Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado
covid19.colorado.gov
covid19.colorado.gov
The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...
The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good...
Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.
If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.
I'm not sure that's possible - the experts are more or less screaming into the wind at this point. The WHO and the CDC have been reduced to punchlines by liberals and conservatives alike. IMHO this scorn is well-deserved.
At the time, little was known about this new variant except that it was extremely different from all that we had seen before, which would very likely result in escape from prior immunity, and may even lead to more severe disease (or not?). The only definitive silver lining that she found at the time was that 1) the variant could be quickly detected with PCR thanks to its S-gene deletion, 2) it was detected early thanks to South Africa, and 3) vaccines could be quickly adapted if necessary, thanks to mRNA vaccine technology. However, in all other regards, the variant was still very concerning.
In other words, do take her cautious optimism seriously. She's not a wishful thinker. Rather, she is a specialist in the field who works with the data as it becomes available and knows how to interpret it
I don't see this as much here in Ontario. Among the vaccinated as of today there is a 10.10/100k hospitalization status vs 16/100k for the unvaccinated (and 11.9 for one-dose). The hospitalization rate among the vaccinated is climbing quickly. Yes, there's still a gap, but yikes.
ICU is better, though, with a 0.76/100k rate for the vaccinated vs 4.74/100k for the unvaccinated.
This may have to do with different hospitalization and testing criterion, I don't know. But hospitalization here is in full exponential growth and not just among the unvaccinated.
Obviously being vaccinated is still far preferable. I have had 3 doses (1 AstraZeneca and 2 Pfizer) FWIW.
edit: sorry had that written backwards
If the rates are the same, and 5/6 people are vaccinated, we would expect 5/6 people admitted to the hospital to be vaccinated. In fact, 5/6 people are vaccinated in the 12-40 age cohort, with older (and more vulnerable) populations having at least 9/10 people vaccinated and quickly going to 19+/20. Therefore, vaccines prevent hospitalizations, as the average of all adults is greater than 5/6.
I take GP at their word that there were just errors in writing their post. But it does leave a weird artifact out there that I cannot fix.
This still shows a greater than 10x difference in outcomes. Additionally, the "unvacccinated" population includes people naturally vaccinated by virtue of having a previous case.
It could very well evolve into a form that is mild enough and different enough from the vaccine spike that brings the unvaccinated and vaccinated hospitalization rates to convergence. Respiratory illnesses in general harm the elderly and immunocompromised disproportionately. But if that becomes the end game where COVID is still circulating, vaccines are no longer as effective at preventing serious illness, because the general severity has gone down, that is also a good outcome as it is what we have always lived with.
Colds and flus have always killed 10s of thousands a year. COVID killed many more because it was particularly severe. Just as the flu of 1918 is still with us today in a less harmful form (H1N1) This virus has a global reservoir and will never run its course entirely before mutating again most likely. Just like colds and flus before it.
Only if it's recent. How recent isn't clear yet. Somewhere in the > 90 days, < 1 year range, it seems.[1] As of last summer, about 1% of COVID cases were known re-infections.[1] Most repeat cases seem to involve two different variants.[2] Whether people who had previous variants are showing up infected with the omicron variant doesn't appear to be published yet.
[1] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/why-covid-19-vaccines-offe...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8604456/
no. covid is novel, not appreciably more severe, and that's where mortality rates are coming from. it's following the dynamics of the many cold and flu viruses that came before it. we just happen to be at the beginning of the dynamics rather than at relative steady-state (e.g., 'endemic'), which is where most other viruses are at.
this inability to reason cogently about steady-state vs. dynamic aspects of systems is absolutely rampant across media, politics, and casual conversation, and must be a named fallacy at this point, though i don't know that name offhand.
You are engaging on wishful thinking I'm afraid - wishful thinking that is even now still killing hundreds of thousands. Perhaps there is a name for that too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83987-3
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.111...
Maybe not. A much broader vaccine is coming along well.[1] That's from the US Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, and it just passed phase I (safety) clinical testing. That one is supposed to protect against all COVID & SARS variants.
There are 93 more COVID vaccines in development at the moment. Some are pills. Some are nasal sprays. Something is going to work. What we have now is the minimum viable product, and even that is pretty good. Early on, there was concern that a 50% effective vaccine was all that would result. Which is about where the original Sputnik vaccine, and the original SinoVac, are. Instead, we got 95% effective vaccines in round 1.
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-create...
This will be with us, and mutating, approximately forever.
Unvaccinated people in Canada are overwhelmingly very very young, in Quebec most of them are too young to be vaccinated.
That's why they don't get hospitalized as much :)
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
You can go here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccination-cover...
From that, you can figure out that there are more people unvaccinated under 12 years old, than in the entire rest of the population, by a large margins - out of 7.6 million people without full vaccination, 2.9 million are between 5 and 11 years old, and 1.9 million people are under 5 years old.
So out of the 7.6 million people who aren't fully vaccinated, 4.8 million are under 12 years old!
And from 2.8 million remaining, 430k of those are under 18, and 1.0 million are under 30.
From this, we can figure out that the pre-vaccine hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated population is much, much lower than for the normal population.
This is without taking into account health status, of course!
Quebec publishes age-ajusted hospitalization rates per vaccine status, the latest number is a 7.7x odds ratio, which would be even worse for the ICU : https://mobile.twitter.com/sante_qc/status/14791225681667481...
I highly recommend anybody concerned about hospitalization among the vaccinated read this post. It's about Delta hospitalizations in Israel 2021, but we should expect the same effect from Omicron and across countries: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
What the hell is going to happen with the omicron spread in countries with hardly any vaccination? I mean if it really is like measles, this could be terrible.
Not an expert but comparing countries is hard, especially now that there are other factors such as how many people are vaccinated, boosted etc. I don’t think it’s obvious from one country how another will fare.
Granted, it seems true that she's actually an epidemiologist, though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school. As far as I know she doesn't have unusual access to information, or a hands on role, she's drawing from public sources and doing analysis.
Which, is fine. But what makes me nervous about this trend is that she's now like almost a household name. She's built a personal brand around this image as being the up to the minute source of information, and the audience she's developed has a certain profile. They're basically looking for someone to tell them how bad everything is and how scary everything looks, backing it up with details so her audience can feel smart when they relay all this info to their friends.
The minute that COVID isn't actually something to worry about her audience is gone and she goes back to being a random obscure civilian.
Which is an incentive structure that makes me pretty sure I know what she'll be posting tomorrow, and a week from now, and so on.
I realize the mainstream news media isn't any better. But still, it's an odd new development that people are mostly seeking out the level of fear/concern they want in their news rather than the other way around.
I personally regard it as a coping mechanism for the people that follow these newly created Covid personalities, the bad thing is that in most of the cases the mainstream media copy-pastes those posts/messages and presents them as the truth, even though there are many devils hidden in the statistical details most of the time.
We really, really need to get away from this academic obsession with prestige. If she does solid analysis and communicates it effectively, with a record that looks increasingly good as time passes, she's already ahead of the curve. Meanwhile many other highly-credentialed, prestigious experts have been wrong over and over and over again in this pandemic.
Academic/scientific institutions are polluted by the credentialisim/prestige focus. It's the ugliest aspect of the whole space.
> In certain jurisdictions, though, we’ve met or exceeded last winter’s hospitalization peak. We can see this in many states in the Northeast, including New York.
When presented with a new source, I tend to judge people based on their perspectives on things I know about. This one is a case study in being misleading, while not technically lying. New York state has only "met" last winter's hospitalization peak if you look at trend lines. If you look at hospitalizations per day, we clearly haven't. Also, of course, "last winter's peak" was not really any sort of stress for the hospital system at all (compare to the spring 2020 wave, which was), and it happened at a time when things were much more restricted than they are now:
https://covid-19.direct/state/36
The statement is more correct for NYC data, where hospitals have exceeded last winter's peak on a trend-line and per-day basis:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-totals.pag...
...but it's still misleading, because again, this is a fraction of previous waves in NYC, but also, a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing. Government officials are pleading people to stop going to the hospital for trivial things:
https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1478353835793997827
I don't know if she is intentionally trying to mislead, or just doesn't have a good handle on the data, but this is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of a person's other claims.
I don't think this is correct. Going to the ER is not the same as being admitted to the hospital. From everything I've read, ER visits are not counted as hospitalizations anywhere.
https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/ced762b25...
> Hospitalization counts reflect the total number of people with COVID-19 ever admitted to a hospital, not the number of people currently admitted.
If you go to the ER and make it to a treatment area, you're admitted. These are bright-line distinctions. Nobody is making judgment calls on the data ("did this person really get admitted, or is it just someone in the ER for an hour? Let me look at the chart!") at this level of analysis.
It would not surprise me at all to find that other cities/states have the same thing happening.
I'd call that pretty scary
Or am I missing something?
People have been saying that since 2020, but if you're talking about the current variant, omicron wasn't even given the omicron designation until the day after Thanksgiving.
