isn't true and very much outdated.

> That does not align with anything I've ever heard.

That is possible, it is a pretty persistent thing but it has been dealt with decisively since the 80's:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...

In a nutshell: it is likely that viruses (and other parasites) change once they have made their jump to a new species. This change is mostly random, selection pressure will lead to maximizing for R0, which may or may not lead to a lower level of lethality but this is by no means guaranteed. Some outliers may evolve to become more lethal, some other outliers may evolve to be (much) less lethal, but for the bulk an intermediary level of lethality (which can still be very high) is the normal outcome.

This is experimentally confirmed over and over again over the timescales that we have been doing these.

The shortest way in which you can condense all this is: "to a virus it is replication that matters, not what happens to the host after it has replicated". Of course viruses don't have any conscious plan but the evolutionary mechanism selects for (more) successful reproduction so it will seem like that from the outside.

Truly deadly virus's don't kill a lot of people. Evolutionally speaking, it's not to their advantage to do so.

Take Ebola (a well known virus, with very high mortality). It's very hard for Ebola to spread. It tends to make people obviously sick, and also kills quick, both of which make it much much easier to control. I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time or energy avoiding Ebola.

Contrast to AIDS, which did not make people sick, and so was easier to catch from a seemingly healthy person. From an AIDS perspective weakening the immune system against other diseases was a flaw in the plan. Once it became rampant though there were (and are) behavioral changes to reduce the chance of infection. Those behaviors are now "normal" because, well, AIDS.

The "common cold" / flu etc are all covid, or covid-like viruses that constantly mutate and constantly do the rounds. We develop immunity over time and they mutate into milder (but more infectious) versions. We take steps to avoid these, but meh, if you get it you get it.

Some behaviors from this pandemic will remain (stop letting - or worse requiring - obviously sick people come to work for example) - others will fall away (I don't see the mask thing sticking around forever...) We'll probably work from home more than we did before, but that was already a trend, this has just accelerated it. Even when we get back to normal I don't think I'll be flying to a city for random meetings anymore.

But HIV/AIDS does kill a lot of people.

Technically it doesn't - people don't die Of Aids they die With Aids.

But that's semantics. The point is that Aids has a long time between infection and death, thus encouraging spread.

Which is why you can't say that "Truly deadly virus's don't kill a lot of people." They can, and they do, there are many examples besides HIV.

Yes, my original statement was incomplete. More accurately I should have said that truely deadly viruses don't kill people _quickly_.

Ebola for example gets you sick, and you die quickly. This results in it not spreading well.

AIDS kills you very slowly (over multiple years) so it has lots of time to spread (fortunately for us it's hard to catch).

So the perfect virus would have the transmisabilty of Omicron, but with no symptoms for years - then by the time the first person dies we all have it already.

Fortunately we haven't seen that one yet (in my lifetime anyway) and to some extent worrying about it is fruitless because there will be pretty much nothing we can do about it.

You may as well be worried about every other ELE - asteroids, alien invasions etc.

> Evolutionally speaking, it's not to their advantage to do so.

There are no goals, paths or planning in evolution, evolution is the result of chance. Selection pressures are what keep the effects of genetic mutation in check. The selection pressure that might cause a virus to become weaker is the result of the virus literally dying in all of the corpses it creates, while weaker strains potentially live on in the hosts they didn't kill. People aren't dying in droves because of COVID, so that selection pressure doesn't exist, and the virus is free to mutate into more virulent forms.

Also, evolutionary timelines span many, many human lifetimes. In that time, a virus could very well become more fatal, 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.

It's obviously mutating all the time. But if a particularly lethal version mutated into being it would quickly kill the host, thus not spreading far, if at all.

Thus natural selection optimises for forms that spread but don't kill.

> Thus natural selection optimises for forms that spread but don't kill.

It may also find an unlucky local optimum where it shows no symptoms for a period while already being highly transmissible and then slowly kill or leave the survivors with permanent damage.

This is part of why AIDS is so bad. We're just lucky that AIDS is hard to catch outside of well understood behaviours.

Mix AIDS with Omicron and you can stop bothering to save a pension.

This is simply incorrect. There are plenty of viruses that end up with an intermediary grade that may well have very high lethality. Once a virus has spread what happens to the host is irrelevant, including death. See May and Anderson's paper from 1982: Coevolution Of Hosts and Parasites.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...

DOI:10.1017/S0031182000055360

> Truly deadly virus's don't kill a lot of people. Evolutionally speaking, it's not to their advantage to do so

The Black Death (1) and the Spanish Flu would like to have a word. Humans eventually evolved sufficient immunity to defend against the pathogen, but significant proportions of the population died before that happened.

(1) not a virus, IIRC, but the same evolutionary pressures should apply

I'm not a doctor but I belive the Black Death is bubonic plague, a bacterium. While yes that will evolve as well, the natural selection on bacteria happens on a very different time scale to a virus.

And hoping not to start a thread on antibiotics and superbugs, but bacteria do naturally select as well.

The Spanish Flu followed a similar path to Covid, it started deadly but then naturally selected to become less deadly. Its also somewhat unusual because of the numbers of displaced persons at the time returning home, the lack of basic medical knowledge etc.

But here's my point. The Spanish flu has mutated now to be basically Flu. It's not "deadly" anymore (for some definition of deadly). Non deadly mutations naturally select over deadly mutations.

It would depend on method of transmission. Bubonic plague was spread by rats. The hosts could be very ill or even dead; it didn’t matter.

Respiratory viruses that only or mainly have human hosts need ambulatory vectors.

Corona has other hosts, some of which seem to be unaffected by it.

virulent means serious (in its effects), not easily spread.

that's what he is writing.

There are lots of signs that it's less dangerous than delta, but too early to make definitive conclusions.

However hospitals are reporting fewer numbers,shorter stays, etc, so the signs we do have are encouraging.

