I really hope Omicron is the strain that turns the virus into endemic and we can live with it as we live with the flu.
Hard to say right now. Hospitals in my state have just activated emergency protocols, because our surge is already exceeding Winter-2020 levels. This means that 20% of surgeries are going to be cancelled, and other such care is going to be officially rationed off. (BTW: We're at 90% adults vaccinated, but "70% to 80%" of the hospitalizations are unvaccinated individuals).
EDIT: To be clear: individual hospitals declare emergencies. Its not a state-wide declaration. Hospitals have begun to declare emergencies and activate hospital-specific rationing.
Omicron has been a bitch so far. It seems like it is causing hospitalizations in the unvaccinated population, maybe not at the same "rate" as Delta, but in high enough numbers that we're going to run out of hospital beds in my area.
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Elsewhere in the country... Florida's 300% rise in cases this past week has demonstrated that natural-immunity from Alpha/Delta was completely worthless vs Omicron.
Florida is well on its way to having a worse surge than it ever had before. It doesn't seem like we can natural-immunity our ways out of this.
One of the problems seems to be that hospital staff are so expensive (because of their regulated monopoly) that we've been running with no spare capacity in normal times. Most other systems have 20% or more extra capacity.
This Omicron is worse than anything we've seen before locally. Crisis levels / Emergency levels of hospitalization have been reached.
Yeah, we've had a nursing crisis and our health care system is shoddier than many people realize. But Omicron is clearly different.
We're well above "20%". This is crisis / emergency time. The emergency declaration will reduce surgeries by 20% (going from 140% capacity to 112% capacity).
Like, its obviously not enough, but... its something.
I think it's been fairly clear in the pandemic that they don't.
Tangential, but has Florida started accurately reporting their cases, hospitalizations and deaths instead of under-reporting them?
Doesn't matter IMO. What matters is the change-in-percent. If Florida's "undercount" is 300% higher this week than last week, that's all the evidence we need, as long as the "undercount" remained consistent.
The exact number isn't important. Its the change in numbers we can look at and rely upon. If you don't trust the numbers, you can still trust the change-in-numbers.
Its not important to get exact numbers. Its more important to remain consistent in your reporting through these crisis. We care about apples-to-apples comparisons within the state, not against different states. A 300% rise is a 300% rise.
You need 95% of your cases to be negative if you expect any accuracy in your case%. If you're at 10% positive or 15% positive, then if you double your testing, you double your cases.
10% positive suggests a testing-kit shortage. That's what's going on in my state, we've begun to ration testing-kits. We only give out testing kits to those with symptoms.
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At some point, your hospital systems favor the individual's health over accurate reporting of statistics. Under such circumstances, it becomes important to use alternative measures for how bad the surge is. Focusing on "% change" is one of the most effective ways of factoring in this issue.
AFAIK, the only underreporting they are doing is not counting positive tests as cases unless the person is a permanent Florida resident, while everyone else is counting tests conducted in-state. Which is significant, but really only effects the case count.
(They may be doing a bad job of actually doing testing, too, but that’s not underreporting though it has a similar effect. But, again AFAIK, hospitalization and death numbers aren’t impacted.)
Anecdotally, I've attended two mega indoor concerts in the past couple of months. It is almost impossible that I haven't been exposed to or contracted COVID.
It took about a week or two between our Omicron-surge before our hospitals filled up around here. COVID19 is a slow-moving disease, give it some time and prepare.
I think 62% vs. 80% could be a big enough delta to explain the difference here versus your town.
I'll be keeping an eye on your higher-vaccination rate and how it works out in your city. I've been trying to tell my coworkers / people around me to get vaccinated (and boostered) but not everybody would listen.
EDIT: The state's average is like 80% total population. I live in an area with far below the state's average in regards to vaccinations.
Can you put any links to the data on any of these? I am really curious to know where you get that from, I can't find any hospitalization data from Omicron and vaccinated rates on those hospitalizations.
https://www.umms.org/uch/news/2021/um-uch-moves-to-crisis-st...