"Very mild" is... not accurate. It hasn't hospitalized them, but even without quarantining, they'd be incapable of living anything like a normal life.
The common cold it most certainly IS NOT.
(Both are double vaxxed and boosted, btw)
"Asymptomatic" now means "just a low grade fever", or "a cough that didn't take me to the hospital"
"Allergies" now means "I can barely breathe no matter what environment and I'm tired like I'm taking Claritin, just ignore the color of my sputum or my cough."
"It's just the cold or flu" now means "I'm just sick for a week, and I should definitely socialize like normal"
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Fortunately the current vaccines and other therapies are pretty effective at preventing deaths.
Maybe Omicron provides immunity to Rho (or whatever is coming), but it may provide no protection to Sigma.
I had a "mild" Covid Original Flavour. I "only" had a 103 fever for 3 weeks, swellings in places I didn't know could swell, and had my stamina shot to shit. It's been just over a year and I'm just now beginning to feel like I can start bringing myself back to pre-Covid healthiness levels.
And all that is "mild". I didn't lose my sense of smell. I didn't lose oxygenation. I never had to go to the emergency room.
The pandemic is never going to be "over" on a case basis, and the virus is never going away, spread will never be zero, variants will always keep happening for decades.
Omicron is telling you that its going to be time soon to start thinking about this virus more like a normal cold/flu virus based on its impact.
1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.
If covid brain fog compounds over time there will be some serious damn consequences.
Being pregnant does dampen the immune system.
This is a highly dynamic situation. Omicron is not alpha or even delta.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021122...
Let's just assume it was Omicron that killed this guy. All signs point to Omicron being less deadly than the common cold.
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...
Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms.
Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.
The vaccine also gives one a sense of protection from infection and so they are more likely to attend mass gatherings. where the virus can be transferred.
Lowered symptoms on droplets would be better, but a lot of in-person workplaces have a "do you have a fever?" check before they issue you any sick leave.
Not having a fever and looking like a mild cold in winter would cause at least my cousin's employer to ask her to come in and wear a mask at work (manufacturing, so she wears a P100 respirator anyway).
Try not to get sick. If you do get sick, don't spread it. If you do spread it, try to spread less of it. Defense in depth.
But the WHO has been warning about this for months.
> We cannot say this clearly enough: even if you are vaccinated, continue to take precautions to prevent becoming infected yourself, and to infecting someone else who could die.
> In many countries and communities, we are concerned about a false sense of security that vaccines have ended the pandemic, and that people who are vaccinated do not need to take any other precautions.
https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-dir...
I'd guess that because, for the most part, that's how the previous variants behaved. Relatively robust immunity, with subsequent infections generally being rare and more mild. Since Omicron has a lot of mutations on the spike protein which is the primary antibody target, it has greater immune escape potential because the antibodies don't fit as well.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
> For the week ending Dec. 18, 1,265 lab-confirmed flu patients were hospitalized, up from the week prior. The cumulative hospitalization rate was 1.4 per 100,000 population as of Dec. 18, nearly double the overall cumulative hospitalization rate reported during the 2020-21 season. 3
I think you're comparing hospitalization rate per population vs. hospitalization per infected persons. If we look at the recent data and do some estimation, that's about 50k new hospitalzed for 3M new omicron cases, which is 0.016 or 10 times the flu; this sounds more reasonable.
This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival.
> It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"
There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes.
Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did.
But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel.
Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
I was amused at the sudden acknowledgement of natural immunity from previous infection in the very publications that have constantly claimed it doesn't exist, the minute it supported their need to keep fear mongering. Same with the younger population point, considering these very organizations have gone out of their way to obfuscate the vast risk stratification by age for most of the pandemic. The terrified 20-somethings wearing respirators in TikTok videos are a result of this.
Can you cite some of these alleged claims?
No it's not. Late November was too early. In mid-December we could start drawing conclusions. At this point things are becoming quite clear - we see similar trends everywhere, not just South Africa.
"The data suggests that three doses of vaccine provided an estimated 68% drop in the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron compared with people who were unvaccinated."
The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here.
Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink).
Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
(it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
Yes, it's called 'Science'.
The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in.
There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
> [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; …
This exactly what we were talking about above.
You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
Getting Covid or not is binary, yes, but the severity of the disease is on a spectrum. I can surely get a 15% less severe disease thanks to a 4-5 month old vaccination. Just like the severity of the disease depends on the viral load you're exposed to.
Of course there's no way of knowing what the exact percentage is for me personally, so in that sense you're right - it's just an average. But it's surely indicative, which is why you should be getting boosters after a specific amount of time, if you're in a risk group.
The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Also, see most of South Africa.
So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated.
I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus.
But let's be honest about this:
The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.
You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu".
The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu.
Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane.
Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
No, that one is particularly weird right now. Vaccines are essentially mandated for many parts of life, and have been for my entire life. At multiple points throughout my development I've had to get required vaccines to do things. I had never even heard of antivaxxers until my late 20s. They used to be laughed at as an insane fringe group on HN.
Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated. I suspect if I predicted on HN that there would be strong resistance to a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic people would have laughed at me as ridiculous.
People don't like vaccines because they don't like the reality we're in and they strangely think resisting wearing masks and resisting vaccines somehow makes it less real. Unfortunately it has made things much worse.
It's so unprecedented and unpopular an idea that everyone - including Biden - were falling all over themselves assuring us they would under no circumstances mandate the Covid vaccine.
Not ones requiring multiple jabs per year, seemingly forever (unless something like Omicron comes along).
Also not experimental ones rushed out with an EUA. Would you accept a mandate of the Chinese or Cuban vaccine, twice per year, for your whole family, for the whole foreseeable future?
> Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated.
You'd be very wrong. I remember very well that people were highly vocal against the H1N1 vaccine a decade ago and would've (rightfully so) lost their minds with mandates. Turned out the vaccine caused narcolepsy in kids[0], among other things. I never had that vaccine. My pregnant partner did (which turned out to be a lucky gamble).
> resisting wearing masks
Barring N95/FPP2+ masks it's mainly theater. It will be interesting to read all about this in a year or three once the heated political agendas have subsided.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_vaccin...
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1
I hope your recovery goes well and you truly have zero issues.
I do apologize if you took that as fear mongering, I have a nephew in a similar situation as you and we are keeping an eye on him just in case anything does come up, not that we expect anything will.
Best wishes to your nephew.
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Current-Research/Coronavirus-and-N...
One of the common long covid symptoms is "brain fog" though. Which I _think_ is probably metabolic or circulatory or something, but definitely affects the brain whatever the actual cause is.
It's mainly that you provided a personal anecdote in one direction and I found it prudent to provide one in the other direction - one that echoes everything we've seen so far, cases skyrocketing, hospitalization rates barely nudging.
That aside, hospitalizations are going up faster than they have at any point prior so not sure where your "barely nudging" comes from.
Statistically, people who are healthy and vaxxed developing severe symptoms from Omicron are outliers. That is no comfort to you, and I can assure you I know how you feel on that front when people like me tell you the stats. My mother-in-law suffered a very rare (statistically) adverse event from her second Pfizer shot in May, which killed her. She was in her early 60s, and healthy, but suffered cardiac arrest 3 hours after her second shot, in the midst of a fever. It was an exceedingly rare event, but it was no comfort to us to be told that.
Atleast here in slovenia, most of the mandates affect mostly the young and healthy... yes, theoretically neither 20yo bobby nor his grandpa can enter nightclubs, due to them being closed, but with such data, we could reopen nightclubs, let bobby party and do all the stupid stuff we were free to do at 20yo, and focus the effort at grandpa, so he gets vaccinated, gets the masks, has somone bring him food, so he doesnt have to go to the stores, subsidize a plan for a smartphone to encourage more videoconferencing instead of live visits, give out free tests at home, to detect the infection early, etc.
Both my wife and I (double vaxxed for 5 months, not boosted yet although were just about to do so) caught Omicron-flavoured Covid in the lead-up to Christmas and it wiped us out each for 2-3 days each, with a combination of fatigue, aches, fever, and violent coughing. Certainly worse than any cold or flu we've had up until that point.
I still have a pretty nasty cough and a throat inflammation.
Aren't anecdotes fun?
Anecdotes was precisely the reason why I posted it. See whom I'm replying to.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-setting...
I don't think 1% is "a small minority".
“7. Health/disability status is self-reported by study participants rather than clinically diagnosed. From February 2021 study participants were asked to exclude any symptoms related to COVID-19 when reporting their health/disability status. However, in practice it may be difficult for some participants to separate long COVID symptoms from unrelated exacerbation of pre-existing conditions, so these results should be treated with caution. “
I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.
Would I be of a similar opinion as parent if I had a similarly asymptomatic-to-mild case? I don't know for sure, but I would hope not, because I wouldn't want to draw conclusions or base policy from just my anecdotal experience.
Other replies to me appear needlessly partisan jibes: I neither said nor implied anything about continued lockdowns and any such inference is pure projection.
