> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide.
No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all.
Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted)
Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence.
That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.
The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection. The story has always been that it reduces symptoms and hospitalization, so there are plenty of opportunities for the disease to get “tickets” in the evolution lottery. Between that, the animal reservoirs (COVID can spread to different species), and the millions of people in undeveloped countries who will never get a vax, COVID was guaranteed to mutate no matter what the public policy. Letting it rip is less a strategy and more an acknowledgement of reality.
> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.
A lot of people believed they were. I've spent some time arguing with people that the punishments for not taking the vaccine were too extreme, and that government-supported firing of people from their jobs was a bad idea.
It was extremely common for people to argue that the vaccine would cut down on transmission (which is basically saying infection) and end the pandemic. Without that pillar it gets quite hard to justify the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Australia. Not sure about the rest of the world but I assume there is a similar story.
this is why i was, and continue to be, against the various vaccine mandates. My employer said to me "upload your vax card or get an exemption else be fired". It was a bridge too far for me and I submitted for an exemption request on grounds of personal conscious. However, a couple weeks later we get another email that says if your exemption request is denied you are fired. I could have taken a moral stand but i have a wife + 2 kids and a MIL dependent on my income and I decided it wasn't worth it. I ended up canceling my request and uploading my vax card.
In the US the politicians know a law mandating the vaccine is a non-starter. So, instead, they encouraged and supported employers threatening their employees. I guess it's ironic that everyone is quitting everywhere anyway.
Who cares about the advertising? The data is in, and the vaccines do both - they decrease your chance to be infected and they make symptoms much more mild if you are infected. The combination of factors is why hospitalisation rates in highly vaccinated countries plummeted.
Or at least they did until omicron. Unfortunately 2 doses of the existing vaccines are pretty ineffective against omicron. 3 doses make the vaccines work better - but I’m honestly a little concerned.
I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?
EDIT:
To be clear I already had COVID and didn't have any serious symptoms so the argument about a hospital bed doesn't necessarily apply to me. Beyond that I actually got vaccinated, my question centers around the disparity of treatment we are giving individuals who are vaxxed and those who are not if both are capable of spreading. Further it brings in the question of vaccine mandates if they are much less effective then we were led to believe.
> I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?
Why are you (and others) thinking that since vaccines aren't 100% effective it doesn't help protecting other people ?
What kind of dissonance cognitive gets you there ?
Why are you blind to the fact that a vaccine that mostly works still help reducing infections and why do you equate that to "vaccines don't work to protect others (since some vaccinated people can still infect others) so I shouldn't get vaccinated" ?
How come you are working from a yes/no, full-or-nothing angle ?
A glass of water won't 100% quench your thirst when you haven't drunk in a long time so you won't take it ?
If you're vaccinated and become infected, you will have less of a viral load, and thus will spread less viral particles to others. The duration of infection will also be much shorter, thus lessening the time you can spread the infection to others. The vaccine also prevents some, but not all, infections in the first place.
You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.
This isn’t true, and the lack of testing during the phase 3 trials to see if there were non-symptomatic cases was a deliberate design choice to avoid answering that question.
I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.
> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.
In the USA? Yes, they were. There was no mention of a future need for boosters. There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
Literally everything I read about vaccine efficacy said that the metrics they tracked were about reducing the incidence of symptoms and serious disease. They didn't even test people in the clinical trials for COVID unless they started showing symptoms.
Now, certainly, some media outlets may have been irresponsibly or ignorantly misinterpreting all this and pushing the narrative that it would make everyone immune. But that's not the CDC or WHO's fault.
> There was no mention of a future need for boosters.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Things change.
> There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
You must have been reading some really watered-down news, and not actually reading what public health officials were saying.
the vaccines may not have been advertised as that, since the evidence during development for that was marginal. but recent evidence suggests that it does prevent infection. unfortunately, less true with omicron.
The vaccine was initially sold as the tool to end the pandemic and get life
back to 'normal'. The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine
and keep profits from sinking.
They could have ended the wildtype pandemic. As soon as delta appeared it was impossible. They have 90% efficiency at best and you need 84% of all people protected to stop delta (1-1/R0 for R0=6). It's impossible to get such high vax rate.
They pretty much did end the Delta pandemic in the Bay Area. We had a minor spike up and then it subsided without any major restrictions or strain on the healthcare system. Vaccination rates are 95%+ where I am, so 0.95 * 0.9 = 0.855 and it was still over the herd immunity threshold.
It was kinda-possible to return to normality with delta though. The entire EU is above 70% of the total population, with some countries above 80%. And of the unvaccinated, most are children who are less susceptible in the first place.
But with Omicron, it's literally like we're back to March 2020. Norway (with 81% vaccination rate) went from normality to full lockdown in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's coming everywhere else during the next month or so.
If omicron causes lockdowns again than this will literally happen every winter. Vaccines were the end state. There is nothing left to do but accept the risks and move on with life.
People scared about hospital capacity should be asking strong questions to their politicians about why they squandered 2 years of peoples short life with zero new capacity.
The public shouldn’t shoulder the failures of politicians nor these “experts”.
> The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine and keep profits from sinking.
The narrative may have evolved but that was more due to the virus evolving rather than some conspiracy driven by Pfizer and Moderna to sell more shots. More people being vaccinated benefits everyone, not just the pharmaceutical companies, and saying otherwise is a bit paranoid.
