Or am I missing something?
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?
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.
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-setting...
I don't think 1% is "a small minority".
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.
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.
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.
Anecdotes was precisely the reason why I posted it. See whom I'm replying to.
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.
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.
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
"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)
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.
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.
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.
Also, see most of South Africa.
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.
The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?
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).
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
> 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.
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...
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...
Does anyone else still believe the shots prevent infection or transmission?
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.
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".
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.
This entire thing is a huge inditement of police nanny states.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.