The parent comment's point about increased infections still stands. Omicron might be less dangerous to the individual but its a disaster at the population level because many more infections mean many more hospitalisations even if more mild.

If it's milder, it can cause fewer hospitalizations while infecting a larger proportion of the population. It depends on how much milder, and how much more transmissive.

It would need to be less serious than the flu to not be a complete disaster - Omicron COVID spreads multiple times more efficiently than any strain of the flu does.

Many western countries you've had 10-20-30% of the population actually diagnosed with covid in the past. 60-70% vaccination rate.

That leaves only 10-20% of the population at risk of severe covid if vaccination and previous infection mean milder illness potentially.

Add to this that SA with 25% vaccination is seeing less hospitalisations.

Omicron in most western countries doesn't have many people left to infect. Those that do will see milder illness.

I don't see how this will threaten healthcare systems any more.

> Omicron in most western countries doesn't have many people left to infect. Those that do will see milder illness.

And here we are with hospitals being overwhelmed in Germany and France, for example, despite high level of vaccination and a lot of people who already had the virus previously. In France we have more people going to the ICU per day than during the last peak, and at the current rate we'll reach, and probably pass, the previous two peaks soon

All it takes is a few thousands of 50+ years old unvaccinated people to use all the ICU beds. In France we have 2m+ people over 50 who didn't even get the first dose, 1% of these 2m people would be enough to use every single ICU beds in the country

There is the sign! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/15/omicron-found-...

> There's not yet any sign that it's less dangerous than delta, and a more infectious but equally lethal virus is going to kill a ton more people

This is only true if it’s a novel virus

> We need to super-nova this thing

Is there a precedent for "us" doing this? Surely some pandemics have "super-nova'ed" themselves, but having "us" encourage faster and wider spread as policy seems risky and unusual.

People used to throw chicken pox parties to infect their kids at a young age because, while there is some risk to the young, it's much more dangerous to get chicken pox as an older person.

Do you know any other diseases where there's virtually no risk to young children but very high risk to the elderly?

Lots of them - polio, tuberculosis, chickenpox, influenza, ebola, typhus, salmonella, etc. There's a recent paper on this here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00668-y

You forgot covid.

I'm not going to go so far as to say we throw Covid infection parties :) But things like travel restrictions, should (and in some cases are) being lifted.

I appreciate the need for govts to be seen to do something "new variant? quick, lock the borders..", but as data emerges that this is "the one to get" there's no need to inhibit the economy in the name of public health, when that inhibition leads to a worse, not better outcome.

Our best case scenario right now is that a) the virus spreads really fast, and b) it's not lethal (or at least no more lethal than anything else in life.)

Ultimately we all need to build up immunity from this thing - whether that's via vaccines or contractions everyone is free to take their pick. but 5 years from now we'll all have anti-bodies for it one way or the other...

i agree, no lockdowns or travel bans, but less drastic NPIs seem to be the way

Hospitalizations are not flat. They're doubling roughly every week [1], and are at close to 50% of their Delta peak [2].

[1] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/NICD-COVID...

[2] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...

The first link seems to show a flattening. Where are you seeing a doubling per week here?

Ignore the last bar (2021.50) - there are reporting delays, and the total goes up as more data comes in. The following day [1] shows it at 6887, +1292 for the day, and the day after [2] shows it at 8019. This is good practice for any very recent (< 1 week old) data - expect there to be reporting delays, and that the most recent totals will be updated in the future.

If you look at the bars for 2021.46 - 2021.49, there's a clear exponential trend with a doubling time of about a week, going from 715 to 1446 to 3994 to 7558.

[1] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Datcov19_N...

[2] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Datcov19_N...

Comparing the relative effect on a low vaccination coverage country with a high one seems slightly irrelevant no? i.e. delta variant is much less of a hospital burden in a high vaccinated country, therefore the relative danger of omicron could be much higher. If omicron was truly 'super weak' - wouldn't you expect to see the SA numbers go down?

I’ll continue to lean more cautious than optimistic with a variant that has the potential to start re-infecting our mostly vaccinated elderly populations at alarming rates. Our hospitals and medical staff need a reprieve as they already have a concerning backlog of non Covid related treatments.

As everyone keeps posting about SA and saying omicron is relatively harmless, here’s the only scientific study I’ve found on the topic, in the BMJ:

“After adjusting for vaccination status, the risk of hospital admission for newly diagnosed adults is 29% lower than in the first wave,”

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n3104

With a doubling time of two days, this reduction in the probability of hospitalisation seems irrelevant in preventing the overwhelming of health systems. As others have pointed out, experts on Twitter seem very very worried and I’m more inclined to go with them (and the exponential function) than with my antivaxxer friend’s posts on Facebook.

Here in the U.K. it already looks to me like London’s hospitals are going to be overwhelmed; I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown.

We aren’t “already in a lockdown” for reasons including (but not limited to) the multi £billion cost, the harm to mental and physical health, civil liberties, the fact that people are responding to guidance, the fact that we have more than 100 million jabs issued, the fact that the modelling has been repeatedly wrong etc.

If lockdowns were a free lunch then sure, let’s have them all the time!

We have not seen a long term exponential growth anywhere in the world yet. Until that happens we are hiding from the bogeyman based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect (speaking from a UK perspective).

Has the modeling been wrong? Or have all the measures you wrote about above worked and prevented the "worst case scenarios" of the models?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/12/19/tackled-sage-...

Well we obviously have no control group for this question, but the predictions have been off the charts wrong in the past whilst the impact of the restrictions appear to have been overstated.

Of course this is a subjective view, but this is almost becoming the accepted narrative in the UK. As of today, we are not getting further restrictions because SAGE and the modelling has been discredited. They are screaming for more restrictions and escalating to talk about millions of cases per day, and our politicians are (rightly, in my opinion) putting them back in their boxes.