Many people get sick every year or every other year. Their illness is like you described: 2-3 days of being "knocked out" and about a week to fully recover.
It's not that I "desire" to go through that every year or two, it's just life. I expect that's why people responded incredulously to your post: for them, getting sick occasionally is normal.
Each is likely an endemic version of something that was far more serious and deadly historically. Now it’s a minor or major annoyanace that is part of normal life. i bet eradicating covid would fall into the same bucket S eradicating any of the others. Something to aspire towards, but until then something to simply accept as normal and move on with our lives.
It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
> It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
WWII lasted longer, and IIRC the US was under a restrictive civilian rationing regime that whole time.
I understand that people can get annoyed with various measures required for the public good, but that's not good reason to "move on" from whatever challenge that motivates them.
This is why it has a vaccine. That prevents it, prevent seriousness of symptoms, and deaths. (yet a large percent of the population doesn't get it, and so 50k us citizens die each year)
Fever for 4 days, horrible coughing, vomiting, barely able to get out of bed. Flu vaccines certainly provide some cross-immunity when the vax isn't matched to the strain, but not too much. That's what my doctor told me when I complained to her (when she told me I had tested positive for flu) that I'd gotten the annual flu vaccine the preceding October. Depending on the strain vs the vaccine for that year and how big of a mismatch it is, it can really whip your ass despite the vaccine. That being said, the flu shot is a good idea for anyone, and crucial for seniors.
No, it doesn't. I've never felt "wiped out" from a typical cold.
This whole thread is full of anecdotes from people implicitly claiming that their experience applies to everyone, when in reality everyone's going to have different experiences with everything from colds to covid. Unfortunately, the latter has a much higher prevalence of seriously-worse side-effects (long-haul, ageusia, anosmia, death, etc) compared to the former.
Omicron now is no different. Ended up taking 3 days off work and am now back to normal capacity.
I think it's a fair critique that some lockdown measures go too far (particularly those with low efficacy, or "safety theater"), but it's more helpful to take about specifics, rather than "lockdowns good" or "lockdowns bad".
At some point (and maybe it's now?), we'll need to shift our thinking from "pandemic" to "endemic". COVID is going to be with us from now on, and will start to look more like flu season (viruses tend to evolve to be less deadly over time). And I don't say that to trivialize it; COVID has given me much greater awareness of the impact of the seasonal flu on the elderly and the immuno-compromised.
The 'privileged' comment is 'I got COVID it was just like a cold, I can do this every year ... so there's no more pandemic'.
Conflating their personal anecdote with the range of outcomes.
For now, we're still in a pandemic. Hopefully it will get better.
But, personally, I would like to avoid getting Omicron, as long term effects are still unclear: does "long Omicron" exist, does it affect vaccinated, and if yes how common and severe is it. There are some recent news about long Covid: it could be micro-clots.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787741
Specifically, reporting long covid symptoms correlates with thinking you had covid, and not as much with actually having had covid.
Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t some real severe cases out there, but it’s probably not nearly as widespread as it seems.
So you have milder symptoms because you're vaxxed.
It also sounds like you're not aware of a) the vaning efficacy of the vaccine or b) how little it does against Omicron.
This one, omicron, seems to mostly infect nasal passages and upper respiratory tract. The next, maybe after spending 2 years spreading across all the weasels of upper winchester county, may affect the lungs again.
This is a lottery that's less fun to play...
(edited for clarity)
> This is a lottery that's less fun to play
How exactly do you propose not playing? Lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc. for life? We're eventually going to have to start treating Covid the same as we've always treated "the flu" and it definitely appears that once Omicron has run through the population, we'll have reached the time to do that.
There are a number of things going on in the world that fall into the "really bad" category of both thing and trend of thing.
There's space in between bland acceptance and incapacitating terror. At the very least have an honest, clear eyed view of where the risk bars are going, and it isn't in a good direction.
Very few places did lockdowns at any point so I wouldn’t expect that to start now, butthe ones which did were successful in breaking spread. It doesn’t need to be continuous, but it’s clearly effective for preventing huge spikes.
Similarly, we’d save lives and billions of dollars if we established the same social norms which some Asian countries have about wearing masks when you’re symptomatic. It doesn’t need anything like 100% compliance or time to be useful – we appear to have lost an entire strain of influenza this way.
This is some grade-a gaslighting, plenty of countries had long brutal lockdowns where no-one was allowed outside unless it was "essential".
> butthe ones which did were successful in breaking spread.
No. Many of those places had worse outcomes than places that didn't do any sort of lockdown.
(When I say lockdown I mean stay-at-home orders. Do you have a different definition?)
If you can't handle these things as a part of your life you're really not going to like what climate change brings to the relatively near future.
But you don't have to worry about arguing in forums, you've already won. Nobody respects lockdown, and never really did, even at the highest rate of infections I see people wearing masks beneath their noses, crammed next to people in airports. After omicron I can't imagine anyone caring at all even if we double our current death count.
Covid is here, it will stick around forever, it will probably be notably worse than the flu for years to come. But in a few more years that will seem like a quaint thing to worry about.
But immunity is analogue. A strong, specific, antibody response can prevent infection. A T-cell response can stop infection turning into severe illness and death. Variants can evade antibodies somewhat easily, but find it much harder to evade T-cells. Antibody levels wane in weeks or months (although memory B-cells remain), T-cells remain active for years or decades.
If you had COVID last winter, then there would be a good chance of you getting it again this winter, even if it was the exact same strain. But you'd be much less likely to die of it.
So when does the pandemic "end"? What is a "pandemic"? If tens of percent of the population are catching every winter, but few are dying, is that still a pandemic?
Can you give us some indication of how severe your symptoms are? Mostly we're hearing that if you've been vaccinated and/or you've had covid in the past that omicron is relatively mild.
Omicron is less dangerous than Delta. It's still dangerous.
The only unvaccinated person you know who has had it, has had it three times?
> hopefully without being lynched for asking the question
Somehow this is a sad reality of social media and the current 'situation'... asking anything is seen as "provocative", and there are many things happening that would require more rigid questioning and better answers.
I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.
My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.
My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.
The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.
The data is now this:
People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)
See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-mil...
FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.
> This is the first evidence to show us that the rate of reinfection with Omicron is high—3 times higher than Delta. In other words, infection-induced immunity is not doing a great job at stopping Omicron.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.
- vaccination is a risk reducer on severity of infection. Nobody said immunity; nobody said prevention.
- and on that point not getting into the hospital is important. From a management standpoint, we've got to insure demand for hospital resources does not dwarf those same resources. That's the key management function here.
What on earth? Yes they did, all along.
December 2020:
> Fauci Predicts U.S. Could See Signs Of Herd Immunity By Late March Or Early April
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...
> "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."
Talking about herd immunity is definitely saying immunity, and doesn't make sense unless the vaccine prevented transmission.
Then, May 2021:
> Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...
(I am vaccinated btw)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/covid-vaccines-tr... "Many scientists are reluctant to say with certainty that the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. [. . .] There should be more data within the next couple of months. Until then, precautionary measures like masking and distancing in the presence of unvaccinated people will remain important."
FWIW, it seems like those commentators who were actually right until Delta emerged. Looking at graph of Covid cases in the USA for example we were on track to low case levels until July, then the Delta variant began to break through in vaccinated individuals and the epidemic grew in size again.
Gotta compare 2021 to the the curves from 2020 though: It's the same shape with different magnitude. Looks more like that drop in the spring and early summer was because it's seasonal than anything else, which we misattributed to the vaccines.
With covid, it's just automatic, but you just need 1 foolish move between 2 people, and there's no server making sure only one person gets it at a time, it's totally a distributed network. And the timeout, instead of being 60 seconds, it's 2 maybe 3 weeks (perhaps a lot longer - we don't REALLY know).
The thought experiment here is that if we TRY to keep something alive that's actually kinda hard to and it lasts 3 months, how is covid EVER going to end?
Does anyone else still believe the shots prevent infection or transmission?
I think at this point, the likely endgame is endemic virus with tolerable consequences. Humanity probably isn't capable of the level of cooperation required to drive this virus to extinction (I'm guessing that would take a massive, coordinated, well-complied with vaccination campaign undertaken over just a couple months).
As far as I know previous immunity still protects against serious disease, even with the variants, so hopefully we'll see less deaths and hospital admissions.
- how long the immunity gained from having recovered from Omicron lasts
- how well that immunity protects against other current (and future) variants of covid
- what kind of new strains of covid appears in next several months / years that may replace Omicron
- how many people we are able to get vaccinated globally
- advances in new and better vaccines becoming available (complete with antiviral pills etc)
And probably quite a few other factors that weren't on top of my layman head...
- how much/long the media keeps the fear drum pounding
Wait. "Everyone can make their own decisions"? And those decisions are completely rational, not affected at all by what the media is saying? I would argue the complete opposite.