The problem is that (higher) exponential growth will cause many more hospitalizations to happen in a much shorter time interval. That can make the wave more deadly even if the virus is somewhat milder.
You're missing the point. If Delta kills, say, a million people, and Omicron only kills half a million people, but Omicron kills that halved amount in, say, 1/10th the time, Omicron is more likely to lead to overwhelmed hospitals.
That would make sense but been the originally strains did not overwhelm hospitals. New York has the highest and craziest number of cases and deaths at the beginning and didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds. Hospitals did not run out of beds and now the biggest problem is running out of staff, the same as every industry. At our local hospital all of the nurses quit for better, higher paying jobs. We’re running at less hospital labor than even pre pandemic, aren’t building new hospitals, and the highest peaks in cases and deaths were while the strictest lockdowns and mask mandates were already in place. There is complete fear overload and yet all attempts at preventing spread, even vaccines, have failed. They reduce symptoms but do not stop the spread. That’s how contagious this virus is, without any symptoms whatsoever people are spreading the virus, even with masks on, and limits on how close they can be to people. We now have vaccines, we have even pills that have been approved, we also know healthy lifestyle fights against it, yet we are still in a 2 year long “state of emergency.” Letting it rip through is not an option we can choose, it will happen regardless of what we do.
> But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
If the emergency and need was that bad they would have absolutely figured out simple logistics to get people on a ship. The fact is most people were told go home and wait it out and are still told that and that is the treatment most people receive. There is no point in continuing our state of emergency when our emergency services are not and never were at risk. Every single lockdown and mask measure put in place has had no significant impact on the spread of the virus. It is that contagious.
> New York has the highest and craziest number of cases and deaths at the beginning and didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds
The ships weren't for COVID patients, they were for non-COVID cases so that hospitals could focus on the overflow of COVID patients that they were better equipped to handle. Turns out that at the beginning of a global pandemic, not a lot people opted to go to the hospital even if they needed to because of fear of infection.
Given that the South African study discussed in this Washington Post article included 78k people, none of whom died if the above Reuters article is correct, doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
I know deaths lag cases. I mentioned just the cases in the south African study because those are the earliest cases we have. None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec.
This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases of Omicron from 15 November 2021 to 7 December 2021 (source: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room). At the time the Reuters article was published we were 6 days after even the most recently reported of those South African cases.
I wasn't trying to present the global denominator - that is far higher than 78,000 since it includes all countries, not just the 78k reported in the South African country.
Pretty much every estimate of exponential growth has turned out to be logarithmic. Which makes sense. That’s how % of new nodes reached in a random walk through a graph works.
And the next paragraph says "Britain gave no details on the death other than the person had been diagnosed in hospital."
However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.
If the person was hit by a bus or died from a cause other than Omicron then that would strengthen the point I was making in the post you replied to which was
>>doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
> Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
No it’s not. Contagion spread is logarithmic, and has obvious upper bounds. E.g. about a third of the us has gotten Covid. 5x contagious does not give you 166% of the population infected. Nor does it give you 100%. Probably not even 90%. I would bet no more than 50% over the next year.
Half as deadly on the other hand is a big deal. It’s not just deaths, it’s also hospitalizations. If you imagine the bell curve of outcomes, the deaths are the small tail on the right and the hospitalizations are the fatter bit on the right. If you get to move everything to the left a bit, you remove the biggest chunk of the population from getting hospitalized in the first place.
there really can't be an "exponential" increase in the number of cases, whatever that means, given that there's a hard upper bound which is the number of hosts.
While technically correct, you and I both know what they meant by exponential. Sure, there's a limit, but if we're looking at function that is exponential until it reaches an inflection point where there's simply less hosts to infect than possible...
> Sure, there's a limit, but if we're looking at function that is exponential until it reaches an inflection point where there's simply less hosts to infect than possible...
What do you think I meant by this? Do you think I believe that the rate of infection will keep going up literally exponentially until it hits 7 billion then turn flat, or do you think that by my usage of 'inflection point' maybe I had more nuance than that?
In a math classroom, you are right. But when we're in a context of talking about the disease on an internet forum, you are being needlessly pedantic and extremely nitpick-y if you expect people to describe the ways infections grows as "similar to a sigmoid function" rathan than the well-understood and extremely common "exponential growth" term.
I don’t really care if you say sigmoid when you mean exponential, my point is that both of those are wrong. People shudder in fear of the phrase “exponential” but disease does not spread exponentially. It never does. That’s a laymen fairy tail and it does a great deal of harm in understanding the disease.
Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
>disease does not spread exponentially. It never does. That’s a laymen fairy tail and it does a great deal of harm in understanding the disease.
>Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
Well, in typical Dunning-Krüger fashion you're lecturing us laymen about the wrong use of "exponential", but it seems that you are the layman when it comes to epidemiology modelling.
Diseases of course spread in an initially exponential phase, not logarithmically as you boldly claim in another comment.
A brief initial exponential phase that doesn’t explain the average state of the system is a poor mental model.
Epidemiologists do frequently use exponential growth in discussions of theoretical spreading, but they are not correct. It does not fucking matter. They’re just wrong. Is the long term spread of a disease exponential. No. We can say this with 100% confidence. Why? Because they do not increase exponentially over time. They QUICKLY hit ceilings and inflection points.
This is the problem. If you call a system exponential because it looks like that at the beginning, your estimates of the middle and end will be hugely off. Massively wrong.
