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.
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.
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-...
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...
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.
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...
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/
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.
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.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'd call that pretty scary