Why are you trying to bend the argument into hospital capacity? Is your argument that if hospital capacity is under threat then it's ok for the media and government to lie and instill baseless fear into people, solely as a means of a) scaring them into staying at home (to minimize the spread of the virus) and b) to demonize unvaccinated people?
One would think that transparency and honesty would work better than bullshitting people.
what you suggest simply will never be an effective strategy.
Doctors can also be incentivized to do rotations in the ER. My primary care physician many years ago used to do ER rotations as a sort of overtime. Inventivize with the right pay, more will do it. Granted this isn't a large labor supply, but it certainly could help.
Instead, what you see is a shrinking of the nurse labor supply by a few percentage points due to vaccination requirements. Pretty ridiculous to complain about lack of capacity when you force some of that because you refuse to officially recognize natural immunity as equal to vaccine derived immunity.
nurses and doctors are leaving due to the stress of a long term pandemic. are you asserting we can just force them back into labor? that's fairly dictatorial of you. it still doesn't change that we would only revert to original levels, it would not be a significant increase in supply.
'incentives' won't help. there simply isn't enough supply in aggregate. and they are not leaving because of a lack of pay they're leaving due to the stress of dealing with assholes on the daily. cash isn't going to fix that problem.
the only option left in such a scenario is literally mandating they return to work. which doesn't nothing be return you to initial workforce levels it doesn't increase capacity.
we're seeing this right now with the national guard 'mobilization' in some areas. they're literally doing nothing but sitting with patients and other menial tasks that don't require training. they're basically just in the way.
plenty of people in the 100-200k range take cuts in the 30-40k / year range to move to better work environments. so the idea you'll get doctors who generally make 200k+ would be willing to work in shitty conditions for a prolonged period is pretty bogus.
nurses you might be able to entice them to come back for 20-30k bumps, but its also unlikely.
even if your idea worked, it doesn't increase the supply. it just brings us back to predecline levels.
edit: in fact a clear example of your idea not working: paying people to get the vaccine. did jack shit to actual increase uptake.
> An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time
In no way has "rapid spread of infection disease across multiple continents" ended. The past few weeks should make that a bit more clear. Being vaccinated reduces the negative effects of infection, and may also reduce infectiousness and spread, but it didn't end the pandemic.
I mean... did we have a "cold pandemic" or a "flu pandemic" before 2020? I'm pretty sure most of the planet had a cold every winter, and we just lived with it. Same with the flu... risk-groups died, and noone bothered the young with it, we just called it "normal life".
> A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected individuals is not a pandemic.
The cold and flu are "stable" albeit seasonal. While we might expect that outcome for variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we're not there yet. A rapidly exploding number of infections is not a stable number of infected individuals.
At any rate, some people getting vaccinated and choosing to live as if the infections do not exist does not "end the pandemic."
somehow we failed to coordinate the back-to-normal in my region when the vaccines arrived. this seems like the next best opportunity to admit that we’re ready to lift restrictions, so here’s hoping we can keep the majority on board this time.
If delta or OG Covid didn’t do much about omicron, I don’t think we can assume omicron will do much about some future variant.
The only question here is, will there be lockdowns, mandates, masks and vaccine passports, or will we finally give up, focus on the risk groups, and let the young and healthy live their normal lives.
The possibility that a new variant arises that substantially evades both Delta and Omicron immunity.
But it will probably turn endemic after this. There won't be any virgin hosts anymore.
Two administrations, one from both parties. Same fed chair. Same people at the CDC and WHO. It’s not partisan. It’s institutional failure.
If viruses tended toward becoming more deadly as they became closer to being endemic, humanity (or any animal) would not have lasted very long.
Yes, welcome to the endemic. Covid is here to stay, it doesn't matter if 100% of the world were vaccinated tommrow, covid would not go away. It doesn't matter if you get the vaccination or not, in your life time you WILL get covid (just like the flu, no one escapes it, you typically get the flu about every decade or so regardless of shots).
We need to just accept this and move back to "old normal".
The only comparable virus is the flu, and the vaccine is equally shitty [0] as the covid vaccines are.
Death rates for young and (currently healthy) people are very very low (lower than traffic deaths in my country, much lower than suicides), and they are the most affected by the lockdowns. By reopening and focusing on risk groups we could finally start living normally again.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Effectivenes...
I expect that for the next year or two, boosters will be recommended as a yearly "flu shot" to give you a decent chance of being minimally affected if exposed. Omicron will continue to be the dominate strain, finding hosts in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. The difference will be that we will have a myriad tools at our disposal to prevent serious illness and treat it when it does happen.
My heart goes out to those impacted by containment strategies. I was talking with someone from NZ or AU (I forget), who hasn't been able to go home an see his wife in two Christmases.
Australia currently has a wildly exponential growth of cases and twice the number of daily cases/capita compared to Sweden, to take two countries at each end of the "containment" spectrum. And that's despite Australia being in the middle of summer, despite Australia being isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and despite Australia having more restrictions than Sweden right now.
It's all hubris. We have way less control over the spread than we like to think.
I think NZ and especially China are the only ones left. I think NZ has relaxed its restrictions about 2-3 months ago and to be honest I'm a little surprised they haven't yet followed Australia's path with the exponential number of Omicron cases, but imo the very big question remains China, I have no idea how they plan to handle this going forward.
Dictatorships usually make examples of individuals/groups/regions to make everyone else fall in line. The virus however doesn't give a shit about the wishes of authoritarian regimes, which is why making an example of a region or a city and forcing millions of people to stay indoors, doesn't stop the spread elsewhere. It's a virus, not a rebellion.
I'm assuming China has always had a low level spread that could be hidden, because their demographics make it a non-issue. However, I'm guessing Omicron is creating such massive spread that regional officials can't deny reality any longer, and the lockdowns are some kind of desperate last-ditch attempt to save face.
As I've said in other threads on this issue, it is very difficult to hide deaths on even a small scale. Bodies do not simply disappear, and even small numbers of deaths are easily discoverable by measuring economic output (and even air quality!) of the region.
China is being at least reletively honest in their reporting, and I think thats difficult for us westerners to believe because their numbers are so shockingly low. An effective containment strategy _is_ possible, and the west has utterly failed in that respect.
> An effective containment strategy _is_ possible
Not at any cost I'm comfortable with.
Suicides among kids and teenagers are up 20%, I'm sure those kids would disagree with you.
Deaths of despair, i.e. alcohol and drug-related deaths are up considerably. Do their deaths count?
Deaths among dementia patients and similar are up, because of the isolation. It's very important grandma doesn't die of covid, but apparently no-one cares if grandma dies of loneliness.
Cancer screenings, heart screenings, stroke care, all of that is on the backburner, which will cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the future.
School disruptions affect all kids, but lower-income kids are overwhelmingly affected by it, and them lagging behind translates directly into shorter lifespans for that group.
We understand that every policy needs a cost-benefit analysis, but somehow, for corona, we completely abandoned that line of thought and went on some hysterical bandwagon where absolutely no strategy is deemed to costly.
Every single comprehensive QALY analysis of lockdown policies show that their cost is horrendous compared to the benefits. We're happily, gleefully, sacrificing our young for the benefit of our elders, and yet if you point this out, you're somehow the callous, unfeeling, murderer. It's insane.
China has obviously succeeded in defeating COVID, and done so with none of these secondary deaths you're describing (look at excess mortality). All of these "secondary" deaths did not occur in countries that implemented effective containment strategies, why do you think that is?
The western strategy has resulted in these "secondary" deaths you're describing, as a result of people like yourself being unwilling to accept the effective containment is possible and worth the cost.
No.
According to National Health Commission report, more than 50% of adults are classified as overweight, and 16.4% are obese. [1]
Prevalence of diabetes is also over 10 %. [2]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55428530
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m997#:~:text=The%20preva....
Do you have a source for that? Most Australian states have little to no restrictions at the moment bar mask mandates indoors. If I googled correctly, Sweden only allows seated customers in bars, restaurants and events as well as limits to events?
https://www.covid-19.sa.gov.au/restrictions-and-responsibili...
The other restrictions are of course coming back, despite promises to the contrary:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2022/jan/07/...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-06/covid-restrictions-ti...
This entire thing is a huge inditement of police nanny states.
We're never getting a T-cell escape mutant that dramatically increases the risk of hospitalization/death in the vaccinated/recovered.
There's really very little to worry about variants if your vaxxed and boosted.
Experts still don't have any idea how intrinsically virulent Omicron is, and it may be every bit as intrinsically virulent as Delta was (there's lots of issues with the TMPRSS2 studies in mice, while the dominant effect is that Omicron is an escape mutant and is reinfecting and infecting the vaccinated).
The lower hospitalization rate of the Omicron wave can be explained entirely by human immunity. The properties of the virus are likely much less important than the headlines indicate, which suggests the the slow process of the human race building up immunity is going to grind on and future waves will be less and less effectively virulent (although it seems like human emotions are really attracted to the idea that the virus is changing to become less virulent and that seems to be driving emotional acceptance that the pandemic is winding down).