The more interesting point is that this time we may actually have data before restrictions. When cases begin to fall without further restrictions even with the more transmissible omicron, I am hoping it will be the final nail in the coffin for credibility of the modellers.

> this is almost becoming the accepted narrative in the UK

"Accepted narrative" != "Anything resembling the truth".

> restrictions because SAGE and the modelling has been discredited. They are screaming for more restrictions and escalating to talk about millions of cases per day, and our politicians are (rightly, in my opinion) putting them back in their boxes.

This narrative of "policians vs. scientists" is gaining traction here and I hate it. It's unhelpful and incorrect. It's reductive, but who would you rather have making decisions about our country in a pandemic? Chris Whitty, or Boris Johnson? I know who I'd pick.

> I am hoping it will be the final nail in the coffin for credibility of the modellers.

Then what? Who do we put our faith in? Politicians with no scientific background who make decisions based on political convienience?

Furthermore, I would not say it is an accepted narrative among people I know. Anecdotal of course, but it is definitely not universal.

Though the UK media has a particular talent for unifying to push a message that suits their ideological leanings, which can often give a distorted view of public mood

The modelling has been wrong. Early on someone ran Sweden's numbers through Neil Ferguson's model's business-as-usual scenario, and the model's estimates of cases and deaths were much higher than observed reality (by around an order of magnitude IIRC).

I’m a bit confused by this example. Are you saying that the model showed higher cases in a non-lockdown analysis compared to fewer cases in the real world with lockdowns? If so, wouldn’t that be expected? If not, what does “business-as-usual” mean?

In this example, Sweden had no lockdown.

Cool, thanks for elaborating.

I've been finding it somewhat telling that people that make the argument you are making presume that no one else has any agency. And won't take precautions without the government forcing them to.

That's false, Imperial College's modelling of Sweden actually matched real-world deaths fairly closely. For instance, it assessed Swedish deaths to 31 March 2020 as being 240 [140-440] with zero interventions, or 160 [110-240] with slight interventions. It estimated deaths up to 28 March 2020 as 89 [61-120].

Actual deaths to 28 March 2020 were 92.

What someone else did was to take the Imperial College model and run it against a bunch of populations without properly adjusting the parameters to account for factors like population density, age, etc. They had no real idea how the model worked, but then claimed that it was wrong.

I think it's clear the most of the COVID-19 epidemiology models created around the world were accurate enough in their goal, which was to test the relative effectiveness of interventions and give broad predictions of relative impact. None were perfect, but then no model like this whether epidemiological, economic, or similar is ever going to be 100% accurate.

The Spectator has a page[1] showing the actual outcomes vs the models, and a worrying exchange[2] with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee. You can judge for yourself.

[1] https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios

[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-twitter-conversation-...

The spectator has, however, had a strong anti-lockdown skew (I avoid the word bias.) since the start which is worth bearing in mind when viewing any statistics that they put out.

Not saying that they're wrong, but their general libertarian-right stance is worth noting.

> Not saying that they're wrong

Then I fail to see how the rest of what you wrote is relevant to what I posted. How is it relevant?

Especially when they simply post official data without commentary.

The chart on the linked page "Covid hospitalisation vs Sage scenarios published 14 Sep 2021" is particularly damming.

The modellers were calling our government all the names under the sun at the time of reopening, predicting almost certain doom.

We then removed all restrictions and absolutely nothing happened.

It seems like a UK phenomenon, but bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here. I'm glad we are finally asking the right questions.

> bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here

I would suggest that its probably the novel respiritory disease at the heart of the crisis here.

Jokes aside, I don't see what the alternative is? If better modelling exists, we would've used it. The alternative was much worse.

> The alternative was much worse.

There are countries that didn't lock down like the UK - I live in one - and didn't fare as badly. What evidence do you have that the UK would've done worse if it had followed those examples?

It's an impossible comparison to make. The UK has a population that skews towards older folks, a chronically underfunded healthcare system and we moved to lockdown later than a lot of other western european countreis.

A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down.

I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions. Genuinely though, I would love to understand the idea that no lockdown in the UK could've done anything other than worsen the situation.

We can argue forever about the type, length and timing of the lockdowns and their relative impact, but that's pointless because even the most well-informed were poorly informed in April 2020.

> It's an impossible comparison to make.

And yet Nature published Comparing the responses of the UK, Sweden and Denmark to COVID-19 using counterfactual modelling in August[1]. It's not as if that's the only paper making comparisons, even if we only look in Nature.

> A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down.

I live in Japan, are you going to tell me it's a younger population? Or perhaps you'll make some claim about the healthcare system here based on… what I could not say as you have yet to give any indication of how your notions are backed, other than by political, tribal concerns.

> I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions.

As I've shown, one simple search should've turned up something, as I have a whole host of results. Biases should not go unchallenged, especially not through wilful ignorance.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9

Edit: formatting

To the sister thread maxehmookau:

This is basically ad hominem. Dispute the numbers and the argument not the source.

We can all point out how almost all other news stories somehow strongly skew towards clickbait and fear mongering and also seem to not be challenging government policy. I'm not sure why, let's not go into that.

Does that matter in the debate?

The actual Twitter exchange is here:

https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297

To summarize: Professor Medley, academic epidemiologist and chair of the official UK COVID modelling committee, states that SAGE only produces models that can be used to justify action, because in his view modelling scenarios that don't tell politicians to do things is pointless. "Decision makers are only interested in scenarios where decisions are made ... decision makers don't have to decide if nothing happens"

He also asserts that government officials ask them for models to justify pre-chosen outcomes and they simply make them to order.

The exchange is astonishing for how blunt it is, but not surprising to those of us who have been criticizing epidemiological modelling from the start. I've been writing continuously since the start of lockdowns that when read carefully, COVID modelling papers were continuously turning out to have unbelievable "errors" in them that invalidated their conclusions [1] [2] [3]. It quickly became apparent that many of these errors couldn't be genuine mistakes and motivated reasoning was the most obvious root cause, but these "scientists" constantly insisted that they were entirely neutral, politically independent and held themselves to only the highest standards. Professor Neil Ferguson even claimed his biggest regret about the pandemic was the extent to which other people had politicized it.