It is obviously apparent looking at Covid that it does not spread exponentially. The impact of this understanding is enormous. In an exponential model, a virus that is twice as infectious could be expected to infect 4x as many people over the same period. If the model is logarithmic, twice as infectious will likely result in LESS THAN TWICE the number of people infected.
Scary predictions that a small increase in spreading will exponentially increase the number of infected people do not hold up against observed real world data. We should be cheering on a more spreadable but less deadly disease. Scale matters, of course, but we aren’t seeing anything like that.
If you want to come back to this in one year and check to see if omicron infected even twice the number of people that delta did over the same time period that’s a bet I’d surely take.
Not the original commenter and agree with your sentiment.
That said, from what we know about random graph models, once the transmission rate passes a certain threshold, the cumulative number of eventually infected individuals will NOT scale exponentially as the transmission rate increases.
You're speaking about initial growth rate though, not convergent size of the once-infected population, which is definitely exponential and relevant if you care about minimizing simultaneous hospitalizations.
Look, no need to be pedantic about this : the only thing that counts here is whether it's still in the initial exponential phase by the time we hit maximum hospital capacity. It seems likely.
Natural immunity is the ONLY way back to a sane planet. It's time you take a step back, look at what happened for two years now, and realize we don't need this insanity anymore.
Given how quickly the virus can infect people and put them in the hospital if unchecked by masking/social distancing/etc. and vaccines, just letting everyone get infected would rapidly overwhelm our health care system and cause a lot of deaths that could have been prevented.
If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death toll would likely be much higher than what we'll probably end up with when all this is actually over, given our current path.
I'm not thrilled with how the past two years have gone, but it could have been much, much worse. It could also have been much better, if it weren't for people using the virus to score political points.
Even with a mix of vaccines and natural immunity, I don't think we can rely on natural immunity to solve this. That just doesn't pass the smell test.
The world “experts” clearly didn’t do anything at all these last two years if they are still freaking out about “healthcare collapse”.
There is zero excuse to push lockdowns, masks or any of that nonsense at this point to “protect healthcare”. Healthcare should have been “protected” by now if this is supposed to be a normal thing
>Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear training running full steam.
Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis.
If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language.
The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.
The evidence of the past year or two suggests otherwise.
For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!"
There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!"
Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
>For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
This hasn't been my experience, in fact the British government's SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) was advising the government to lean on the press in order to increase 'the perceived level of personal threat' early in the pandemic[1]. I really do think the use of behavioural psychology to encourage compliance with government policy is one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the pandemic that future historians will correctly give more importance to than we did at the time. In all honesty this isn't so much a criticism of how the British government acted during the pandemic but how it acts in general. This institutional bent towards the manipulative is partially what led us into the unmitigated disaster that is the War on Terror in my opinion, consent for which largely stemmed from a state of fear among the general public made worse by poor journalistic norms.
>Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
I've not seen a single bit of serious journalism along those lines, it's either been 'COVID is going to kill us all and it's the plaguebearing hordes of the unvaccinated who are to blame' or 'The government is turning totalitarian and it's the fault of out-of-touch bureaucrats that need to be removed' (the article I linked is very much a member of that species). I've come across very little in the way of sober analysis, almost every piece of journalism I've come across on the topic carries some kind of moral judgement against $group in it. The point I'm making is that moral judgement sells and feels good to dole out to people you don't like, but it also robs us of a little humanity every time we do it.
If they’re used correctly, P95 and P100 face masks can reduce the likelihood of being exposed to coronavirus by blocking contaminated air particles. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises against people in the US using face masks because most people who aren’t trained medical professionals may not know how to fit them properly, and the risk of exposure in the US is so low to begin with.
But at the time the risk was still small, because the virus was mostly not in the US yet. Article doesn't say the risk will remain small in the future, does it?
Mine had. Not less than 24hours before the story emerged. Which result in 2 things: loss of trust in public authorities public faces ("omicron is a christmas gift !") and loss of trust in the scientific public faces ("omicron may be milder").
it’s worth always keeping in mind that the only dichotomy that matters in political economies is that between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else, not left-right, black-white, east-west, socialist-capitalist, or anything else. it’s been this way for all of human history past and will likely be so for the rest of it too. that’s a sober position to take, not a cynical one, as some might argue. the more dynamic our political and economic engines are, the better for the general welfare (obviously at the extreme this breaks down, but we’re not in danger of that extreme any time soon, if ever).
masks provide no added protection in most common situations where they’re used, but provide much political leverage, which is why they’re popular. same with (non-sterilizing) vaccine mandates and other arbitrary public restrictions. these are political wedges, not effective public health measures. if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status. we’d also be policing private behavior (family/social gatherings) much more invasively, rather than public behavior (grocery stores and restaurants).
Your second paragraph assumes our governments have the means to do that. They don't. Which breaks the logic of your conclusion. And masks do add protection. Their political leverage is null. What is gained by authorities ? There's no advantages.
> if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status.
Ww are worried. Infection status is considered. Vaccination status is considered. You are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to minimize the covid problem.
You can fight reality with logic and interpretations and a different philosophical approach of the situation but facts don't care. Hospitals are regularly overwhelmed, people are dying when they shouldn't and the virus doesn't care about our psychotic or neurotic bouts. We know that if we do nothing it gets worse real fast.
Of course there's a political advantage. It's something that forces everybody to visibly declare an affiliation with a side at all times in public. That will always be used for political advantage.