It's also the fact that, to put it bluntly, many of the people who were the most susceptible to be sent into ICU or to die because of Covid have already had that happen to them. Not sure if that scenario is included in the definition of "herd immunity", to be honest, just wanted to point that (cynical) truth out.
If a minor cold is enough to cripple our healthcare system, you have to wonder if maybe there is some other reason our hospitals aren't able(or willing) to go back to normal.
I spend thousands of dollars on health INSURANCE every year. If I go to the ER it still costs me over $2k. The last time I went to the ER, I didn't even see a doctor ONCE.
This is why anti-vaxxers and covid-deniers are such a big problem. They think that even if they are wrong, it only affects them, but it doesn't. If I get in a car accident tomorrow, there is a very real possibility that my own treatment will be delayed because the nearest hospital is overwhelmed with dying COVID patients.
The last time I went to the ER was prior to the pandemic… and it still cost over two thousand dollars after insurance. Insurance that I spent probably over 10k a year for.
Maybe Covid isn’t the issue. Maybe our infrastructure is.
If you think they aren’t laughing their arses to the bank over this then I dunno bud.
You really think that we can’t afford the equipment and staff to handle this? How much do you spend on health insurance every year? Your brother? Sister? Literally everyone around you? Why aren’t we pointing fingers at the hundreds of wasteful medical contractors hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars in this time of crisis? How much money do you think director level types and administrator level types deserve in times of catastrophe such as these, especially if my daughter can’t even see a doctor when she is sick?
Omicron is not the problem. We should be able to handle this.
It is probably more accurate to say it is the likely start of the transition between 'pandemic' and 'endemic' phase. We say endemic as it LOOKS like the gap between coronavirus immunity length to viral instability (number of changes) is longer than for influenza. (T-cell response still very strong, original SARS patients almost 2 decades later have cross immunity to SARS-Cov-2, Omicron immunity effective against delta, etc) That said - it is VERY unlikely to be eradicable at this point due to its ability to infect so many different species and circulate and breed in the wild (more so than even influenza).
So new variants down the line in the coming years/decades is more likely (not different than swine flu, bird flu, etc pandemic risks in the recent past). But, if longer term immunity holds up - none of these will have anywhere near the impact given the absence of billions of naive hosts to burn through.
So if we call the transition from pandemic to endemic the end (likely, yes) - then probably.
If omicron means we'll all get it in the next few months, and (for the 99.x% survivors) that means that covid is "just another cold/flu", we can stop with the "pandemic" (political), and live as we did before 2020. Old people will need vaccines and boosters and all that (as they did for the flu before 2020), and young people can finally live a normal life again.
In Europe they definitely will with increased surveillance and digital IDs that have proven to do nothing to stop covid (as initially portrayed), but that won't stop govs from pushing them onwards and dehumanising any group who doesn't want to comply with their coercive measures.
It's an interesting time for people who really value freedom and human rights.
Depends on if politicians believe they can lift restrictions without negatively reflecting their career or not. There's a lot of Twitter mobs out there promoting "extreme caution" that will tank your political career if you aren't catering enough to their caution-comfort-level.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...
Omicron is infecting fully vaccinated people and those with previous infection. In the early cases detected in SA, many had already had COVID and/or Delta.
It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.
If it’s largely immune to the vaccine and doesn’t produce antibodies against COVID/Delta, we might as well label it a new disease instead of a variant.
Luckily it seems to be incredibly mild. I wonder if we had such robust data on the common cold of it would look similar to Omicron.
Omicron infects those who are unboosted, and likely reinfects a lot of the population that is >6 months recovered from prior single infection.
It is all about the fact that Omicron infects people who already have T-cells and aren't immunologically naive. The way out of the pandemic is our memory B-cells and T-cells.
What does immunologically naive mean? And how do B-cells and T-cells help us get out of the pandemic?
Trying to learn as much as possible, thanks.
immunologically naive means that your body has no prior exposure to a virus (or its variants). basically it means it has NFC how to deal with it. so it basically has to brute force its way to a defense against the strain.
This is why you saw people with early covid cases having their immune system go haywire and a lot of the treatments for covid focused on dampening the immune system to prevent it from killing the patient.
once you've seen a virus and its variants a few times your body has 'remembers' strategies on how to fight the virus. and launches those strategies against it. sometimes depending on the mutations those strategies are less effective (omicron) and your body has to create new strategies.
B-cells and T-cells are how the body store and deploy these strategies.
Your body has intrinsic, innate and humoral defense mechanisms, along with circulating neutralizing antibodies.
Intrinsic and innate defenses are early and quick and children and young people have strong defenses there and they can shred viruses quickly (and sometimes so fast that people don't form any humoral memory to the infection). If you ever get a '24 hour flu' where you feel like you have a degree of fever and then it passes that may have been an aborted infection that was destroyed by your innate and/or intrinsic systems.
Neutralizing antibodies are what most people think of as "immunity" which is immunity against infection. Small amounts of neutralizing antibodies will bind to foreign particles that are circulating and hinder them from being able to bind to cellular receptors and cause infection to begin with. This is true sterilizing immunity, and if its good enough it is a perfect shield. The neutralizing antibodies though bind to specific sites on the proteins of the virus (about 20 for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2) and mutations at those sites can cause escape mutation variants (like Omicron). Neutralizing antibodies also tend to wane (probably because of autoimmune diseases that they could otherwise cause).
Once an infection has taken hold then you have intracellular virus and proteins. Those are chopped up by proteases inside the cell (in general proteins are often chopped up by the cell this goes on continuously) and those short protein segments are bound to a receptor called MHC-II which is then transported up to the cell surface and displayed on the surface of the cell. This is how cells signal what kinds of proteins they are "seeing" inside of them. There's a complicated system to distinguish between self-protein segments and foreign segments which I won't go into. Once the segments of the viral protein are displayed on the surface of the cell on MHC receptors that is a signal to other immune cells that there's something going wrong and the cell is either lysed and destroyed or dragged off to lymph nodes (by dendritic cells, which have nothing to do with nerve dendrites, but they looked kind of similar so got named that a long time ago).
Once in the lymph nodes the learning process happens and undifferentiated B-cell and T-cells are trained on the peptide and that leads to T-cells that can recognize the proteins. The fact that it is small slices of the protein and not the whole thing mean that there's actually many more segments that T-cells get trained on. There's a couple thousand T-cell epitopes in the virus, and they're overlapping and in many cases they're overlapping in conserved regions of the proteins where the virus likely cannot ever mutate without ceasing to be a virus. So T-cell antigenic escape will be impossible.
This process takes a lot of time though, and doesn't happen right away. There's also the process of hypermutation and affinity maturation which means that the whole humoral system looks a lot more like a bayesian spamfilter than a lock-and-key model. This is why giving a booster 6+ months after an initial shot(s) is effective at producing immune responses against variants that have mutations in the protein that the immune system is being trained on. You give the immune system "Viagra" as a string and it learns to identify "V14gr4" as well more or less.
Now the next time you get hit with the actual virus, even if its a variant, it may not be affected by neutralizing antibodies due to antigenic escape or waning immunity, but if you've got T-cells then they'll see those peptides being displayed by infected cells. Many or most of the peptides will be recognized as being exactly the same as the prior infection. Those T-cells will then either send out cries for help (CD4+ helper cells) and rally the troops, or else they'll directly lyse and destroy the infected cells (CD8+ cytotoxic lympocytes).
Because you've seen the virus before those T-cells have a huge headstart now and even though you don't have "immunity" in the sense that you've been infected, the severity is lower, because your body can identify the infected cells and immediately deal with them.
And one example of how we know that T-cells don't really wane and have considerable cross reactivity in the face of mutated proteins is the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. People that were born before 1957 were exposed to the H1 protein of the H1N1 strains that were circulating in humans from 1918 to 1957. That virus spent ~50 years mutating in pigs before hopping back into the human race, but the H1 protein in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic still was recognized by cross reactive T-cells in old people born before 1957 and that took the whole edge off of that pandemic. Everyone born before 1957 was effectively vaccinated (and probably boosted many many times against the 2009 pandemic). The H1 protein would have extremely mutated after 50 years of serial passage through probably billions of pigs, but conserved regions in the protein meant that the "spamfilter" was still trained on enough of it to give it a high score.
And that's the quick overview, there's a lot more.
There has been a study that suggests Omicron infection provides protection against previous variants. This correlates with data from the UK that suggests Omicron is displacing Delta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc (link to study in description).
And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare
I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation
Wishful thinking (that I hope comes true). Ebola got more lethal, not less.
This pandemic will inevitably end, after which Covid-19 may stay endemic, but Covid-19 becoming endemic and the pandemic ending aren't really the same thing and frankly aren't really causally related so to me it seems weird to express hope for the endemic to begin rather than the pandemic to end.