Now we have a claim by the head of SPI-M itself that the modelling is not only entirely a product of political considerations, but that he thought it was obvious and can't understand why anyone else would be confused about this.

Medley's comments make it untenable to believe that UK COVID modelling is scientific. Moreover his views speak volumes about the confusion and moral degeneracy that appears to exist inside the civil service/public health academia, something I've been worried about for a long time now. Read enough public health papers and you can't escape the conclusion there are very deep cultural problems in this field. This new event fits that impression completely - note that the Professor is confused and irritated by the exchange. He wasn't forced into the admission by clever questioning, he seems genuinely confused by the idea that not doing something is also a decision. In his world view it's obvious why SAGE didn't model a scenario in which Omicron is less severe than Delta despite the South African data, and he can't understand why Fraser Nelson (editor of the Spectator) is playing dumb as he sees it.

This looks like near-total ideological corruption. Medley doesn't merely disagree with the idea of hands-off government, he doesn't appear to even recognize the concept exists at all. Nor does he recognize that there's a contradiction between presenting himself and his team as scientists whilst working backwards from pre-chosen conclusions to get a model that justifies them.

Frankly though, I don't actually believe the government has been telling SAGE to create models justifying lockdowns. This is inconsistent with what we've seen so far, in which SAGE constantly runs to the press and kicks up a fuss any time the notionally conservative British government tries to relax restrictions. Additionally the LSHTM Omicron modelling paper itself doesn't say anything about equal severity scenarios being requested by the government. In fact it says they assumed omicron severity = delta severity due to "lack of data", which is transparently false. There's been data for weeks saying the opposite. Now even the head of the committee and senior LSHTM academic is disagreeing with their own claims about their severity assumptions.

I think everyone in the UK who has trusted COVID modelling and "The Science" in the past 2 years needs to seriously reflect on what just happened, and what this exchange says about the state of our scientific institutions. Telling people the models are unreliable has felt like shouting into a gale force wind, for years. Maybe now the modellers themselves are saying the same thing, people will start to believe it.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569

[2] https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-...

[3] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...

Brilliant assessment. Wouldn’t normally comment just to say this, but as we’ve slipped off the front page I wanted to say thanks :-)

You're welcome, glad you agree!

I don't disagree with most of what you say, however I do want to point out that "mental health" is something that commentators and politicians on the right have only recently actually started to care about, especially in the UK.

Mental health services in the UK have seen decades of real-terms cuts by parliaments of all colours. Getting mental health support on the NHS is next-to-impossible in a meaningful timeframe so watching anybody in parliament say "lockdown bad. mental health important." is outrageous.

Say you're anti-lockdown if you are (not you, OP), but don't for a second let Conservative MPs make you believe that they actually care about the nation's mental health.

It's a bit different when you decades long dynamics of whether you can see a counselor on the NHS, vs when you can literally see drug use, alcholism, domestic abuse numbers rise in the last 2 years.

That's concrete numbers. Some theoretical "conservatives don't support mental health" is more of a political point.

From my perspective the UK has had an insane rise in self diagnosed mental illness, and its not the lack of funding that's the issue, it's the supply side. If every single person wants to see a counsellor about their mental issues (which basically everyone has), you don't have enough professionals (or money) to deal with it.

> based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect

it's absolutely not about modelling, it's about real-world stats in this case. you can just see the numbers.

but as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation.

It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier.

I think we're not in a lockdown because the Tory backbenchers don't want to be, and Boris Johnson cares more about his political career than science, the NHS, or saving lives. That doesn't surprise me much, but what does surprise me is the sheer number of intelligent people seemingly ignoring the evidence.

> as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation.

From the actual Imperial paper[1]:

In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB

That's next a graph labelled from Mar 2020 to Oct 2020, and the portion of the graph that is above zero appears to run from mid April to August.

That isn't the only glaringly obvious mistake in the paper either. Still, I digress. You wrote:

> It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier.

From the Macmillan Trust's recent report, The Forgotten 'C'? The impact of Covid-19 on cancer care:

> Given the current recovery trajectories and worrying indications of the rise in Covid-19 cases across the UK,we consider these to be ‘best case’ scenarios. We believe if cancer referrals and screening do not return to pre-pandemic levels, the backlog could grow by almost 4,000 missing diagnoses every month, reaching over 100,000 by October next year.

> Macmillan fears that for some people their chance of survival will be reduced and that untimely cancer diagnoses could result in significant loss of life

> More than 650,000 people with cancer in the UK (22%) have experienced disruption to their cancer treatment or care

> For around 150,000 people this included delayed, rescheduled or cancelled treatment.5 Of these, more than half (57%) told us they were worried that delays to their treatment could affect their chance of survival.

If we're talking about preventable deaths and, like the Imperial paper, you don't wish to look at the figures, then I suggest you take a look at some of the personal stories included in the report, like Simon's:

> it still took two and a half months to get my scan done, and then only as I’d ranted and complained. I then had a phone call towards the end of May, to tell me ‘I’m sorry Mr Green, you were right, the brain tumour has come back, and it’s now inoperable’. I was devastated.

> Because of the Covid crisis no one could attend the hospital with me, and I had to deal with this news alone, I was speechless.

> I should never have had that MRI cancelled. If they’d found it in March and operated straight away, could I have been around in 10, 20 or 40 years’ time? I’ll never know that.

Maybe, just maybe, the backbenchers and, hence, Boris Johnson (due to their pressure) cares more about lives than their political careers, had you considered that?

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

[2] https://www.macmillan.org.uk/assets/forgotten-c-impact-of-co...

Edit: formatting

> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown.