What nonsense the only ones that have made masks political is the right-wingers of the world for whatever convoluted "freedom" reasons they have come up with.
I don't wear a mask because of my political beliefs. I wear a mask due to the abundance of evidence that it helps prevent transmission. If you assume my political affiliation from that not only would you be wrong but you know what they say about assuming.
> It's something that forces everybody to visibly declare an affiliation with a side at all times in public.
No. Forcing people to wear a police badge or a yellow star or a hijab or a a beard in some places would fit that outlook but the first reason to wear a mask is a medical/prophylactic one. The fact some people (right or left) decided to associate that with political beliefs is another matter that has nothing to do with the inherent advantages that wearing a mask provides in some occasions.
you are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to maximize the covid problem.
you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid. the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them. we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
> you are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to maximize the covid problem.
You are trying a weird (and childish may I add) apparent mirror strategy but subtly adding twist of your own making that weren't there to drive your point that Covid is not a problem:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Fixed:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged.
No need to get all conspiracy on that one.
> you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid.
They are overwhelmed and they shouldn't and they weren't 2 years ago. It'd be very weird that all around the world the hospital infrastructure just happened to show their limits at the same time and that it'd have nothing to do with the current pandemic but only with greed (I suppose you refer to the impoverishment of public hospitals). Occam's razor and all that.
Would you please wear a mask and get a vaccine or keep your distance a bit if you don't want/can't ? Thank you.
> the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them.
So what if they have a comorbidity ? It's still happening. There's a strong underlying current in anti-* that suggest to let people die and let selection plays its game. Are you advocating for that ?
Unfortunately for your weak ass arguments the virus does care about masking in the sense that it hinders its efforts to infect us. Vaccination is also shown to work.
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Ah yes, the media and the politics are manufacturing a crisis. Media do it to make money (or something) and politicians to their benefit (whatever that is).
You rather believe in a pharma-political conspiracy to manufacture a global pandemic than face the fact life is unfair and unpredictable ? You rather believe that behind the shadows there's someone that is pulling the strings over all this for their own political or financial gains because then it would make the world less scary, less unjust ? I am sorry, this is not how the world works. Things are fucked up and it's not fair and it's not (y)our fault but it is what it is.
I was with you for the first paragraph, but the second makes a number of concrete statements about the virus that are contrary to what I've heard elsewhere, so I'd second the ask for sources.
"the only dichotomy that matters in political economies is that between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else"
I always think of this as putting on different pairs of glasses to see the world through different lenses. That is one lens. left-right is another lens.
There is no "the only lens that matters". There are many lenses which have different degrees of predictive power depending on what you are observing. You don't use a microscope to look at the stars.
left-right is the worst of political dichotomies. it provides no purpose other than to arbitrarily divide the world into good vs. bad from the perspective of the viewer. that’s meant to solely benefit politicians, not provide any clarity, because it collapses the acceptable political narratives down into a palatably small set from which the politician can form a base. in short, it’s pure bullshit.
The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.
>The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune
The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild.
From today:
> lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference.
One of the issues of fast spread is that hospitalizations and deaths lag behind infections for a few weeks.
If you don't correct for it, it's easy to see "10x as many cases but few deaths" just because cases went up so quickly that deaths didn't start yet. Of course, this can be corrected for, and I'd expect a good study to do so - but I would NOT trust a typical news article to make the distinction, nor would I trust it to skip the temptation to misinterpret the study for a more interesting headline.
The last paragraph of the WaPo article we are all commenting on:
“South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection,” she said. “We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.”
https://covidestim.org/ provides estimates of the percentage of previously infected individuals by US state. I happen to be in Massachusetts, for which they estimate around 50% previously infected, with error bars. So a bit lower than South Africa, but not too far in the big scheme of things.
The UK provides some estimates of seroprevalence in blood donors (thus a skewed sample):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-... (Figure 3). These estimates aren't quite what you are looking for, but one test is sensitive to previous infection and estimates 20% previously infected, whereas another test is sensitive to (infection OR vaccine) and estimates ~100%. Basically, in that population, pretty much everybody has some kind of antibodies.
To answer your question, I would say that SA doesn't look particularly unique.
Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist:
> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.
It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
The lower vaccination rate is more than offset by the high rate of prior infection. This might also mean that omicron is mild if you have been previously infected. Populations with high vaccination rates and low infection rates might be at risk. Or they could be fine. We can't extrapolate to them from the situation in SA.
Hospitalisations and deaths will likely increase regardless, as so many more people will be infected, even if it's proportionately less dangerous to a given individual. But I agree, more data in the next few weeks are what we need to make genuine determinations.
"...or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune"
There are not a lot of people out there still who are not partially immune at this point, due to vaccine, recovery or both. It varies by region of course, but it's certainly true in most parts of the US.
This isn't some final strain so let's all hurry up and get it. The more people that get any variant increases the likelihood of new variants and we don't get to pick what they do. We need to stop thinking about this as a pandemic that will end and start thinking about it as an endemic disease that is never going away. Soon, you'll be getting your annual covid shot along with your flu shot. It is going to continue to kill immuno-compromised people for a very long time. Our lungs are definitely our weak spot (just look at the elderly mortality rates for pneumonia, 20-30%).
It is most likely pretty close to the final strain, viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections) and this one is pretty close to the global maximum.
> viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create.
People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.
