That chart is misleading; the rise/spike in deaths is always delayed from the rise/spike in cases.
It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals.
> because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals.
This is a legitimate theoretical concern, however empirically it looks like South Africa's hospitalizations are peaking at slightly more than half their previous wave, with deaths on pace to peak even lower[1][2]
I believe the scientific consensus is that there isn't enough data to discount that theoretical concern. There's still too much uncertainty on how things will pan out, so the recommendation is boosters + some restrictions. They're not going to make a bet when people's lives are at stake, which seems reasonable to me. With more data coming out, I personally do hope we find that that concern is very unlikely. The situation is changing drastically day-by-day.
They are going to make decisions based on incomplete information when people's lives are at stake, decisions where deciding wrong can have material consequences to lives and livelihoods, because choosing not to act is itself a decision.
I do think that the decision that was made to keep pushing boosters and basically do nothing else is probably the correct one, but not because it was the default thing to do and we have to wait until there's incontrovertible evidence that the default action will lead to ruin before doing anything else.
Exhibit B will be the UK. Their cases started spiking about two weeks ago. So far their hospitalizations haven't budged and are even a bit lower than they were a month ago, less than a quarter of their pandemic peak[1]
That said, deaths are still dropping, and have been dropping since November, which was a local minimum in case numbers.
The pertinent fact, I think, is that the UK is vaccinating like crazy, coming up to 1m boosters per day recently (total population just short of 70m IIRC), even 12-18 year-olds are getting jabbed now.
Thanks. Looks like you can filter my link by London as well, which shows hospital admissions have doubled in the last 10 days from about 1/6 to about 1/3 of the previous peak (though patients in hospital is lower at 1/4, possibly reflecting shorter stays but hard to say). London cases have continued spiking since but may possibly be peaking now (not sure how much lag there is in backdating reported cases here) so it will be interesting to see how much the hospital numbers rise from here.
I can't wait until public opinion seems to catch on to the fact that we will never eliminate covid. It blows my mind that we see 100% vaccinated universities going back to online-only learning. What exactly are they waiting on?
The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave.
Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.
If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid? Wasn't that the entire rationale of these lockdowns in the first place? To build capacity for covid?
Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.
> If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid?
The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.
Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.
On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)
WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.
So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.
And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.
1.5k nursing home workers out of a total of about 600k. That's 0.25%. Across the whole population, we've had 810k deaths out of 330M, which is also 0.25%. So we still have the same number of nursing home workers per capita. Except that, considered per nursing home resident, it's an increase, because the rate of nursing home residents dying has been much higher than the general population.
That's true, but it is an excellent advertisement for the risks of the job to others who may not have thought about this beforehand. So one person may die and a multiple may walk.
Because it is not the same level of risk. This can be trivially seen by comparing the percentage of health care workers that ended up with severe cases of COVID (or that died) compared to the regular population. Especially in the beginning of the pandemic when it wasn't really clear what we were dealing with and how it was spreading a lot of health care workers got very high doses and ended up in serious trouble. This isn't unusual for such situations, but it is unusual for it to happen at this scale.
com2kid gave 1.5k for the number of US nursing home worker deaths [1], which is the same 0.25% as the general population. [2] I could definitely believe that more american healthcare workers are dying than the general population, but what stats is this coming from?
The thing to look at is when those deaths happened. And when they did they were disproportionate. Once personal protection for health care workers became widespread those severe cases and deaths dropped to much lower levels.
It's still not clear to me that the profession is riskier than just "being an American"? If you have numbers you would like to link to, I'm happy to dig into them.
Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as:
"As a start, the number of deaths among HCWs was simply
estimated by applying the crude mortality rate from each
country (namely, the number of deaths reported to the WHO
COVID-19 Dashboard divided by the population size) to
the estimated number of HCWs in each country derived from
ILOSTAT . This simple estimation considers HCWs to have
a similar exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of death
to that of the general population..."
From there they do adjust for some things, but they are the ways that healthcare workers are different, demographically, from the general population. They are not looking at occupational risk.
I could still totally believe that healthcare workers are at elevated occupational risk, but a paper that assumes their risk is what you would expect from their demographics isn't going to help us answer that question.
They count but statistically speaking they are a blip in the numbers. It sucks to lose any manpower but given the risk they add to the overall system it could be still be a net positive.
I'm not an actuary though, I only have statistics background.
People will say "well you can't just make more nurses and doctors in 6 months!" However, had we built or repurposed buildings as COVID-specific treatment centers there would be a fairly standard treatment protocol that could be applied by people without 4-8 years of medical training, allowing the highly trained nurses and doctors to supervise the process and multiply their effectiveness. Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, with some going from knowing nothing to being able to run IVs and be fully certified EMTs in 6-9 months. Stories abound of how bad they are at hitting the vein the first time, but it's certainly preferable to dying in the waiting room.