Not argumenting with rest, but this has rather simple explanation - people are fed up with literally everything covid-related. 1.5 years of existential dread coming from all directions will drain and numb most. Politicians are still voted into their position.

Locking everybody at home for a long time, repeatedly, without any real solution in sight (the best vaccines work a bit for 6 months and then they're practically gone). That's a hard sell in democracy.

I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more.

> I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more.

If you are going to go this path then you also need to say that the unvaccinated do not receive covid treatment beyond meds they can take home and stay out of hospitals. The primary concern has not been just how many will die, but the effects of those who do not die upon the rest of the medical system. We must be allowed to deny care to those who choose to put themselves and others at risk to keep medical resources available for everyone else.

Yeah, good idea. And while you're at it, since 50% of severe cases worldwide are obese people, let's deny care to those as well. And for diabetes too, I mean it's their own fault right? /sarcasm

As sad as it is, prioritization is nothing new in healthcare, you don't have unlimited financial and human resources and amount of health issues far outnumber available care. My cousin died few weeks after being born due to heart defect that was operable, but waiting list was too long and no amount of pleading from parents and grandparents changed her position in that list.

Every single old person is a swarm of more or less critical issues that are much better treated among young population. There is a billion of those elders at least.

But to state it officially is a political suicide, nobody in elected democracy will do that. Unofficially, its been happening in hospitals since they were created, but for other reasons.

One solution might be to actually ramp down covid care, so that rest of healthcare can work as before. This would probably save more lives overall than even the strictest lockdowns. And have some system for covid treatment which prioritizes vaccinated/immunosuppressed at least a bit without stating it in plain sight.

To my mind, the following is more of a cause for concern long term: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.... 'Striking Antibody Evasion Manifested by the Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2'. We have a situation in which there is mass escape of virus able to resist specifically-induced antibodies. What might be the long-term result of this, given natural selection and virus survival of the fittest?

We're probably heading for a common cold like situation.

Just like with the previous coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

I haven't read the bmj study but a lot of this stuff is pretty bad in terms of predicting anything. I did read the Imperial one and it was awful as in based on almost no data.

The best real world guide is looking at places like South Africa and hospitalisation has been pretty modest.

Some SA data https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/14726238938317291...

Excess mortality almost unchanged https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1471137212502847490

You may feel differently if you didn’t classify any dissenting opinion as siding with the anti vaxxers on Facebook.

Disease does not spread exponentially after an initial period. It never does. It obviously and observably has not done so with the past two years of covid data. It rapidly caps off as it reaches the edges of the social graph.

> experts on Twitter seem very very worried and I’m more inclined to go with them (and the exponential function) than with my antivaxxer friend’s posts on Facebook.

I wouldn’t give a lot of heed to either of those groups, they’re both avenues where nuance is discarded in favor of fervor for the sake of memes. You’ve chosen panic, as I suspect your party of choice has, as your fervor of choice, but that doesn’t mean everyone sees the same fire you do requiring the largest of firehoses whose dousing will cause all sorts of collateral damage.

There is more at play than pure epidemiology, though that is for sure a factor for consideration.

> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown.

In no small part, because of a couple weeks of daily revelations about how utterly brazen the Government was in flouting the lockdown restrictions. You can't really cancel Christmas after pictures surface of you having a fucking garden party at number 10 at the height of the lockdown. BoJo's saving his skin, and he's fine letting the bodies hit the floor.

Nobody cares man. Lock yourself down if you're so panicked and leave the rest of us alone.

This is with the "Nowcast" projections on. You can disable them in the page, and this shows a measured 0.7% of cases (less than one percent) as Omicron. That's some aggressive projection model...

Probably no worse than the Imperial College London model that was used at the beginning of the pandemic to seed the response path we're all on.

Agreed, I think it's important to highlight that the 73% is a projection.

That said, to be clear, the 0.7% is what was measured the week of 12/4, not more recently.

Is there a place where we can see the raw count of samples that were sequenced in the last week and what % of them were Omicron vs Delta?

Just sticking to places with it in a simple format, there's S gene target failure rates for San Diego [0] and University of Washington [1]. I don't know if Kristian Andersen's lab has that info anywhere else, but UW has it online somewhere else, just can't reach it on my phone.

It looks like both Scripps and UW are listing SGTF rates at >70% now, as of yesterday. Given that San Diego and certain counties within Washington are >70% omicron, the CDC nowcast listing it as 73% (for the nation?) doesn't seem crazy as an average.

Edit: I just noticed you asked for sequencing info, but SGTF seems to be a good enough measure. Sequencing is slow, so you'll always be ~1 week out. Andersen's data is particularly good IMHO because they list Ct values <=30 and >30. It's been a pet peeve of mine for some time that certain labs run the PCR tests to Ct >40, since that could be positive with ~1 RNA molecule meaning it's unlikely that's a real infection (at least at the time of the test).

[0] https://github.com/andersen-lab/SARS-CoV-2_SGTF_San-Diego

[1] https://github.com/proychou/sgtf

There's another Omicron strain that evades the S gene failure litmus test

https://covariants.org/per-country ("The raw data behind these charts comes from GISAID")

CDC should remove note about Newcast from website. It gives wrong impression and may confuse people.

If you disable "Nowcast", you go two weeks backward in time. The CDC is doing its very best to give you information here.

I've been making Covid-projections since ~May using these data. This is the first time I've seen them emerge on a day other than Tuesday in months -- they got this one to market because it matters.

It is my ongoing impression that the people behind these projections are doing the very best they can with the very best data available in the US. If you compare last-week's data in today's release with those released last week, you'll see a substantial refinement as new sequencing data roll in. If you're forecasting covid-trends in the US, this is one of the very best resources you've got.

(Also, shout-out to the UK HSA. When the next variant comes, I hope we've gotten our latency and reporting up to your daily Omicron-report and weekly Technical Briefing level. Y'all are helping the whole world, too.)