Evolution isn’t programmed, it’s a function of survival. If there’s a highly infectious virus with a huge lead time to develop deadly symptoms, that’s more than enough to spread “optimally”
people are easily influenced by others who they admire, even if they have no idea what they’re talking about. athletes, politicians, investors, artists, etc.
> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time.
Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
In decades maybe we get a mild covid.
> Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.
> No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity.
So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains.
Clearly not how it works and not what's happening.
We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading.
Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ?
> That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past.
We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly.
We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu.
> Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants.
It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu.
Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take.
Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking.
edit:
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains
Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers.
Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ?
We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines.
And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.
>> We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year.
Seriously? I thought flu vaccines were just a hipster thing: something you do to look cool, but they don't really matter much. In my country only 4% of people take them, and we don't have many flu-related deaths.
Diabetics and older people are strongly advised to take it. That surely helped cementing the "it's a flu" when most of the deaths are old people. Also, we don't have many flu-related deaths because it either turns into emphyzema or other pulmonary complications which are the cause of death. Or the vaccine did its job.
That's incredibly quick in evolutionary terms. If COVID becomes milder, it may take many human lifetimes for that to occur. In the mean time, it can mutate into something stronger.
Agreed. I still have to come to terms to that myself so I use `decades` not to scare people too much but... also my understanding of the situation and evolution is not solid enough to get into an argument about decades vs lifetime so I stick to decades because it can also mean centuries :/.
> Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
Too bad all those back-to-office-adamant employers completely ignore this. Like, OK, I get infected cause I had to commute to work and then you fire me/lay me off and I'm left holding the bag, financially and physically cause you really wanted to make your leasing payments "worth it".
Most likely, considering this is HN, s/he's moving bits around all day. Something that every day grocery store workers can't do remotely with the things they have to move around.
Which reminds me that in the first lockdown, in my country, grocery stores workers were considered "essential" and were allowed to go to their workplace and work there.
If I was in charge I’d classify tech workers as non essential and not let them work. Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
> If I was in charge I’d classify tech workers as non essential and not let them work. Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Tech workers were classified as non essentials. That's why we got the whole remote thing. Other professions also got labelled non-essential and governments asked employers to put remote/wfh in place as much as possible and at some time made it mandatory. Being classified as a non-essential never meant you were de facto out of a job or prevented from working (Western Europe here).
> Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Wait, what ? Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
I won't say everything I am thinking but wishing people to lose their job because you think they are privileged and they are scared of covid is pretty fucked up. I am making €1750 net a month, in IT, I have a master degree. I don't feel privileged.
> The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Then follow your heart and go work in the service industry in a supermarket.
> Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears. So yeah, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Very little tech work is “essential”. So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
It requires a lot of privilege to be scared of Covid.
> These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears.
Could you please provide some examples of how tech workers have been able to punish the rest of society ? As far as I can tell it's the public authorities who decide laws and public health policies. Tech workers can't even unionize and now they can lobby for WFH or lockdowns and are punishing the rest of society ?
> So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
I wrote it in my previous comment then deleted it but I'll finally put it here because fuck it: I did lose my job one month into the first lockdown because my n+2 non tech boss decided to use the federal budget allocated to my job to create a new job for her bestie. How am I privileged ? Why didn't being put on unemployment during lockdown erase my fear of covid ? While at the same time a family member of mine who is an artist lost her gigs but thanks to our welfare state she didn't lose an euro of income in the last two years and now she's setting up fires and stirring things up in antivax/mask riots in Brussels. Their world revolve around the virus, their only meaning in life is now to be against every health measures (and yes they are ordering covid online in the Netherlands rather than get a jab. Which FAANG employees is forcing her to do that, uh ?).
You may not like how the covid thing is handled but thinking it's tech worker's fault is wack and wanting to punish them for that is wackier. If anything, talk to your representative or your councilmen or something. They are the one in charge.
> Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
Not GP, but one reason is that they're advocating for restrictions that have severe detrimental effects (loss of employment) on others, but not on themselves.
I haven't seen much on HN about such restrictions so I suppose something in the mainstream media does point to that or I have a bias. Do you have some examples ?
Also, apparently, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated is already a giant no-no for some here so I'd like to know what restrictions are being advocated by who ? Surely it's not a `they` as in everyone though, right ?
Waiting decades with government policies in place and altered behavior is not a realistic option. Most people would rather risk infection over the long term.
> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections.
The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.
It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir.
Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
> It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir.
You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right? We still wiped it out.
Smallpox, Measles, Polio. We've wiped out diseases before, and we can do it again if we so try. I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases and are so pessimistic about this subject...
> You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right?
It seems unlikely that many cows caught smallpox, given the prevalence of cowpox. Cowpox is a different disease, and was the first vaccine, after which the very concept of "vaccination" is named. Milkmaids had long been known for their immunity to smallpox. If smallpox had been in cows, milkmaids would have been known for universal smallpox exposure instead.
> I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases
Cowpox produced strong enough immunity to smallpox that a vaccine likely derived from it completely wiped smallpox off the planet, but it's very much not the same disease - cowpox doesn't spread effectively in humans and is much less deadly. There's just really good cross-immunity between the two that made vaccination possible using 18th-century technology and understanding of science, even though their last common ancestor seems to be way back in prehistory.
Rabies only has animal reservoirs, it isn't spread person-to-person. And it appears that the localities that have eradicated rabies have done so by dropping animal baits with oral vaccines.
So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines.
The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going to end this way.
Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological? Or that all "diseases" are equivalent? Perhaps I should read more into your confounding of cowpox with smallpox.
Leprosy is bacterial and treated with antibiotics. Same with bubonic plague, if that was next on your list.
> Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological?
I believe COVID19 continues because we have a ~60% vaccination rate in the USA, which is far below the needed vaccination rate to slow down the spread of the disease.
A lot of these other diseases brought up have substantial 95%+ vaccination rates, or treatments that can hamper the spread.
No disease is equivalent to another. Smallpox and Measles had much higher spread R0 / replication rates. Others are bacterial. Cholera is water-borne and solved with other methodologies.
Those diseases could be (mostly) eradicated because they have incredibly effective vaccines - the CDC quotes 95% for smallpox, 97% for measles, 99-100% for polio. No currently known Covid vaccine is that effective and there's no obvious reason to expect future ones will be.
The difference isn't as minor as I think you're suggesting. Compared to 95% efficacy, 90% efficacy means twice as many vaccinated people get sick and 75% efficacy means five times as many get sick. I don't see how eradication programs would work with such a differential, and (relatedly) I don't know of any experts who think it's feasible to eradicate Covid with current technology.
> I don't see how eradication programs would work with such a differential
Its all about R0. If the efficacy (and compliance) is above the 1 / R0 rate, then eradication is possible.
As its "efficacy times compliance", the number we wish to maximize is the smaller number. Efficacy may have dropped to 60% (double shot vs Delta), but a 3rd booster brings the efficacy back up to 90%.
Compliance however, is stuck around 60% in the USA in general, and a large number of people are refusing to get the booster. As such, compliance is the number we need to work on right now.
--------
Going from 90% to 99% vaccine efficacy barely does anything, because our vaccine compliance numbers are so damn low.
Agreed. But I don't hear anyone talking about making a old style COVID vaccine that prevents infection, disease or transmission. That's what's different in this case. We don't currently have what we many of us used to think of as a vaccine.
We are lucky we have vaccines at all; it was never a sure thing.
Also, IIRC Sinovac’s Coronavirus vaccine is an “old style” inactivated virus vaccine, and the J&J one is an adenovirus vector vaccine. They are not as effective as the mRNA vaccines.
The same selection pressure that applies to every other disease. Symptoms make you less likely to spread. Fatalities make you much less likely to spread. Most of the diseases you carry are completely asymptomatic.
This is why island populations all get sick when a ship comes in.
Don't most covid deaths happen after you're no longer infectious? I thought a lot of that was from the cytokine storm.
But to the other commenter's point, if omicron DID get a more deadly variant that kills you after you've already infected other people due to presymptomatic spread, then why would that variant be likely to die out? It's already reproduced before killing the host
it's overall less likely to reproduce because we take measures against covid collectively. What spreads more unhindered, covid or the common cold?
A disease that spreads before it's symptomatic may not face negative selection pressure for some individuals, but on the aggregate people wear masks, avoid contact, even entered lockdowns, are more likely to obtain vaccination, and so on.
There's a stronger behavioral response to a more deadly covid than there is to one that is entirely harmless. It's not just death that reduces rates of transmission, and it's not just sick or symptomatic people who avoid contact.
> Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker viral variants is stronger viral variants killing their hosts in droves, thus preventing the stronger variants from passing on their genetics to new hosts.
That selection pressure doesn't exist, because people are not dropping like flies due to COVID. The virus is free to mutate into something stronger because there is little pressure to stop it.
There are two primary factors driving virus evolution - not killing the host and defeating the host's immune system. Killing the host, at least with humans, is an evolutionary dead end, since we go out of our way to quarantine the body and destroy or permanently confine it.
In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time.
There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At some point we should see an equilibrium reached with the coronaviruses, and the hope is that it'll be as mild as seasonal colds. Omicron could be a significant leap in that direction.
Covid related links have saturated any searches on viruses in general, and the doom&gloom "reporting"is at the top. There are a lot of papers and examples of what I'm talking about, though, it's just irritating to get at.
Gain of function research gives us rapid and repeatable demonstrations of vital evolution. Viruses that don't kill their hosts and develop more and better mechanisms of infection or evasion of immune system defenses outcompete other variants. There are a lot of examples in animal viruses, but Sars and hiv are examples of recent relevance.
To be clear, I'm not making the claim that this happens to all viruses - evolution doesn't work like that. A virus that leaves you mostly functional for a few months before it kills you is not at all an unlikely scenario. Viruses also exist concurrent with other variants, and they can mutate rapidly. There's no hard and fast rule, just influences and constraints that can manifest as trends.
In my opinion, the ideal outcome for sars-cov2 at this point is that a super mild variant evolves that will confer robust natural immunity while spreading fast enough to prevent the spread of other variants. It could become more deadly - I hope it won't, and what we know of virus evolutionary pressures in humans hints that we could get lucky.
SARS and HiV are certainly not examples where a human virus has evolved to become more contagious but less deadly. SARS was not contagious enough to escape our control efforts, and HiV is mitigated by our anti viral drugs.
Indeed it would be nice if a less severe strain out competed current COVID, but such a thing has never happened before (as far as we know) - and as you point out there is no selection pressure for mildness when death/disability occurs some weeks after the infection has been cleared.
There are multiple strains of hiv. One of the papers I linked to is a detailed study investigating a less lethal, more infectious strain. Sars-cov1 also evolved a few strains that were more infectious and less lethal. Both effects, by the way, are usually associated with separate individual mutations. It's rare that a single change in DNA results in both effects.