Anyway, we'll need to ride out this last wave first. I'd say hopefully last, but we may end up hoping it wasn't. Regardless let's hope it at least burns itself out in the process as opposed to smouldering for ever.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muller's_ratchet
Noteworthy exception in virology is Marek's Disease: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease
Not sure from where I got it, but the contagiousness of Omicron is impressive.
I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day).
I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms.
I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice.
[0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.
Thanks, I hate it. :-)
Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused.
Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one.
But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias!
For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave.
* Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.
So you’re the least ill you’ve ever been from anything but it’s also “a beast”?
A beast compared to what? Common colds in previous years? Previous influenza strains?
> As a malady it is fine with me but I am still having an eye on long covid…hoping for the best.
You got 3 shots, wear a mask (it sounds like outside), lord knows what else. And you’re still worried about long term side effects from a cold? Can you quantify your risk of serious side effects from this illness?
And fucking wearing mask doesnt have anything to do with long covid… Are you straight out of telegram or what ???
Okay let’s see your evidence of long term side effects and syndromes caused by Omicron. The variant was discovered Dec 20. Whatever you’re claiming is based on previous variants which are not in circulation.
> The vaccines dont reduce the risk of those two as good as the the other factors ….
Okay, how much do the shots reduce your risk of “long COVID”? Looking for quantifiable results from research, not your opinion.
> And wtf a cold… dude stop trolling its covid.
Uh literally quoting “the science”:
> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common.[
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
> And fucking wearing mask doesnt have anything to do with long covid…
Not my point, if you read more carefully. Can you quantify your risk of long term complications from a mild infection? How’s that compare to risk of car accident, sports injuries, cancer?
> Are you straight out of telegram or what ???
Is this supposed to be some kind of ad hominem attack? Yawn. I can’t pretend to care about your opinion of me. If you’re going to respond please focus on answering my questions.
If you are reading between the lines… congrats there is blank space. Btw aint you afraid that some cold could mix with hiv and go viral via telegram and sudenly you have covidaids?
And a cold aint covid … covid is the malady geniuos. Different strais of viruses. Are you for real ? I talked with many of you and can never figure out if you rly cant understand( apparantly you can read and write ..congrats first step to be a human) or if you are just trolling ?
And if this is a cold pleaaaasee get it :)
Use google… its not my job to do it for you
> Not my point, if you read more carefully. Can you quantify your risk of long term complications from a mild infection? How’s that compare to risk of car accident, sports injuries, cancer?
I read carefully and it was your point. And again usw google . Not my job
> Is this supposed to be some kind of ad hominem attack? Yawn. I can’t pretend to care about your opinion of me. If you’re going to respond please focus on answering my questions.
Yes it is. People like you aint indivuals. You are all the same bunch with exact the same opinion and the same way of misunderstanding things. Dude you are totaly transparent
> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common.[
Nice you can usw gooogle … do it again
What's transparent is that nothing you've said is based on facts or rationality, it's just regurgitated hysterical opinion. And since you've been nothing but a childish and frankly rude idiot I'm not going to engage with you any further. Hope your little cold gets better soon.
I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.
edit: Please don’t downvote the user, it was a relevant question and I only clarified my comment afterwards.
Even during the lockdown, a family friend of mine needed to go to a hospital for an unrelated issue, and that's when a nurse from there passed COVID19 to him. Then he passed COVID19 to his father. He was 35, no kids, didn't work in an office. Still got COVID19 and spread it with deadly results. Etc. etc.
Church, Weddings, Thanksgiving / Christmas / New Years, Birthday parties and other social events? Choir practice? Indoor sports like basketball or racketball? Gyms? Restaurants?
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There's a lot of social interactions between people when you start counting them up.
Certainly. But why is it inconvenient to people? We don't really discuss personal issues in the public space, so I'm forced to use my own examples.
My grandma is in her late 80s and soon will be 90. She's had brain cancer decades ago, recovered, but maybe that's finally catching up to her. Our family pretty much murmurs about it behind her back, but her sharp mind simply isn't as sharp as it used to be. Every year is a diminishing of her memory, her ability to focus, her ability to hold discussions and interact with us.
To the point where she's pretty much locked herself inside her own house (we're worried about her but she refuses to live with any of her children) in most situations.
So what does this have to do with parties? Well, parties are one of the only ways we can manage to draw her out of her house and interact with us.
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I can't imagine that I'm the only one who is dealing with the diminishing mental abilities of an elderly grandparent (or parent). But my grandma's extreme stubbornness and pride makes this entire exercise more difficult.
Now sure, maybe we do have to worry about COVID19 killing her. But on the other hand, her lack of socialization and isolationism is another issue that our family struggles to find a balance with. That certainly can't be healthy either, and arguably the social part takes priority at this point.
Furthermore: COVID19 has vaccines and booster-vaccines to mitigate that particular disease. But we don't really have a "Treatment" for the social isolation she's put herself into, or general aging issues as her mental state deteriorates over the near future.
Frankly, this is probably signs that she's on her last legs. Its something we will have to come to terms with as a family, but hosting parties where she can still see us (even in this state, before she gets worse) is a priority.
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Yes. Its "inconvenient" to cut out the yearly parties out of our life. And I'm sure other people have similar stories about why _THIS_ Thanksgiving / Christmas was like no other, and why it was very important to meet up again.
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Don't get me wrong. I'm largely pro-lockdown, and pro-mask, pro-vaccine. But you cannot underestimate the importance of social interactions or family, especially since we all are in different circumstances. Sickness and health changes the calculus in many ways.
I didn't share this story last year, because I felt like the lockdowns were a needed step (pre-vaccine). But this year, I'm speaking towards opening up again and relying upon the vaccine to keep us safe. Perhaps its two-faced for me to take different stances just one year apart, but things really have changed and pushed my calculus towards the other way. After losing Thanksgiving/Christmas 2020, people are aching to see family again. And 2021 has vaccines, dexamethasone, monoclonal antibodies and the Pfizer pill. We've cut the death rate by 80%+ on treatment alone and vaccines can cut it by 90%+.
2021 is just not the same year as 2020.
Realistically speaking, the party is going to be at a house of one of her children, or grand-children.
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An "outdoor" party these days is a closed tent anyway with heaters. Its practically an indoor party with the same air-flow issues except much much more expensive. Do you think I haven't looked into this?
That disease doesn't somehow make in-person interactions with family and friends unavoidable, though, when people don't have the disease. The fact that people with dementia requiring stimulation to stave off decline are also members of families doesn't magically make all interactions with family members medically necessary.
I generally agree with your conclusions about the change in circumstances, but I personally limit in-person social activities to a small circle of people who are also limiting in-person social activities precisely because I want to continue visiting my grandmother without killing her.
We're not all watching the same movie.
The issue, and this remains true today, is that hospital space is filling up fast (and did fill up in those states months ago).
A discussion must take place about balancing our individual social needs with the needs of our public health system. There was a train-derailment in Montana in 2021, and COVID19 filled up their hospitals so much that the injured needed to be driven 2+ hours away to look for hospital space / treatment.
Is that the kind of community you want to be a part of? Where your nearby doctors and nurses are not accepting any of the injured train passengers due to the overwhelming COVID19 case numbers?
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We definitely need to do our part as individuals to minimize the damage we cause to our hospital systems.
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There's something to be said that "Yes, this tradeoff is worthwhile but only for the end-of-year parties". Vs overwhelming your hospital space just to "own the libs" when no major parties / social events are even happening in the middle of August.
Me too, I think at this point further lockdowns would be akin to trying to stop a freight train with your shins: futile and extremely painful.
It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream".
I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.
- to what extent does recovering from Omicron prevent Delta?
- how long does that immunity last?
We probably are going to have to live with this, but I'm not sure many countries have caught up to the healthcare staffing implications of that.
If Omicron is reaching 100% prevalence in so many locations, I wonder if Delta will not be as much of a threat anymore? It seems like there haven't been any infections with older variants for a long time now.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34954396/
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2022/01/coronavirus-omi...
Different aspects of immunity seem to last different times. Antibodies fade over six months or so but T Cell immunity can last decades in general. Though obviously Omicron hasn't been around that long to check on.
His point was that nobody predicted delta, and nobody predicted omicron. There's no telling how serious the next variant will be (and arguably there's much greater chance of a variant given how many people are getting infected.)
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...
https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/china/xian-covid-outbreak-loc...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
> Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among unvaccinated individuals (Table 3). This indicates that the increased transmissibility of the Omicron VOC primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility. If this observation can be confirmed by independent studies, it has important ramifications for the understanding of the current challenges for control of the epidemic
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
Here are some links saying you can get both:
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/omicron-delta-en...
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1543522/can-you-...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...
How do you get infected with significant levels of cellular immunity? And does that mean the infection is less severe?
I have oversimplified this explanation to keep the comment short. If you'd like to really understand what's going on I recommend this panel discussion by a group of leading physicians; it's long but worth a listen.
Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.
https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-int...
Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.
why? RNA detected != active virus. e.g. in room temperature, virus can survive the maximum of 5 days (on plastic 3 days, cardboard 24h). It's an impossible vector of transmission.