> If you compare last-week's data in today's release with those released last week, you'll see a substantial refinement as new sequencing data roll in.

They're doing their best, but these "Nowcast" numbers are horribly unreliable. Fortunately, that's not a big deal but hear my whole post out...

Last week, two weeks ago was Nowcast as 2.something%. Now the revised numbers is like 11% for two weeks ago.

To be fair: the error bars were like 0.1% to 16% on that estimate (so they "weren't wrong"... but with error bars this huge, there's no point trying to get into the nitty gritty). But even today, we can see the "73% Nowcast estimate" as an error bar of 35% to 95%.

---------

The error bars are huge, but given the rate at which Omicron outcompetes Delta, we know that Omicron is doubling in roughly every 3 days. With an estimate of 30% (smallest case scenario for Omicron), we'll be at 99.9% by next week. It doesn't matter if we're at 30% today or 95% today. 99.9% Omicron is certain in the near future.

We don't know if we're at 30% now or 95% now. But the era of Omicron dominance is among us right now, or maybe even a few days ago. That's incredibly important news, we may not know the exact time or day, but this is the best advanced warning we're gonna get.

Omicron is here. Hopefully we all know what the new rules are by now...

Agreed on all points. The SGTF sampling by UW, Yale, and others have been more than sufficient to get a good-enough estimation, in combination with the really excellent work from the UK and Denmark, of what we're facing.

Our trajectory for the next ~10+ days is largely locked-in, but strident (and empathetic) leadership may help to blunt the impact in the weeks that follow.

It might be Christmas week, but if you limit contacts for the next week or two, you'll put yourself in a much-better place to be able to manage the month to come .

May this be the last time humans have to pay so dearly to learn the lesson that exponentially-scaling adversaries are best-confronted when they are small.

> learn the lesson that exponentially-scaling adversaries are best-confronted when they are small

*looks at Florida* Nope.

People can't even really grasp compound interest, nevermind an invisible, exponentially widening something.

There is a 0% chance of that happening. In every timeline in the multiverse that doesn’t happen.

People are sick of sacrificing to protect those too dumb or brainwashed to protect themselves. Especially when all that sacrifice means nothing because of those people spreading it around and acting as hosts for it to mutate in.

> Hopefully we all know what the new rules are by now...

What are they, precisely? There are always going to be new variants. I think there is a spectrum of valid responses, depending on your risk aversion, but I guess for most people the new rules are actually the same as the old rules. It does seem like there is some incremental desire to get boosters. But I've already done that, and I already wear masks in public. What else is there to be done?

Omicron hasn't been out very long. But it has been out long enough to demonstrate that 2-doses are weak but the 3rd booster dose helps a lot.

The question is whether or not this factoid has spread amongst the citizens yet, or if misinformation has gotten ahead of it again. I see a lot of anti-vax propaganda / anti-vax talking points being repeated verbatim in my circle of friends, suggesting that unfortunately, misinformation once again dominates the discussion.

-------

But yes, perhaps no amount of time can fix the fact that so many of us are plugged into misinformation systems and propaganda.

Nobody’s impugning their honesty. Just pointing out that this is a model, not data.

95% CI includes 35%-95% . . . with intervals that wide, the statistic seems to be questionably useful.

For a variant that represented 0.0% percent of cases a few weeks ago, that CI is pretty astounding.

Sure but, like, we knew this was going to happen either this week or next week, right? It was only a question of when.

You know the most interesting thing about this to me is how the absolute number of delta infections decreases so much when omicron comes on the scene. This kinda implies that for at least a significant fraction of the infected, they were exposed to both delta and omicron, and omicron won. I'm really curious how that works. Does anyone know of a clear explanation of the mechanism behind that?

Counterpoint: https://theprepared.com/blog/73-of-covid-cases-arent-omicron...

In this post there's a good point about this figure being a projection and not a measurement, but we do have actual measurements that do not require full sequencing of the virus to recognize omicron but just a PCR test. From [1]:

> To gain insight into the spread of the Omicron variant in our community, we are working with a large number of partners to track S-gene target failures (SGTFs). SGTFs are a feature of the TaqPath PCR assay that fails to detect the spike gene of certain variants of interest due to a deletion in these viruses' spike gene. Most Omicron sequences have this deletion while most Delta sequences do not. As a result, the proportion of SGTF in positive tests can be used to estimate the prevalence of Omicron.

Worse, the key part of the reasoning is problematic: (emphasis mine)

> Assuming, as data has indicated, that Delta cases stayed approximately constant during this time, these numbers correspond to Omicron case numbers growing approximately twenty fold in one week, a doubling time of approximately thirty six hours, sustained over a two week period.

> This is out of touch with what we know about Omicron. Responsible estimates of the growth rates of Omicron in populations with better data (like the UK and Denmark) and prior data on the USA, have suggested doubling times in the range of TWO TO FOUR DAYS. This has caused us (and the real experts) to characterize its rate of growth as “explosive,” and to say in late November and early December that it might attain dominance in the USA in a matter of weeks. And that’s all true. But a doubling time of 36 hours, sustained for over two weeks, is out of step with all the other data. It’s not credible.

Even if 36 hours is a bit lower than most (but not all) measurement, it's not that far of the reality, while the “2 to 4 days” discussed in the article is too optimistic. A few example of doubling times:

San Diego: 1.4 days [1], in the different regions of the UK, the doubling time varies from 1.5 to 2.2 days (median: 1.6 days) [2]. In France, the estimated doubling time varies from 1.6 to 2.2 days.

Excerpt from [2]:

> We are observing doubling time central estimates of less than 2 days for every region except the South West. This may be related to poor PCR gene target reporting coverage in this region.