Well, logically speaking, we never needed vaccines, since some percentage of the human race will survive COVID regardless. The question always was just whether you can improve your own odds of staying healthy. And so far that data seems to have been strongly in favor of vaccination of yourself and those around you, with further increased benefit demonstrated from opting for a booster shot. But still never being essential or necessary for survival.
You seem to be interpreting "essential" as "essential for continued human existence", which is a pretty low bar. "Essential for maintaining public health", or "essential for preventing excess deaths" would be better interpretations. While vaccines are not essential for continued human existence, they are essential for maintaining public health and preventing excess deaths.
I don't think that was the question? It was how to not overload hospitals and create a safer environment for those in the population most at risk. Thus healthy young adults getting vaccinated to reduce the rate of spread
- Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote.
- Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms.
- Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild.
The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because:
1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease.
2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all.
3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view.
I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
Failed as in the vaccines, that were being advertised as being 95% effective with no talk of any boosters only 6 months ago, no longer provide any protection at all.
As for the vaccines forcing mutation, SA is only 25% vaccinated so that doesn't work.
Have the vaccines succeeded in preventing many people from dying? That is something for history to judge. There just isn't good enough data on vaccine deaths to judge that at the moment. The problem for COVID vaccines is that whilst they may some people from dying of COVID, not many life years are saved because almost all the COVID deaths are concentrated in the very elderly. Meanwhile vaccine injuries are a looming iceberg because they aren't being properly tracked or recorded. The number of random cardiac failures in athletes is well up this year and eventually people will stop being in denial about the reasons. The long term damage from this programme can be judged in five or ten years.
However, if Omicron does display Delta as it appears to be doing very rapidly, we can say that at most the vaccines were useful for maybe 6-8 months. Bearing in mind you aren't "vaccinated" until your second dose and there's a gap.
I don't think I've ever seen so many wrong sentences in a single HN comment.
I would love to go through and debunk them all, but I don't have the time or the crayons, nor would I think it would be effective in changing your beliefs. You're too far gone.
> Failed as in the vaccines, that were being advertised as being 95% effective with no talk of any boosters only 6 months ago, no longer provide any protection at all.
It's disappointing to see complete lies like this on HN. Vaccines have been, and remain, incredibly effective in preventing hospitalization/death, even without a booster (although everyone should also get their booster).
And why do we think that? Because public health agencies said so?
It's not because the trials proved it - they didn't. At only ~64,000 participants the e.g. Pfizer trial was not powered to show any difference to deaths and didn't use hospitalizations as a goal metric either, only infections.
And so we're forced to rely on the testimony of the same people in charge of the program, where their data is often missing or deceptive in some way. For example Germany has been claiming nearly all cases occur in the unvaccinated. It turned out this wasn't true. Rather, they don't have data at all on the status of most cases, and then reallocate all the "unknown" column to "unvaccinated" because ... well, why not? No matter what they do, plenty of people will still take their word for everything. This was revealed by Die Welt and the response was nothing. They still do it, as far as I know.
The UK data is usually considered to be the best, as in, the most detailed. And there, when the data on deaths is studied carefully it turns out to be riddled with anomalies and problems that cast doubt on whether vaccines did in fact reduce mortality (the numbers are low enough that statistical artifacts can actually matter). For example, in the UK data vaccination reduces non-COVID deaths in unvaccinated people. Don't take my word for it, ask a professor of risk management:
"Our research team have now analysed the ONS England November mortality data. We conclude that, despite seeming evidence to support vaccine effectiveness, this conclusion is doubtful because of a range of serious inconsistencies and anomalies", "The ONS data provide no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality."
I don't have to trust public health agencies. I can go look up the numbers in my local hospital or ask family members who work there. >90% of ICU cases and deaths are unvaccinated. Hand wavy arguments about "the data is bad!" from a non-peer reviewed paper with 0 citations does not convince me that you're arguing in good faith.
If your (English) family are telling you that then I wonder when they said it because the official figures were just updated and say >50% in ICU are vaccinated now. It's been changing over time because the vaccines wear off so fast.
In the case of my numbers, I'm based in the US. I wish we had a high enough vaccination rate to worry about the base rate fallacy. I'm surrounded by rural areas who unfortunately don't believe in vaccines until they show up in the ER. We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end.
How bizarre. You're the one who brought up that stat in the first place, I'm only pointing out that it's incorrect, at least for the UK - and the US isn't going to be very different. There's no base rate fallacy here because I'm not even building an argument on that data to begin with, you are!
"We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end."
You have a surgical backlog because your hospitals have been firing staff. Former "heros" who, quite sensibly, observed that as they'd already had COVID they didn't need a vaccine for it, and who were immediately demonized and excluded despite the hospitals supposedly being overwhelmed. You might want to meditate on that and consider whether that's the expected course of action during a crisis or not.
I get the feeling you are getting your information from highly political sources rather than getting out from behind the screen and talking to real live people.
Where I live, there is no vaccine mandate for hospital staff due to staffing concerns. Talking with actual local physicians, nurses and doctors are quitting in droves after seeing a huge amount of preventable death in the past few months, by patients who deny the reality of the disease they have, and whos families harass hospital staff about treatments that don't work (hcq/ivermectin/whatever the latest magic pill is now).