One whole population group to study to get a better understanding of how bad this wave is is to look at the cruise line industry. Everyone has to get tested, and thus you are studying a whole population. According to a recent CDC report [1], between Nov 30 - Dec 14 of 2021, 162 cases were reported on cruise ships. Then the next two weeks 5013 cases were reported. This is roughly a 30x increase!
If you look at the NY Times infections chart[2], in the same time period, their 7 day average only went up like 3x. This is grossly under reporting of infections.
The sewage chart looks at a whole population and it is easy to see the increase in infection is more in the 30x scale than it is the 3x scale.
Be safe out there everybody. If you look at whole population groups, Covid is way more infectious than what a lot of news media outlets and their data would tell you.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/30/us-cdc-says-people-should-av... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
This sewage report is about a whole population and it is clear to see infections many more times higher than what a lot of news agencies are reporting.
The two most effective approaches are using neuroplasticity exercises to retrain the limbic system (cheap, but time consuming - an hour a day for 6 months): https://ansrewire.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/
Or doing microcurrent neurofeedback (costs ~$150 a session, do one session a week for a couple months): https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/
Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.
Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
[bear in mind, the hospitalisation number is not quite what it seems. It is "people in hospital who happen to have Covid", not "people who got Covid so bad they need to be hospitalised". So if you have asymptomatic Covid and a broken leg, you count for this purpose. Still, you do require the whole Covid-safe theatre, medical staff in PPE so it's also not like "meh doesn't matter"]
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...
Just wanted to check that since (at at least one London hospital) they're on different wards (as in, even discounting that obviously you don't want 'broken leg with covid' on a general 'broken bones' ward with neg/query patients) so seems odd to me they'd report data like that vs. those needing treatment for it.
So there's at least three categories: people with really bad Covid, people with Covid bad enough they can't be at home, but not (at the time) awful, and people who don't suffer with Covid at all but could infect others, and something else is wrong with them.
I think they are all challenging to the healthcare system in different ways. Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate.
> Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate.
Absolutely, and it's all too easy to make 'obvious' armchair policy..! I was just a bit surprised since my assumption would be it counted the relevant wards (if it were up to me, I think that would be the first three; only not the isolation-but-there-for-something-else).
It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.
If the rising part of the S-curve is steep, that means people get infected within a shorter timespan and a corresponding higher load on hospital beds and healthcare personnel, which is what we are trying to avoid with the lockdowns.
What am I missing?
Also, calling exponential growth a 'conspiracy theory' seems unnecessary
Sure, but those aren’t the only choices. Over the last 30 days the daily case average has increased by 500%. During that same time the daily average hospitalized has risen 100%.
And the test positivity rate has increased to almost 30%, which implies an almost comical undercount in actual cases.
The contagiousness and severity are diverging in an extraordinary way. We’re likely undercounting cases by 1/5 or 1/10th.
Rapid tests are perfectly fine and should be counted by health departments.
Case in point. My family of 4 all tested positive on rapid tests. 3/4 of us had symptoms. None of us received PCR tests because the next available appointments (other than a 6 hour wait at a state run testing center) were a week away.
Thats 4 people not counted. And we were part of an outbreak that included 3 other families that all tested positive via rapid tests.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
The Omicron variant R0 value appears to be somewhere in the 7 - 10 range.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
why long? The EcoAlliance's gain-of-function (with the "Human Subjects Included" checked) NIH grant for Wuhan started in 2014, the human-specific DNA modifications of the virus were described in the EcoAlliance's 2018 DARPA grant proposal, and in the end of 2019 - voila!
With regard to omicron - we may be also witnessing the continuation of the same magic of the fast "gain-of-function" by the virus :
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints.
This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease."
https://www.newsweek.com/how-dr-fauci-other-officials-withhe...
What's new to me though is how deep the involvement of US entities apparently was and how close to SARS-CoV-2 territory the whole endeavour came. So in this case, absence of evidence is definitely not evidence of absence.
Also that one of the drivers of shutting down the lab-leak theory was apparently commissioning the WIV to do GoF research! (Though I still wonder what all the other scientists supporting that editorial were doing.)
If those FOIA papers will be used for more investigations in the near future, thing should definitely become interesting.
However it is important as the WHO recommends to do way more to export vaccines to countries that need it. Not just developed countries to prevent the chance of new variants.
My understanding is that in many of those countries, the vaccine is readily available, but people don't want to take it for various reasons.
If we're worried about Omicron mutating to become more deadly, why aren't we worried about the other human coronaviruses doing the same? 229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1 that have been around for ages?
There's nothing magic about Omicron, its just a repsiratory virus thats relatively new to humans so there's not so much population immunity. And looks like we're rapidly getting exposed to it, so its about to lose its advantage.
They can only insert themselves into specific cells (acidic ones in lungs, nose, throat, stomach) and thus are respiratory viruses.
SARS-Cov-2 can insert into most cells of your body and loves the organs like the heart, brain, testes, lungs, etc.
It is airborne like a cold but can damage your brain and heart where a cold cannot.
Many viruses can attack multiple organs in the body if the infection is bad enough and the viral load is big enough to spread that far - e.g. see https://www.healthline.com/health/viremia
Fewer % hospitalizations, but you have a much larger population getting it in a shorter amount of time.
When hospitals get oveerwhelmed you're going to get a knock down effect on non-covid issues where medical attention is needed but cannot be provided.
It very much looks like Omnicron is an upper respiratory infection vs previous variants that are lower respiratory infections.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-...
> Professor Andrew Hayward, of University College London, earlier told Sky News that it is unlikely there will be a variant more severe than Omicron.
He said: "This one will be hard to outcompete... given how successful it is."
Professor Hayward added that for a "variant to stick", it needs to have "some advantage over the existing variant and that advantage needs to be really in terms of increased transmissibility or escape from immunity".
He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."
I thought the virus doesn't care about becoming more or less sever since its transmission capability is all that matters to it and symptoms are hidden (thus increasing transmission between individuals) in the first days of infection and that's what evolution is driving him to be: more transmissible.
The fact symptoms appear sooner than delta seems to be a step backward for the virus in terms of efficacy and it's compensated by being way way way more virulent.
What am I getting wrong here ?
Also:
Omicron could as well have been more severe (and the jury is still out on long covid anyway). If there's another variant less virulent but compensated by hiding symptoms longer... then this would take over omicron and this variant could as well be more severe.
Is that totally out of the realm of possibilities ?
My regular joe thinking tells me that we can only be sure of the direction it's going to take when spring comes. 2021 had 5 vocs, it's only the first days of January.
Something as infectious as Omicron but with better immune escape would presumably do very well, even once the Omicron waves pass.
https://www.vaccinestoday.eu/stories/what-is-r0/
Preliminary data on the Omicron variant indicates an R0 value in the 7 - 10 range. So SARS-CoV-2 might still have a little more room to evolve even higher contagiousness.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
So yes it's bad/dangerous in that hospitals may fill to overflowing and struggle to treat covid or non-covid patients, but not bad in that Omicron is directly killing more people than Delta et al.
The reason for this is Omicron replicates mainly in the upper respiratory areas and does not invade vital organs. This is also why its so contagious.
The Alberta active case rate looks like a vertical line [1], and that's even after recently switching mostly to take-home test kits that don't get reported in these numbers. In my group of friends, 6/7 tested with take-home kits.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/147886170257374003...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?count...
We know a lot of people who have had this experience in the last month. Most people seem to have had this cold or Covid recently.
Now, I am suspicious that something is going on here. I have a suspicion that the LFTs are not testing positive for relatively mild Omicron. The LFTs procedure here, which we followed, has been to only swab the nose (they changed it maybe over the summer?) but I have seen many anecdotal reports over the last week of people who tested negative (LFT) with just a nasal swab but positive if they swabbed their throats. This potentially ties in with reports that Omicron mostly affects the throat whereas Delta affects the back of the nose. I have seen no official studies.
It would not surprise me if we find out in a few weeks/months that nasal LFTs have a very high false negative rate with Omicron.
Edit:
Just found this about a small study suggesting exactly what I am suspicious of:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-o...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v...
I found it strange that I am boosted, masked, and sanitized, plus I am isolated as I am an unpaid carer for a family member with poor health and I managed to catch the bloody cold!
It seemed suspect to me as well but of course, anecdotal.
(0) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v...
Obviously this is very anecdotal and speculative, but like you said, I wonder if LFTs don't pick up this strain of the virus as well as previous, and if that is what is causing the numbers to be so high since I would imagine it is how most people test.
> Rapid tests do work with omicron. "But why are some people staying negative in the first days they have symptoms??" This is expected. Symptoms don't = contagious virus This is literally a reflection of the fact that vaccines are doing their job!
https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14720244576403947...
There's a nice diagram with additional information there, and further discussion on other possible factors contributing to the results we're seeing.
The cold is a minor annoyance to most people's immune system, as almost everyone has prior exposure to cold-causing viruses, but colds still manage to spread. We don't test obsessively or quarantine for "the cold."