The 70% to 80% quote is from local-TV stations.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/um-upper-chesapeake-hospital-...
> Barrueto said 70% to 80% of the hospitals' patients are unvaccinated. He said the move also sends a message to the community that it's not business as usual.
This is simply wrong. A rise in cases is not evidence of much of anything related to immunity, let alone natural immunity. Plenty of vaccinated people are getting infected as well -- they're not dying from it.
> Florida is well on its way to having a worse surge than it ever had before. It doesn't seem like we can natural-immunity our ways out of this.
Please stop speculating. The "surge" in cases is currently lower than what happened in FL over the summer, and hospitalizations are flat:
>While COVID-19’s omicron variant pushes Florida to pandemic daily records in cases reported and has drive-thru testing lines snaking through parks and pharmacy parking lots, hospitalizations haven’t risen at the same rate — yet. Sunday’s report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said there were 2,302 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida. That’s 39 more people hospitalized than in Saturday’s report and from 245 hospitals, as opposed to the 246 hospitals in Saturday’s report. COVID-19 patients occupy 4.27% of patient beds in those reporting hospitals, compared to 4.18% in the previous day’s reporting hospitals. Of the people hospitalized in Florida, 333 were in intensive care unit beds, a decrease of nine. That represents about 5.41% of the state’s ICU hospital beds, compared to 5.55% the previous day.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25685593...
When is it going to happen? The UK convinced itself alpha would give them herd immunity and stop future outbreaks. Then the same people came out to say ok now with delta in the UK we'll let it burn all summer and then be protected. And now the same people have the gall to say, ok ok this time omicron will be the one that gives us herd immunity.
It's time to call out this nonsense for the complete horseshit nonsense that it is.
This is not helpful. I understand that you disagree with the parent, but you could have ended your comment on a more constructive and helpful note.
It's time to call out the minimizers and downplayers on their horseshit.
Maybe it's time to do that on Reddit or Facebook, but this isn't the point of HackerNews. From the guidelines:
>" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
So it’s gonna expose everyone regardless, therefore it is a kind of herd exposure, if not herd immunity. Hopefully, in combination with the previous exposure, the transmissibility will be lowered by this “herd exposure” so in future waves the hospital system won’t be hit as hard.
It’s roughly less than half as lethal as Delta, other things being equal. In combination with boosted+vaccination, the risk is pretty low, comparable to flu or perhaps lower now that we have better treatments.
We need the pan-coronavirus vaccines, though, in addition to these less lethal variants, to really bring this down to background seasonal flu/cold virus levels. (And it wouldn’t hurt if we finally fixed the HIV pandemic so variants don’t mutate so much. And fix vaccine logistics further so we have a prayer to deploy vaccines before literally everyone gets it like Omicron.)
Coronaviruses normally don’t mutate as fast as the typical seasonal flu since they don’t do recombination as efficiently. So we SHOULD be able to keep up with it. But our main vaccine strain is now 2 years old. You can’t expect that to work well forever.
Having non-stop sanitary edicts and booster shots every three months is not really a long-term sustainable policy either.
Getting to a high (like over 95%) vaccination worldwide would also prevent the creation of more variants. There are quite clearly solutions that will work; what lacks is political will (and disinformation spread by selfish people and politicians).
Maybe if we're getting a vaccine that provides immunity like the Polio one does and that we're vaccinating 100% of people in a few days and we're getting rid of all animal reservoirs of the virus at the same time, which is just near impossible given the cost and the logistics, maybe the virus could be eradicated. Maybe.
Also it is environmental pressures that drive viruses to mutate and create variants. If the virus escapes the vaccines than there is a great deal of change that it is the vaccinated that favored the vaccine resistant strains. In fact one of the first most contagious strains were noticed in India a few weeks after the beginning of their vaccination program.
It is impossible to say what causes a mutation to arise, but to say that it is 100% sure that the non-vaccinated are responsible for the variants is simply based on nothing tangible.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
The reason we get so many variants is because there are enough unvaccinated individuals that the virus is able to rip through billions of individuals.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...