I actually am against vaccine mandates and don't think anyone who doesn't want the vaccine should be forced to take it. That said, if you don't take it, I don't want you in the hospital if you end up getting covid. Take hcq/ivermectin/whatever joe rogan is saying now rather than occupy a hospital bed, don't clog up the hospital due to your mistake.
> I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
I suspect that if this omicron had emerged in 2018 at least with the symptoms and lack of severe disease that we have seen so far…it would likely have been described as a virulent common cold and may have gotten an occasional news mention, but zero public and government panic.
I think the phrase “Look for the devil and you will find him” is going to describe virology and government approach to virology for probably the next decade. This is a shame, because it seems to create and feed tyrants at almost every level of government.
> Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
I see currently reported numbers of 75% and 81% for those rates respectively, which means unvaccinated people are over-represented by about 30% relative their percentage of the population. Now these numbers are still very new, and unreliable, have no confidence interval, and only for infection, not hospitalization. But I don’t think that difference would be irrelevant, unless it ceases to hold up after data is collected over the next few weeks.
If I evades vaccines for more dangerous variants, I'm not convinced catching it will make me immune to those variants either. It might actually be different enough to be independent.
That omicron is able to so easily infect people who have had and recovered from delta points to it being almost a different disease from the perspective of the immune system.
It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous.
If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest.
But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time.
The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.
> The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
Making COVID extinct is unfortunately not a reasonable scenario. There will be animal reservoirs, high vaccination rates are difficult to achieve for most countries, long-term lockdowns will be hard to enforce if you're not China.
A vaccine resistant strains is extremely bad news; if it's less severe that would be good, but that remains to be seen while it's obvious now that vaccines are less good against it.
We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.
Yeah, a highly infectious vaccine resistant strain spreading while the world opens up and people rely on the waning strength of their first two shots is pretty much a recipe for year three of this crap.
At this point I'm expecting this crap to be a thing until we have a winter of excess deaths at or below Pre-Covid levels. Once that is observed I think people will finally move on. It sounds like this is still going to result in deaths, so I am now expecting year three of this crap.
I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
At some point, it seems like you have to weigh the lifetime risk of dying from COVID against the loss of life enjoyment and decide “We shouldn’t subject ourselves to another 1.25% of our lifetime of this (whatever “this” is) to lower the fatality rate from Y to X.” (If you’re lowering from 5% to 1%, that trade makes sense for even severe social restrictions. If you’re lowering it from 0.5% to 0.4%, that trade makes no sense for anything beyond the very mildest of restrictions.)
I think it's better to consider some kind of "casualty rate" that includes long COVID, rather than just the "fatality rate". At the moment it's possible some people may never fully recover full function after contracting COVID even though they survive.
The people who never fully recover are orders of magnitude more expensive than the dead. The latter are a one-time cost in lost productivity and care expenses; the former are an on-going cost. Since we, collectively, are the ones who are going to pay via taxation, we should IMO be a hell of a lot more concerned about COVID’s long-term consequences.
While I don't think you're wrong, in practice I think most people use fatality rates as a proxy that kinda implicitly includes non-fatal harms. How often do people talk about heart disease or obesity in terms of "casualty rates"?
Beyond personal choice, in America statewise regulations and urban v. rural differences in mitigation techniques may mean citizens vote with their feet and gov'ts respond to properly shore up tax bases.
In any case I'm no longer thinking this has a clear end date, just a gradual fade into memory, the exact length of time it takes undefined/unclear.
Only in places that continue to consider covid the only problem society should focus on. It might be hard for some to imagine but we cannot continue to put the world on hold for exactly one specific form of illness.
For one thing, we've created a pandemic of untreated mental illness. All these people I see walking their dogs at night on a rainy day alone on the street wearing a mask with foggy glasses are gonna have a hard time getting over this... All the people who haven't left their house in two years are gonna need some help. People have lost their minds and it is gonna take a while to heal.
I don’t think this indicates omicron is vaccine resistant.
But rather that the current vaccines aren’t effect for because omicron is substantially different from the original covid strain used to develop those vaccines.
Vast majority of those are mild illness or where it was a secondary finding. There's been a sharp decline in the number of hospitalizations requiring additional oxygen.
But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
I think we aren't very confident yet that there's much selective pressure toward less severe disease - the reason being that the virus does a lot of its spreading before symptoms get to be their worst, so the severity of "worst" doesn't seem to factor into the evolutionary fitness of the virus. And this is supported by the fact that delta was both more contagious and more severe.
We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
Delta is more infective than Alpha. The mortality rate is comparable if not worse, but it's hard to say as we've had extensive vaccination, which has made it hard to assess. We're lucky for the moment with Omicron, but there is no guarantee.
The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid.
The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population.
The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent.
Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them.
The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
> But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
Yes, the best case scenario might be an extremely mild disease that gives everyone natural immunity to more virulent strains. But half as deadly with twice transmission rate is kind of a wash, in the short term right?
But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window.
I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.
I think the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains.
There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.
Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare.
If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
If the choice is between that and permanent "emergency powers" for all levels of government to continue to panic and scare monger and implement things like vaccine passports, required immunizations as a condition of employment, the destruction of SMB and the demonization and hostility towards anyone that doesn't trust The Science (while shutting all discussion down about The Science because the plebs aren't smart enough to understand The Science)
If a past infection with Delta doesn't protect against Omicron should we expect an infection by Omicron to protect against Delta or any future strains evolved from it?
Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.