If "Symptoms don't = contagious virus", how in the world is the virus spreading at such a blistering pace? Is Mina suggesting that literally everyone is getting this thing, including in highly vaccinated populations, by magic? Occam's razor, combined with basic knowledge about how respiratory viruses work, tells us that people who have symptoms are very likely contagious. They might also be contagious before noticeable symptoms arise, and as they subside.
As for viral loads, with Delta, research found that vaccinated individuals were capable of having viral loads as high as unvaccinated individuals[1]. Until there's data about the viral loads with Omicron, it seems dubious for Mina to suggest that the reports of rapid tests failing to pick up omicron infections are related to low viral loads.
Instead, Mina's 5th tweet is worth paying attention to:
https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14723880511462645...
There is a lot of chatter about how people are getting positive rapid tests when they swab their throats instead of their nasal passages. It's anecdotal at this point, but if we're going to engage in speculation, this seems a much more valid form of inquiry.
The vaccines are very effective at reducing the risk of hospitalization and death, and Omicron seems more mild to begin with. It is very effective at spreading in vaccinated populations, which isn't surprising given that the decreasing size of the SARS-CoV-2 naive population means that the virus is now under pressure to select for immune escape. It's strange to me that a "Epidemiologist, Immunologist, Physician" would tweet as if he didn't know this.
Official guidence:
> There are different tests you can get to check if you have coronavirus (COVID-19). The test you need depends on why you're getting tested.
> The 2 main tests are:
> PCR tests – mainly for people with symptoms, they're sent to a lab to be checked
> rapid lateral flow tests – only for people who do not have symptoms, they give a quick result using a device similar to a pregnancy test
> Both tests are free.
Source: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/testing/g...
At least when I caught Delta I had a sore throat and a runny nose to start. That was it for a couple of days.
There was an outbreak in my children's school so the family went to get tested.
It was only after that I got a cough and fever (and positive result). It wasn't until about day five I noticed I couldn't smell.
Public health where I'm at says basically everything is a possible Coronavirus symptom. They list headache, sore throat, runny/stuffy nose, congestion, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting and/or diarrhea, inability to smell, and pink eye.
Before getting the results I had assumed this was the mutation everyone would get as we leave the pandemic with a natural immunity to this weak strain.
It does seem like that past month or so I've been hearing constant sniffling, coughing, and sneezing as I walk around the neighborhood.
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)
You overestimate our abilities to make viruses that do what we want, let alone to make viruses that do what we want and won't evolve into viruses that do what we don't want after being released into the wild.
This is also basically saying "can't we make a transmissible vaccine", and as much as I like vaccine mandates, I think there would be significant ethical issues with that.
So yeah I'd put it in a 'last ditch Hail Mary to save the world' type of plan...
But, I think that's not actually the case. Omicron infection does provide some immunity against Delta. See this preliminary report from South Africa, for example: https://www.ahri.org/omicron-infection-enhances-neutralising...
I'm not an expert (so take this next part with a very large grain of salt), but I would guess that someone with an active Omicron infection (and so swarming with antibodies) would get the biggest immunity boost against Delta. So if Omicron is everywhere, Delta runs out of infectable hosts. In principle, it could even go extinct - if that were to happen, it wouldn't matter so much if Omicron-induced immunity wanes, there would be no Delta left once the shields are down.
The growth of a single delta infection: 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64
Versus a single omicron infection: 1 -> 3 -> 9 -> 27 -> 81 -> 243 -> 729
Omicron started out as 50% of the cases and over 6 reinfection cycles became 90% of the cases. Delta just can't keep up. These are made up numbers but that is the general idea.
Omicron is basically a self-administering vaccine that is preventing Delta from spreading as easily.
BUT, it is so elegant that you just provided fuel for the new conspiracy theory of how government forced us to get vaccinated by creating this crazy new variant in a lab that would essentially spread the vaccine without our permission. Just waiting for that to start bubbling up from the fringes ;)
[edit] I think this is where I heard that. Feel free to judge for yourself how reliable the source is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc
In two weeks we'll find out if the calculus of lower death rate x higher case count means anything, but even if it turns out to be a complete disaster with record deaths, I just don't see anyone caring.
Pandemic is done after omicron no matter what. We already largely ignore deaths from climate change (which depending on your calculations can easily be as high globally as covid), we don't even speculate on deaths from environmental pollution. Covid is just another environmental hazard that we will accept like any other.
Even if we are a space faring civilization, these people will make it uncool to “pollute” space or would be against fusion power if we are able. I can already see progressives against SpaceX.
No optimism for you!
This is a weird observation to make. Optimism is by far the dominant ideology in our society and has been for well over 300 or so years.
Even currently when you browse mainstream media news postings the vast majority of the articles focus on how mild omicron is and how people should get to back to work.
I'll agree that the media makes plenty of money pedaling anxiety but real pessimism is nearly forbidden in everything from mainstream media to academic philosophy (seriously, Schopenhauer is basically it and he's much more of a buddhist than a true pessimist, the majority of German pessimist thinker remain untranslated in English).
Reacting to any observation of concerning data as "against optimism!" speaks more to a prevalence of hard denial than the rise of true pessimism.
How does this contradict optimism? They're doing these things because they believe this will lead to a brighter, better future. Just because they disagree with your path to get there doesn't mean they are pessimists.
They don't want a brighter future. That's the message I am getting. In some ways that's pessimism, no?
One more anecdote - I had a someone from work come over to help me for moving furniture. He goes "Why do you want to have kids? Do you really want to bring them into this world?". It's this pervasive sense of pessimissm that emanates from this culture. I am pretty convinced.
If you have to present data to a user, please read a book by Edward Tufte first. His books will change your entire perspective, e.g.
However it does seem to be the case that omicron is taking over in Colorado USA...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
Letting the original run freely would have likely cost at least 1% of the population, plus the long covid, lack of treatment for other conditions etc.
Would we rather have a widespread epidemic we know less about and can control or a less deadly one we have treatments for, but have limited control over? It's hard to say. It'll be interesting to see what happens with omicron in China where they're trying their hardest to control it.
Is it pure luck that Omicron is more transmissible but apparently less severe than Delta? What is to stop the next variant being more transmissible than Omicron but 10 times more deadly?
I know news outlets are really bad for clickbait titles, but I read yesterday that a new variant was detected in South France in the last few days? When will the carnival end and what does it mean?
If it’s good at that, it is so transmissible that quickly everyone will get it (the fabled “herd immunity”) and new variants, unless they break the mould, won’t have a large enough population of o sustain themselves in.
Otherwise, maybe we’ll enter into some kind of equilibrium, where there’s enough of not-terrible Omicron to keep everyone “topped up”, equivalent to permanently high vaccination levels.
Or, none of our happens and as you say, the next variant is more transmissible and more deadly, and we’re screwed again.
Re France, new variants pop up all the time, if it’s the same one I read about, there’s no indication that it’s special right now so for now I’d say clickbait.
That is, Omicron is mild so people likely didn't change their behavior too much. If you saw a lot of people around you going to the hospital, you would likely stop going out so much. (Some people knew many people going to the hospital during the pandemic; others saw none for years. The infection was very unevenly distributed. On HN I expect most people are remote workers and know few people getting infected.)
I doubt that is true though. Maybe some of the people who now have Omicron would have gotten Delta later on? I don't see how one variant can truly extinguish another variant otherwise. But I am hoping someone here knows better than me.
I read someone in Israel got `flurona`, flu + covid (https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-fir...).
Delta did pretty much eliminate prior variants in many parts of the world.
Antibodies (and b-cells and t-cells) for Delta work ok enough against Omicron, and vice-versa. Since Omicron is spreading so fast, it is able to get to more bodies faster than Delta, so Delta has no where to go. Delta did the same to previous variants.
Sigh
My gut is that the answer would be yes because this variant targets children more effectively.
I wonder if it is possible for a virus to wipe itself out by spreading so quickly that it ends up with very few left to infect, assuming it doesn't mutate enough in time.
Are they buying Chinese masks for the kids? Or is there an American "for kids" N95 standard that creates a name collision with the Chinese KN95 standard?
https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ lists small-size KN95s from China and an uncertified mask from an N95 manufacturer.
It is going to happen. Exactly. 99.78% to be exact.
Oh, great. Okay, so it’s not 100%.
Well, scientists never like to say 100%.
But it Florida and the South had a high degree of immunity to delta even pre omicron.
This would push their winter peaks back as acquired immunity would fade at a later point.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching
https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1
The first one is a bit more user-friendly, the second one goes more in-depth into mechanics and research, but neither peddle fear or moralism. There is actually quite a bit of positive news lately:
Omicron uses two different ways to enter cells. This is part of why it's so transmissible, but it's also why it is less severe: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-differ...
Omicron generates some immunity for Delta, so it is likely to displace Delta entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc
Most Omicron hospitalization are accidental so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI