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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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> 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%.

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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.

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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.

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