Omicron Has 80% Lower Risk of Hospitalization in South Africa
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I have a friend that repeats narratives adjacent to right wing conspiracy theories sometimes. I always call him out on it and correct him.
The last instance of this was the vaccine mandate. The right-wing narrative conveniently leaves out the testing alternative to vaccination.
I simply told him the complete story and we went and looked up the policy on whitehouse.gov.
This time, and a lot of the times after I correct him says the same thing you ended your comment with. Something like "There's so much conflicting info how do I know what to believe".
The triggering part of this is that him and apparently most of the population of the United States would rather throw up their hands and say I'm confused than look it up.
would be interested in some of you guyses takes on this. as far as noobie me can tell, they adjusted for several factors in this one
They find lower severity relative to the Delta wave this summer, but no difference in severity relative to non-omicron infections from November. I am curious what the variant distribution is among those non-omicron November infections; one confounding factor is just high overall immunity which they say is difficult to fully account for (they did control for known prior infection). Refer to the discussion section on page 10.
This is the preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116
>Some of this reducton is likely a result of high population immunity
In addition, Omicron seems to be a milder variant, especially WRT the lungs where previous variants were most dangerous.
The top five symptoms of Omicron are:
Runny nose
Sneezing
Headache
Fatigue
Scratchy throat
Note the telltale cough, indicative of lung involvement, is not included on the list. This variant just does not seem to have the same affinity for the lungs.
The real question is “what is the relative severity, conditioned on prior immunity” — as in, what is the intrinsic virulence.
As in, should an unvaccinated person with no prior Covid expect delta symptoms, or this list? We apparently still can’t answer that with confidence given the data currently available to us, but it seems unlikely to me that this cohort should expect anything milder than the wild type.
We can hope it is milder, and we’ll learn more soon.
I mean, it seems there would be no reason to expect a sudden change in severity from one virus to the next in such a short time span, unless there was something intrinsically different about this virus.
EDIT: I'd add to that there also seems to be an overwhelming prevalence of those five seemingly milder symptoms versus symptoms from previous variants.
There also would not have been a sudden surge in immunity that would explain such a rapid shift.
Also, see ms to be not just milder symptoms, but different symptoms. So there does seem to be something intrinsically different here. Given all we've heard about the striking mutations at the spike proteins for Omicron, it's probably not surprising since they drive so much of the virus's profile.
Agreed, and that’s what this SA study is doing. They compare to delta cases from this summer, and also non-omicron (presumably mostly delta? I can’t tell) cases from this November.
They find that cases are less severe than in the summer, but not enough data to conclude any difference compared to November non-omicron.
More data will tell us if it’s intrinsically milder with different symptom profile, or if the other strains in November were not delta, or if it actually only seemed milder because of undercounting prior infections, or something else
>They compare to delta cases from this summer, and also non-omicron (presumably mostly delta? I can’t tell) cases from this November.
From the article:
Compared to delta infections in South Africa between April and November, omicron infections are associated with a 70% lower risk of severe disease, they said. The omicron data was collected for the two months through November.
I read from that significant overlap in comparisons between both summer through November, as well as Omicron and Delta up through November. In all, that statement seems to specifically address most of your questions, as they have directly compared per the variables you seem to be questioning.
The one thing they have not been able to conclude is the role immunity played in the differences.
That's where I'm lobbing in my opinion (partially sourced from other reports, beyond this study) that we might be able to read into the seemingly stark shift when Omicron hit the scene, particularly WRT symptom variation. While we are awaiting more data, there does seem to be a consistency in these reports, and that consistency points to a sudden and observable difference in Omicron symptomology that would not be explained by increased immunity alone (again, my opinion, informed by the study time frames and other sources).
Of course they can't conclude that yet, but I'm predicting that's what the data will show.
So that was my internet layperson attempt to address your original question with regard to intrinsic virulence versus immunity. I just think it's unlikely that we're coincidentally seeing a sudden surge in immunity concomitant with the appearance of a new variant, which also happens to have a ton of mutations and starkly different spike profile.