Oh, and in this sentence, just click on his link (which now includes data from yesterday and completely defeats his argument)

> And this points to another big problem. These numbers don’t comport with the national case numbers and what we know about how variants interact[link to 3]. While huge case surges have been seen in the states in Region 2, which was already 2.4% Omicron in the latest measurements (the week ending December 4), as well as other Omicron-dominant areas like the UK, they haven’t been seen in most states elsewhere in the country. This pattern was also seen as Delta took over from Alpha in the USA this summer, but we’re not seeing it in most of the USA now.

[1]: https://searchcovid.info/dashboards/omicron-estimates/ [2]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... page 6. [3]: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+covid+cases

Those are some really wide 95% confidence intervals. As it is right now:

  Delta 26.6%, 95% CI: 5.1%-65.8%
  Omicron 73.2%, 95% CI: 34.0%-94.9%
  Others 0.1%, 95% CI: 0.0-0.4%

That's not to say that Omicron isn't the majority of COVID cases (it probably is), but compared with previous weeks the intervals are really huge.

Not really.

Last week, the error bars were 0.1% to 16%, which was much more uncertainty IMO.

This Nowcast model is "only" a 3x fold from lowest to highest. Sooooo... this is actually a lot more accurate and certain than last week's prediction.

Right, that’s pretty much how a 7 day in the future prediction is going to look when rates can double daily. The pattern fits from SA data roughly though. But that’s not ceterus paribus, etc.

It really depends on the question.

My observation was from the standpoint of "is omicron the most prevalent variant," which this week's data suggests probably, but it could go either way. Last week's error bars would suggest that the answer to that question would be "very unlikely."

As you point out, a 95% CI of 0.1% to 16% is also huge.

A 1% Omicron would suggest we have 6 doubling-periods before dominance, roughly 18 days.

A 10% Omicron would suggest we only have 3-doubling periods before dominance, roughly 9 days (seems to be doubling every 3 days on the average).

--------

The 30% vs 70% dominance question is "is Omicron going to be dominant on Thursday, or was it Dominant yesterday?". Which... isn't really that big of a difference anymore. We're just solidly in the era of Omicron now.

CDC refines the measurements as sequencing results are reported. After about two weeks, the numbers settle down to near their final precision/value.

London is right after South Africa at the vanguard of Omicron. It seems it's hospitalisation rates are only now starting to emerge.

https://i.redd.it/92wwp9jp8q681.png

Have you got a link to Reddit source of the image?

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusUK/comments/rkrjwv/londo...

The main question is not the death or even hospitalization, but rather if you get long covid.

Yeah most people are not talking about the long term effects of having your body fight covid... oh well, rich people can't get richer if we slow down the economy.

Actually, if we "slow down the economy" it would likely adversely affect the lower income bracket blue collar workers and other wage earners who have to be at work in person, but no longer can. I suspect most HN-goers (on average very well off) can just work from home.

We slowed down the economy in 2020 and the rich only got richer faster.

Amazon isn't hurting because of shutting down businesses. Small business owners are dying in droves. Slowing down the economy just means centralizing purchases to large corporations.

Agree, as a young, healthy person with access to top level care (Canada) I'm not really worried about death or long hospitalization, I'm worried about long COVID. I've heard many stories of people losing taste/smell for a long time and when it does come back their senses are all messed up and what used to taste great now tastes terrible. Also stories of people that were active prior and can no longer do any exercise. I have a coworker who is a bit older, but has been off work for a few months with long COVID symptoms. That's all my real concern.

I might get a ton of flak for this, but I discount the frequency of long Covid by a substantial amount. Not the severity, mind you, but the amount of people it's actually physiologically affecting.

If you can increase UFO sightings by telling everyone that UFOs exist and talking about UFOs... well, then what do you get from a global trauma with high and continuous uncertainty, that requires uncommon expertise to parse, on the news 24/7?

"Long COVID symptoms may have causes other than SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/11/long-cov...

I have seen no real research into it. No real proof that it's a major issue. But (guess who) the mainstream media has been playing it up for a while, and it's always used as the final indisputable argument by people who support the lockdowns.

This study, with some limitations (mainly data collected from EMRs), suggests 36% of those with COVID experience one or more 'long COVID' symptom between 3 and 6 months following infection.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Per https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t..., it sounds like long term physical and mental impacts can stay with people who get hospitalized by the flu. Why are you more worried about long COVID than persistent effects of diseases that have been around longer like the flu?

Perhaps it has about 10x the odds of causing severe post-viral syndrome than flu does, just as it has about 10x the mortality? We don't know much yet.

> when it does come back their senses are all messed up and what used to taste great now tastes terrible.

From what I've read, even that goes back to normal after a while. From my own experience, that's exactly what happened. I couldn't smell or taste anything for around 3 weeks, then coffee tasted like rotten bananas for around two months and ultimately everything went back to normal. I guess I got lucky on the other symptoms like tiredness and being short of breath, because I never had those to begin with.

The FLCCC protocol for long covid has had a lot of good results. I fixed my three and a half month bout in the spring with it. One dose of ivermectin and I felt better in a few hours and cured all the symptoms in five days with four more doses. The only remaining symptom of chest inflammation resolved with prednisone.

It could easily be that you had an undiagnosed case of worms. That was the outcome of a bit of research about those cases where Ivermectin seemed to have a positive effect on curing COVID-19.

No. Too many non worm symptoms that were exactly like covid symptoms.

My understanding was that a hypotheiss of why ivermectin seems more likely to be effective at treating COVID in studies conducted in places with lots of parasitic infections is that some of those undiagnosed parasitic infections exacerbate COVID symptoms.

So, having symptoms associated with COVID and not particular to parasitic infection wouldn't rule out that hypothesis, but instead be consistent with it.

Interesting. I've heard there's a few side effects when clearing parasites, more nausea for instance.

Brain fog, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, extreme high blood pressure, clotting issues, extreme fatigue, chest congestion, sore throat, sense of smell was haywire. All this got better than I had felt in the three months of suffering within a few hours of the first dose. Then better after each additional daily dose. After five days I felt well again. Only had chest/lung inflammation left to deal with. Prednisone fixed that. I don't live in an area where parasites and worms are at all common.

Yes, among symptomatic cases we really need statistics of not only hospitalized vs. not hospitalized but also severe vs. mild.

Long Covid is hard to accurately track. Most of the studies rely on self-reported symptoms, very hard to apply scientific rigor.

Is "long covid" anything other than post-viral fatigue syndrome? I still haven't seen anything to imply it's different than any other virus, in that regard.

Not that I want it, but giving it a new name just seems like more fear stoking.

Yeah there’s a whole bunch of things. As someone who enjoys eating and drinking coffee parosmia would have to be the worst.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/09/paro...

Well, it does mess with angiotensin receptors, which are all over, controlling the blood flow pretty much everywhere. That's why there's loss of smell, "covid toes", and multiple organs affected in high viral load cases, especially those with high blood flow... Brain is one of these organs, and neurological damage has been documented.

Covid? nein, danke. Vaccines, yes, please.

There are researchers who believe long covid is related to blood platelet microclotting, inducing hypoxia in tissues. Remains to be seen whether this holds up.

For me the symptoms were brain fog, weird sense of smell, headache, heart issues, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, cough, fatigue, fatigue after light exertion.

I am mostly concerned about the mutations coming out of the Omicron contagion than the Omicron variant itself.

A valid concern. Omicron is apparently mutating faster than previous variants - less genomically stable. https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20

Source?

https://twitter.com/_b_meyer/status/1470124417749557248?s=20

Do you have a source? I follow covid news stuff pretty closely and saw nothing like that.

Since I don't see anyone else mentioning it here, I thought I'd call out Zvi.

With all the constant noise around covid coverage, it's been such a huge relief that Zvi has been able to provide the excellent summaries that he does at least once a week. It's nearly impossible for every individual to spend enough time to parse through the deluge of information and parse the signal from the noise.

So at this point what percent of people testing positive are actually tracked? It’s still a giant pain to get a covid test and requires at least one day lead time to get scheduled in at the pharmacy. It’s so much easier to pop in to that same pharmacy and get a rapid test for $10 and do it at home.

The news articles stating this number are refering to data for the week ending the 11th. I can't get that data through the link, only the week ending the 4th of December with a low estimate. iOS, Sweden. Anyone else having that issue?

A lot of speculation.

Is there a way to know the average hospital duration in SA for people without a previous infection?

I know the current data in SA says it went from 8,5 days to 2,5 days.

The variable currently, if the data can be cross-referenced to other countries, is the high infection rate of delta in SA.

Excluding previously infected from hospital stay would create an educated guess in my eyes. If it stays <3,5 days for example, that would seem like good news.

And yet the damaging travel ban against Southern Africa remains in place, even against recommendations by key US scientists...

Korea is already seeing a significant uptick (doubling week on week) in imported Covid cases, mostly from the US.

These are projections. Click on "Nowcast Off" and it will only show actuals, which is a completely different picture (very little Omicron percentage).

google "new york coronavirus" and look at the massive past 10 day spike in the new cases chart. This isn't going to end well.

New case count arrivals should be normalized against sampling rate, there's been a massive increase in NYC test collection capacity via mobile vans and testing tents on sidewalks.

Sampling rate needs to be normalized against percent-positivity. NYC has gone from 3% positive to 8% positive, suggesting that NYC is missing half of its results compared to before.

Remember: the flu is among us. A lot of these tests should be returning negative because the flu is spreading like normal.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#testi...

Positivity rate reaching 8%. 3 day lag.

Anecdotal, obviously, but I haven’t seen any new testing sites in Manhattan. The vans and tents have been there for months. The only change I’ve noticed is the lines.

I walk past two tent sites on my way to the gym every single day. Been there for months now. I’ve never seen any significant queue until this week.

There have been vans and big tents (10x10' approx) for months, in stable locations.

More of the little booths (4x4' approx) appeared in recent weeks, in additional locations.

Not anywhere I routinely travel in Manhattan. Sidewalk booths have been there since June or July.

Yes, and now they are in additional high-traffic midtown locations, where there was previously no booth. Same principle as opening more supermarket checkout lanes: if one booth has a gigantic line, add another booth at the opposite end of the block -> two shorter lines that don't block sidewalk traffic.

There may be an increase in collection, but it's backlogged by actual labs doing the work. If you look at the last few days, there's been no real increase in test numbers. We've really hit our limit in daily testing, but positivity keeps going up.

> New case count arrivals should be normalized against sampling rate, there's been a massive increase in NYC test collection capacity via mobile vans and testing tents on sidewalks.

those have been around since spring 2021 everywhere in the city, the amount of vans and testing tents is not higher now than it was mid summer.

Looks like they were cut back in Nov, then increased.

Dec 16, https://www.thecity.nyc/health/2021/12/16/22840510/nyc-shut-...

> The number of city-operated fixed-location testing centers listed dropped dramatically in the middle of November from 54 to 34, with 31 operating as of Wednesday, an analysis by THE CITY of city Health + Hospital system data shows ... State health stats show upwards of 146,000 tests administered Wednesday, compared with about 106,000 on Dec. 1.

Dec 19, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/new-york-elections...

> additional testing sites will be opened after Tuesday, describing the process as “kind of a rolling-thunder situation.” The number of mobile testing sites will grow to 93 by Tuesday, with more to come after that, officials said.

Dec 20, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/new-york-elections...

> Nearly two dozen new COVID testing sites will be added this week to New York City’s arsenal ... By this week’s end, the city plans to have a total of 112 of its own testing sites up and running — up 23 from the 89 sites currently available.

That's just one variable, are hospitalization rates going up at a similar rate? That's the critical and undeniably most important number for setting policy.

Wait ... how come when you turn the "Nowcast prediction model" into OFF then there are zero Omicron cases in the US?

Check the dates.

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