The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.
> there would be a fairly standard treatment protocol that could be applied by people without 4-8 years of medical training
No, there wouldn't, because, among other things, comorbidities that must be managed, especially in the population most COVID hospitalizations come from.
> Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, even to the point of running IVs
Which allows them to serve as, basically, better-than-nothing EMTs in the absence of anyone else, which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care; they don't replace doctors and nurses, though.
> which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care
This is a battlefield. It's an emergency, remember? Do whatever it takes. We forced people to sacrifice their short-ass lives in lockdown so these people could figure it out. Where is the results? 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down to protect a healthcare system they had 2 years to build up specifically to manage covid.
It's as if every one of our lives is worthless in the eyes of people making excuses. No. We paid with our time--something we'll never get back. It is a complete travesty that governments continue to blame the public for their own inability to figure shit out.
Yes and all battlefields are emergencies but not all emergencies have the same conditions (and thus make the same measures expedient) as battlefields.
> Do whatever it takes.
Sure, but what you are suggesting is not what it takes, or something that would be reasonably expected to be useful and effective.
> 2 years and these "experts" still want us to continue locking down
We never generally locked down in the US and no one is suggesting lockdowns now, so I have no idea what “continue locking down” is supposed to mean. (Some US jurisdictions had brief and mostly unenforced policies that, if enforced, would have been local lockdowns, but even the on paper policies expired without renewal quite some time ago.)
So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain to "flatten the curve to build up supplies and healthcare" with zero results? In fact, so little results that many places are locking down yet again like it was march of 2020?
Do y'all not value your lives or short time on this earth at all? You should be furious the government is still playing the "protect healthcare capacity" card. They literally wasted 2 years of your life. No results. And they have the audacity to blame you and the rest of society for their failure!! How on earth is that excusable?
> So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain
I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality.
> many places are locking down yet again
What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere.
> And they have the audacity to blame you
The only people I’ve seen anyone in government even approximately blame are particular government decision-makers who allegedly deliberately acted to make things worse and the unvaccinated, neither group of which included me. So, again, I reject that this description is grounded in reality.
Sorry, not gonna play "its not a real lockdown" pedantry with you. I don't care what you call it. Any restriction we made in the last 2 years be it closed small businesses, masks, vaccine mandates, hall passes to go on dog walks, "not allowed to walk on the dry sand, only the wet sand", closed playgrounds, closed schools... all of it... it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity... right? If that is true, where are the results?
And if the goal isn't to flatten the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity, please inform me what the goal actually is. 'Cause if that ain't it... I have no fucking clue what we are doing.
When you use a dramatic-sounding word like "lockdown", there's an implicit bargain you're making. You get to have a stronger emotional effect on me, and in exchange I get to call bullshit if it turns out that you're using it for something that doesn't justify that stronger emotional effect.
It sounds as if you're calling _every_ restriction anyone imposed on anyone in the name of fighting COVID-19 "lockdown". In which case, I call bullshit. For instance, being required to wear a mask when indoors with other people (I guess this is the sort of thing that the bare word "masks" in your list means): yeah, it kinda sucks, but it is a long way from anything that justifies the term "lockdown".
The same goes for your words about the government (I'm not sure which government, but never mind) "flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". I don't know exactly what's happened in your life, nor in the life of anyone else who isn't me; but while lots of things have been worse than usual for the last two years it's a long way short of "flushing my life down the drain". In fact, here are some things that two years of would be (1) much worse than what I have endured for the last two years but also (2) much less bad than "flushing (those years of) my life down the drain". (a) Being out of work. (b) Getting divorced. (c) Having a substantial disability such as deafness or the loss of a limb. (d) Major depressive disorder.
At least one actual underlying point you're making is a cogent one: governments across the world were concerned about their healthcare systems being overwhelmed, they asked or required people to make sacrifices that (as well as protecting the people making the sacrifices) made that less likely, but they didn't take steps to make substantial increases in the capacity of those healthcare systems that would make such sacrifices less necessary in the future.
That's partly because making substantial increases to the capacity of your healthcare system is hard and takes time. Hospitals take time to build. Doctors take time (a lot more than two years) to train. Etc. But, still, it's probably true that one thing we should have been trying to do alongside panic-mode COVID-19 fighting is to make longer-term capacity increases.
And, yes, all those restrictions governments have imposed have costs as well as benefits, and we should be weighing those up and not just assuming we should do everything that has benefits.
But you don't do either of those points any favours by tying them to hyperbolic language for all the things governments have been doing in the short term to try to reduce the spread. Nowhere has been "locked down" for two years, unless you take "locked down" to mean "doing anything at all to try to reduce the spread of COVID-19", and you shouldn't do that because words have meanings and connotations and that isn't what "locked down" means. Some people have indeed suffered terribly, but by and large we have not had two years of our lives "flushed down the drain", unless you take "flushed down the drain" to mean "made a bit worse", which again you shouldn't do because that's not what those words mean.
Say "Wearing masks kinda sucks, and we should actually look at whether the benefits justify the costs" and I'll warmly agree (though I might or might not end up agreeing with you about how the calculation comes out). Say "Working from home kinda sucks for many people and is basically impossible for others, and having everyone do it has severe economic consequences, and we should weigh those up against the benefits and not do it if it's net negative" and I'll warmly agree (though, again, I don't guarantee to agree about how the calculations come out in every particular case). But say "the government is flushing your life down the drain" or "we have been in lockdown for two years" and, no, sorry, I call bullshit. Those things are not true, and when you say them I can't help suspecting motives I can't endorse such as a preference for labelling everything a government does with the most negative labels you can find.
> unless you take "flushed down the drain" to mean "made a bit worse", which again you shouldn't do because that's not what those words mean.
It takes a remarkable amount of privilege to say something like this.
We stole peoples proms, first dates, high school dances, drunken college hookups, funerals, weddings, livelihoods, social lives, you name it and we stole it in a failed attempt to “flatten the curve”.
People who minimize or brush away the impact the last two hellish years of our existence are either privileged as fuck or have a pathetic, miserable pre-pandemic life. I hardly know what else to say.
How dare anybody say last two years was “made a bit worse”. Speak for yourself… but you have no right to make that claim of others. These last two years seriously fucked my shit up and I’m hardly the minority. Screw people who gaslight us by saying “made a bit worse”.
What "takes a remarkable amount of privilege" is equating what has happened over the last two years to the awful, awful things that can actually flush two years (or more) of a person's life down the drain.
Note that you didn't just claim that some people's lives were impacted badly enough to amount to flushing them down the drain. (That might well be true. The Plague Years have been much worse for some people than for others.) What you wrote, to someone about whom so far as I know you know nothing to speak of, was: "So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain". "Your life", not "my life" or "some people's lives". And, if I may borrow your language for a moment: you have no right to make that claim of others.
To repeat something I already said (but you apparently didn't read, or decided to ignore because if you acknowledged it it would be harder to maintain the desired level of outrage): yes, it's been much worse for some people than others. If you tell me your life feels like it's been flushed down the drain for the last two years then I'll believe you. But you don't get to point at some random person on HN and claim that the same is true of them.
> it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity... right?
No.
The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development of effective preventive and treatment interventions, minimizing deaths on the route to that. (I suppose you can call that “building healthcare capacity”, but the goal has never been prinarily about bulking up the number of seriously I'll people hospitals can concurrently treat on a sustained basis, but the capacity to prevent people from getting seriously ill.)
(The original research indicated that after a general lockdown period, cycling local, often more modest, control measures would likely be necessary to that end.)
While the particular half-measures adopted and half-heartedly implemented have had mixed results in preventing health system overload (since we've seen temporary overload various places at various times), we have, in fact, developed various effective interventions and are on the road to more.
> The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that
So we agree it is about healthcare capacity. You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it!
You know the unethical, immoral way of avoiding healthcare collapse? Force hundreds of millions of people into this purgatory we are living in right now while doing absolutely fuck-all to build capacity. Then blame them all for "not taking this seriously" when their brilliant plan of doing fuck-all fails.
Seriously. Do you not see how much bullshit it is to just expect the entire world, billions of people to put their lives on hold indefinitely for exactly one specific illness when the solution could be to simply build capacity to deal with covid surges? These governments did fuck all to solve the capacity problem. They dont respect any of us at all!! They pissed our lives away so they didn't have to do anything.
Do you not value your time on this earth at all? 'Cause if you do, I'm sorry to tell you but the government just hoodwinked you into thinking it was your job to sacrifice your life so they didn't have to do anything at all.
Life is short dude. Expecting everybody to do this because "original models" by some bullshit "expert" said so... bleech...
This whole conversation is about the notion that we should have massively expanded hospital capacity, which is an extremely expensive endeavour, and probably not feasible because of the lack of trained people.
> Let's say it's 100% of the government's fault, which I don't believe, but let's just say it for argument's sake.
Who else's fault is it? It isn't the public, that is for sure. You can't blame people for human behavior and "not taking this seriously". These governments asked us to pay one of the highest costs you can pay--they asked us to donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause. And thus far, they have done absolutely nothing but blame the public for their failings.
Life is short. Being asked to flush 2 years of your life down the toilet in this purgatory we are in is a huge ask. Don't you think we should see some results now?
These last two years have been some of the hardest years of my life, as a person who normally travels and works internationally with large groups of people, I have been inside the same house for two years with just my parents, one of whom went through chemo and a heart attack while covid was happening. So I feel you on how these past two years have seemed like purgatory, feeling stuck and watching life tick away.
I also wish the various levels of government would have responded differently. I'm assuming you mean in the US, but that's where I am so I'll go with that. I wish the Trump admin would have responded differently, the Biden admin, the US Senate and House (2020 and 2021 members), my governor in Michigan, the senate and house in Michigan, the county health department, my local mayor, and more.
At least in Michigan, they didn't ask me to donate 2 years of my time, much of that has been my choice, frankly against what the Michigan Congress voted. The governor pushed for strong closures in the beginning and the Congress overruled that. Many of the people here have been acting as if there is no pandemic, doing almost exactly what they did before covid-19 existed. Frankly, even many elements of the Trump admin and US Congress have told us to live our lives as normal.
So if anything, I think the government, at its various levels, have provided mixed messages on what we should and should not do. From complete and total lockdown, to open but wear masks, to complete and total return to normalcy. At least in my experience, I haven't heard a coherent "donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause," but rather a mixed message, coming from politicians, who, just as the public are people with human behavior.
IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.
My kids wear masks all day long and school. They do not love it, but they complain way less than some people do about wearing one for 20 minutes in a grocery store.
I wore an N95 on a series of flights to Europe over the summer. It was not the most pleasant thing, but I was ok with it. Doctors and nurses regularly work 8/10/12 hours while masked up.
A lot of it is finding the people, beyond the physical space. You can't just 'spin up' nurses like AWS instances. They're in short supply right now, and many are feeling burned out. There's a post going around about a doctor who got assaulted by deranged family members of a man who died. Don't know if it's real, but a lot of people were saying they've experienced similar and are just done with it.
When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.
We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.
"I readily admit that I don't know what I'm talking about but at the same time I'm going to insist that my hypothetical situation is definitely correct and the knowledgeable people working on medical staffing and capacity management for their entire careers simply do not know as much as me, a computer toucher."
Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.
> makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job
Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period.
It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too.
This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
Exactly. It's crazy how some people think that shutting down pretty much everything within days is a more viable alternative or even more doable than ramping up healthcare capacity in... 2 years. They'll usually wave away the massive repercussions that shutdowns cause but they will become very perfectionist when it comes to standard of care and how we need fully trained doctors and nothing less. It's an emergency, as you said it's not time for perfection because the costs are extreme
I think what amazes me is how little it seems some people value their own time and life. Like, life is super short. I sacrificed a non-trival amount of it so these "experts" could build up healthcare capacity.
They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
Totally agree. I have been talking about this for the past year. The cost of lockdowns in the Netherlands is ridiculous. Everyone says we can't scale IC blabla. In a crisis we can even put mechanics at beds if we need to.
For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
> Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war.
Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.
ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).
Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people. You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.
What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.
> Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people.
That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.
> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
With what staff?
> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.
As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.
Bullshit you can’t staff them. You have entire nations worth of resources at your disposal. You absolutely could staff a Covid ICU in a month if it was truly an emergency. It would be janky and imperfect but you could do it. It’s an emergency after all. You don’t have time for perfection.
It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.
What kind of life do you lead where mask mandates and moderate restrictions means two years of it is completely wasted. I understand freedoms being trampled and whatnot, but saying "they stole two years" seems pretty dramatic.
No he is totally right. I haven't been able to see my girlfriend for two years because of borders closing. I had to wait two years to see my parents. Friends and family that were supposed to visit me couldn't. Hundreds of event have been cancelled. I couldn't practice my martial art because our training place was close. I was denied entry in a library two days ago. I couldn't network or present my work in person at an international conference. Had to work remotely and didn't speak irl with coworkers for like 6 months. Restaurants closed very early. Etc, etc.
Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.
It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.
I have a lot of sympathy. The situation sucks, and some have it worse than others. Expats and people with important relationships in other countries have it especially bad. I understand that. I have expat friends that have had a really rough time too.
That being said, it sucking is not the same as years being wasted. You still have opportunities to do plenty of other stuff. The only reason these years would be wasted is if you do not try to adapt. Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.
Covid having a low impact on your life personally is missing the mark on a couple of levels. The low impact might very well be connected to the restrictions in place. In an alternate timeline where restrictions never happened, you might have been equally or more frustrated over the lack thereof as you lost a loved one.
How do you quantify how much discomfort for the general public is worth it to save X amount of lives? You and yours might have gotten dealt a shitty hand because of the border shutdowns, but on the aggregate I think the restrictions have been reasonable.
> Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.
This is a much better way of describing my reaction to these claims. I appreciate you making it soberly.
There are absolutely folks who've been dealt a rough hand over the last two years--but I certainly wouldn't call my life "boring", and somehow I've figured out ways to make the last two years two of the best of my life: building a wood shop, getting away from the computer more, learning more about myself. And while I'll go back to traveling, etc. once things settle down, I have learned that I don't have to go places to be fulfilled.
Focusing on what one can't do is probably a great way to have made the last two years suck, though.
After two years and seeing just how crazy society can be, you really think drafting random people and telling them to put IVs in someone's arm with minimal training is a good idea?
Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.
That's not how drafting for a war works at all. There's extensive training for all the positions, unless you're considering the mythical notion of how Russia sent bodies to war with no weapons
I mean again I'm no expert but it seems to me that if all these people are supposed to do is treat exactly one illness, it would be possible to train a certain set of people on how to manage 80% of the workload and escalate the exceptions to somebody with more knowledge.
It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else.
Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures.
They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.
In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
When COVID first hit Italy, they started calling up retired doctors and also sending people in medical school into clinical support positions. And it just wasn't enough.
Vaccines were readily available; perhaps no one predicted quite so many people would avoid them, preferring to take a chance suffocating to death. Administering vaccines is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than expanding hospitals.
> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.
If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.
You're right, I actually had the benefit of chatting with somebody who organized the lab test network around covid-19 and asked if they (Belgian government) considered ramping up hospital capacity and training non-qualified people the basics of taking care of covid-19 infected people... turns out they never considered it.
Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.
But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?
There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control
ICU beds require something like 7 specially trained nurses each to operate. Generally, availability of trained staff is the limiting factor (developed countries, at this point, generally have more ventilators etc than they can use), and lead time on making new doctors and nurses is pretty long.
While a nurse is hard to train in 2 years, you can start pulling doctors and nurses from adjacent specialties and cross train them for COVID ICU wards.
If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.
At that point you have shortages elsewhere (and that _is_ happening to some extent in some places; hospitals are delaying routine procedures to keep the ICUs running at full capacity). It's not a great solution, especially if it goes on a long time; when you start delaying routine things for years, you start seeing serious problems.
Realistically, the only viable course is probably to vaccinate and boost as many people as humanly possible, and await better vaccines and therapeutics. Paxlovid should hopefully help when it's available in quantity.
I believe that covid has given us incredible insight into the human psyche, including how well we are able to respond to problems that have political/tribal attributes to them.
Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.
> if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.
If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge sacrifies for something they don't perceive to be a major problem.
I think we're probably in luck somewhat: if something actually serious came along, I agree that people would be much less disagreeable, and perhaps we'd have enough actual problems so authorities wouldn't have to engage in make work projects.
That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the degree to which covid is a "major" problem. I am very worried that the inability for people to even mutually agree upon a way of discussing (let alone agreeing on anything) culture war topics, and our inability to take such phenomena seriously, is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for decades into the future (just in time for the climate change culture war).
What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population. We're constantly bombarded with the latest COVID-19 case/death numbers, editorialized headlines designed to instill fear, and told to basically shut up, get our vaccine shots, and trust the "experts", and there's been no attempt to educate the population on the real numbers.
For example, how many people know the:
- Case fatality rate of COVID-19 (in the U.S, it's 1.6%)
- Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 (can only be estimated, but probably around 0.1-0.3%)
- Hospitalization utilization (not just now, but also before COVID-19 so one can compare to prior flu seasons and such. Personally I have not found this data)
- Demographics of those who died with COVID-19 (in the UK the median age of death is 84, above the life expectancy of 82. Most deaths are old people and/or those with co-morbidities)
Most people drastically overestimate the danger (eg. by at least 5x according to one survey) because they're bombarbed with news and government fear-mongering, forced to take vaccines and be subject to draconian restrictions, then told to shut up and "trust the experts" while being kept in the dark on the data. Even Big Tech was censoring those who questioned the mainstream narrative (eg. Chris Martenson briefly being banned on Youtube)
In any civilized democracy, the citizenry should be educated so they can make the most informed decisions. There obviously seems to be no interest in educating the people except when it serves the narratives of the elite - which right now is basically "get your shot" and do whatever it takes to reduce COVID-19 numbers regardless of any collateral damage (eg. businesses going bankrupt, people losing work/income, hospitals reducing capacity for other kinds of care, schools shutting down, mental health crisis, restriction of freedoms like movement, general fear).
I agree, it is a very sad state of affairs, in general, and particularly when it comes to reporting of statistics. If this pandemic is genuinely serious, why is there no standardized set of metrics for reporting on it, including things like explicit acknowledgements of where certain sources may not be an exact match for the metric, and all the other things that any serious data project has? And, why is there no meta-conversation about what metrics should be reported?
> What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population.
I think it's even stranger than it seems at first glance. There is no shortage of people calling for "moar critical thinking", as in "why don't those whose job it is to teach critical thinking do a better job"....but have you ever seen the conversation go beyond that?
To me, it is clear as day that overall humanity has a very serious problem with "critical thinking", and when I say that I'm casting an extremely wide net, one that would capture not just Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, and over-enthusiastic progressives, but also 90% of the HN userbase (an arbitrary line can be drawn anywhere according to the drawers wishes, but it is not difficult at all to draw a line that captures ~everyone, according to an explicit standard/methodology). I truly believe that things are in a far worse state than anyone realizes, and my reasoning for that is that each individual overlooks one crucial detail: critical thinking is implemented by the human mind, and the human mind is an illusion machine....and, due to millions of years of evolution, it is so good at conjuring illusions (such as each of our respective entire conceptualizations of reality) that we are unable to realize when what we're seeing is an illusion....or worse: the possibility never even crosses our mind. And, if it does, we will ask our mind "Is this an illusion?", and the answer will come: "No, it is not, this is reality", which will be enthusiastically accepted as fact. And that I propose is "how it works", and how nobody realizes what is going on. (There's more strange stuff over and above that, like if you mention this particular idea to anyone, the majority of the time they will get ~angry and insist on changing the conversation, or, engage in non-logical rhetoric, character attacks, scolding, etc etc etc - but this is the essence of the problem imho.)
That will be the fun one for sure. What I do know is the knuckleheads running the show right now up and down the west coast are the last people I’d trust to handle that correctly.
"Capacity" doesn't mean floor space. It means trained medical professionals, beds, equipment, consumables. These things don't just appear out of thin air
COVID patients completely overran the hospital where I live. We're a not so big city that serves a lot of really rural areas. The ICU was full. The regular hospital was full.
This is what a liability state looks like. Nobody gets sued for following the CDC, that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi or rare steak
Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy.
My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all.
Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.
I'm not sure how you can suggest there's any caution here. At least not with regards to the students. They are a low risk category with 100% vaccination rate and their risk of losing out on many of the important aspects of college are being disregarded.
The public opinion around me (I live in Eastern Europe) does seem to have caught on to that fact, I mean the normal people, the problem is the media that, even here, keeps treating this like a thing that we could eventually get rid of.
I wonder if the approach is similar to managing herpes. We don't yet know how to eliminate it and yet we believe that if someone has a current outbreak (visible sores, etc) than they should avoid sexual contact with others so they don't spread it...until it subsides again.
I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."
If federal law makers cared about public opinion, they'd have declassified marijuanna as a schedule 1 drug [0]. They also would not have done the recent weapons deal with Saudi Arabia [1].
Considering the details of the business they're in I don't think they have much choice other than to chart the course that enrages the fewest people even if that course is non-optimal.
There are many places where that's a perfectly rational decision.
COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.
Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden?
Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
> In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need.
> Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden?
In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal.
> Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018?
Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid?
> How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing?
See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society.
> These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.
Are we looking at the same chart, or are you talking about some other data/country?
That chart shows it spiking just days ago (~Dec 15) in SA, not on Thanksgiving. So it’s still too early to know the effect on deaths (though I still agree that it seems they won’t be as bad).
Didn't the doctor who discovered and documented Omicron state that it results in mild disease? Therefore, it won't require ventilators and thus won't overwhelm hospitals?
It typically takes three weeks to go from being a case to dead, given how quickly it was rising it was very hard to get a good sense of how many people were likely to die before it was already infecting huge numbers of people.
That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.
Well, "overweight" by CDCs definition (BMI > 25 == overweight). But there's a strong link between complications from COVID and Obesity. It's a shame nobody wants to make the obese pay for their externalities -- even the people who'd like to make the unvaccinated "pay" in some way turn a blind eye to this issue.
If you want to make "the obese" "pay for their externalities", I do hope you have a fantastic plan in place to break the backs of the Nabiscos of the world who literally-not-figuratively design for habituation and drum their marketing into every place they can.
The situation was not caused by overstressed people going "you know, I really want to be fat".
The reality of food scientists designing these things to feel good and to habituate in a world of constant stress with few affordable and time-permitting outlets is a pretty obvious problem with this sort of claim. So is the fact that these bastards push to kids, and a reasonable person might find it a little odd that, at best and most generously, you want to punish people for the outcomes of inadequate parenting.
But it's much easier to blame fat people than the pushers, and it feels so much more satisfying to break out the hauteur about them as opposed to the businesses that tech people with tech salaries might someday seek to emulate, so--I guess I get it.
That's the issue though, everyone points out the correlation, but of course there's a correlation. Everyone's overweight. Need more analysis to show just how much it affects COVID outcomes. While it would have been nice for the governments to make more of an effort to get people to lose weight during the pandemic, it's not guaranteed it would have had the results some people expect.
It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.
The other related factor is omicron is more likely (than other variants) to infect someone who has been vaccinated or previously exposed to covid. So the number of infected low risk individuals is higher, than with previous strains.
The denominator is higher than if, let’s say, delta was let loose in the same population at the same time.
To clarify, omicron is more likely to infect vaccinated or exposed individuals _than the other variants_. NOT omicron is more likely to infect vaccinated people than non-vaccinated people.
The wording startled me until I understood the intended meaning.
South Africa is well under average vaccination rate globally. Also what do you mean by they've been exposed to the virus? Of course they've been exposed to the virus, that's exactly why it's interesting to see how their deaths follow cases.
There's no indication that the first world, with much higher vaccination rates won't fare better than South Africa, which seems to be faring exceptionally well relative to other case spikes.
> Also what do you mean by they've been exposed to the virus?
"have been exposed to the virus" usually means something like "immune system isn't totally unprepared, but has had contact with this virus before (or a proxy via vaccination)".
In South Africa, it is mostly via getting COVID-19 in the Alpha or Delta waves.
So now we're going to suddenly admit that natural immunity is a thing.
The science has been super clear on this for a long time. The problem is that the CDC and NIH, the grand tradition of federally funded science, have chosen not to study anything that conflicts with the directives of their organizations. They haven't bothered to study natural immunity and have left it to other countries like Israel.
Instead they pretend like it doesn't exist and claim that they don't have science to support it (exactly like the federal government did with marijuana in the past) because they never bothered to fund studies.
When you factor in the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated, well over 70% of the US population has been exposed to the virus in one form or another.
I caught the virus in the alpha wave. It's been infuriating having the federal government pretend like t cell immunity isn't a thing. For my age group it absolutely is.
> So now we're going to suddenly admit that natural immunity is a thing.
A thing that gives some benefit to a lot of South African who also later got sick with COVID-19-Omicron, some of those were hospitalised, and some of those died. So clearly not a magic wand that prevents Omicron entirely.
A benefit obtained at huge human costs in previous waves, which vaccination would have blunted.
You can tell the bad takes because of the accusatory tone - Who is going to "suddenly admit" I don't even know who is being accused here? And the simplistic "all or nothing" thinking - the "is a thing or isn't" idea. Medicine is not Boolean logic. None of this is binary, boolean, on-off. neither vaccination nor prior infection are a guarantee.
The United States Federal Government doesn't acknowledge that naturally conferred immunity for COVID exists in any policy. They admit that it's "something to be studied" and ignore all science from other nations. Meanwhile, most European nations have acknowledged this in the form of policy. The Dutch just (in the last few days) extended their green pass eligibility based on previous infection from 180 days to 365 days based on the recommendation of their public health authorities.
The above policy is pushed in the exact Medical Boolean Logic you just attacked in your comment. They push policies that pretend the vaccinated can't spread it and that unvaccinated (previously infected or not) are all dangerous to be around. Boolean logic. They deliberately avoided informing the public about the extremely steep age gradient of risk for COVID infection, pushing that no matter your age or health status, COVID is super dangerous to you. Boolean logic. CNN has had a different story of the same variety fixed to their front page for over a year: A story featuring a person who isn't old getting really sick from the virus who wasn't vaccinated. They deliberately highlight the statistical outliers to push the boolean logic that YOU ARE AT RISK FROM COVID NO MATTER YOUR AGE/HEALTH. Yep, and I'm also at risk of getting struck by lightning when I take a walk on a sunny day. They push the lie that previous infection provides no immunity. My father's physician told him the other day that "natural immunity from COVID doesn't exist." Boolean logic.
You're attacking me for "bad takes"? Are we on Twitter here? I utterly despise that kind of dialogue, and the meta-analysis of my commentary as if I'm part of some super-entity of horrible humans who fall into a collective tribe to be attacked and expelled from all polite conversation. I'm a lifelong Democratic voter, I drive an electric car, I think climate change is bad, support women's rights, support labor unions, I grow marijuana and donate to medical patients and no, I'm not a "simplistic all or nothing" thinker. You've done this in other threads, and clearly view yourself morally superior to those who disagree with you on this specific issue.
One thing to add: I've voted Democratic since my first vote for Al Gore in 2000. I voted for Biden in 2020. I will never vote Democrat again. I've switched my status to Independent. This party no longer deserves my support, and I look forward to voting for anyone not in it in the future. They aren't the party of science anymore. The Republicans are nutbags, but at least they don't interfere with my life and force me to get a shot i don't want or need. I caught COVID, I recovered, and I'm done. Fuck anyone that wants to force me to get a shot I won't benefit from. As if there's a single fucking record of someone catching COVID a second time and suffering more severe symptoms than with the first infection.
The vaccine mandate turned me into a single issue voter. No government will ever tell me I have to inject something into my body to be allowed to engage in commerce. Especially a government like the US, which doesn't do a fucking thing to pay for my health care. They have no fucking right. If I get myocarditis from the shot, like a 35 year old Googler who lives on my street did (he now has permanent scarring on his heart), the bill is on ME. Fuck that. He can't even hike with me anymore, and will suffer life-long side-effects. And the bill for the treatment is on him.
From memory, SA has 3.3mil confirmed cases, and an estimated 7.8x total when you include unconfirmed. So roughly 75 percent of the population have caught covid. Plus vaccinations, that adds up to a lot of mild reinfections.
Similar situation in Denmark as well. Huge number of omicron infections, but deaths haven't budged and number of covid patients in hospitals are actually decreasing.
This comment links to Reuters, which says "Denmark reports its largest number of coronavirus-related deaths since the start of the pandemic: 57". Where are you getting your data?
Your comment is factually untrue. 17 people died yesterday. Didn't have this high number of deaths since last winter before vaccines, and from the chart deaths seems to have increased 10-fold compared to a month or two ago. I'd like to see a source for your claim that numbers in hospitals are decreasing.
No, my comment wasn't "factually untrue". The 7-day rolling average is steady at 9 or 10 according to the covid data on google. It hasn't changed (at least, up until yesterday's data). Things may change now, as there were 57 deaths just announced today.
> I'd like to see a source for your claim that numbers in hospitals are decreasing.
Such a number would be difficult to interpret, or entirely meaningless, without understanding the classification methods and policies of each constituent region. This also holds true of overall death statistics.
Take this with a heap of salt but I looked for this figure yesterday and found it to be 12 in several sources, but hard to find the official figures. Share them if you do find them!
Yes, there's definitely some degree natural immunity. There's mixed evidence as to whether it's stronger[0] or weaker[1] than full vaccination, but it's definitely better than nothing.
Via previous infection? And if so, you're not concerned about waning protection? It would appear that people even with previous wild/delta infections have hit or miss immunity to omicron.
You gotta remember that the vast majority of infections are asymptomatic or mild. We focus on the ones that aren't, for a number of valid reasons, but this also skews the average person's risk tolerance and awareness toward thinking that there's life altering danger in each infection. There's millions walking about who think it's a fake virus because they got a headache and a sore throat for a day while being told that they are at risk of intubation and a range of "long covid" symptoms, and this doesn't meet their experience or that of their entire friend and family circle. Yeah, lots of families also experienced the opposite, but you'd probably be hard pressed to convince those ones that it's a mild disease. Thing is, it's both.
But that doesn't address the questions about natural immunity at all. Assuming you already had it and that you were 100% fine and you're now forever immune seems extraordinarily foolish.
I think it's clear he's referring to the fact that natural immunity has protected most of South Africa and thus, the world is freaking out over Omicron. As was suggested by a doctor in South Africa at the very beginning, which was ignored by governments. Of course, excuses for the South African data not aligning with the whole "vaccines are the only answer" narrative are now being created.
I am cautiously optimistic about the severity of Omicron. But as others have pointed out before: deaths trail infections by 2-4 weeks.
Omicron was first reported to the WHO on 11/24 and wasn't categorized as a variant of concern until 11/26. It hasn't even been a month since it was acknowledged much less has become the dominant variant in most places.
Increase in Gauteng (South Africa) has started already well before 11/24. Even if deaths trail infections by 2-4 weeks we would have already seen nice steeply increasing slope.
Another point is that anecdotally hospitalizations in SA were shorter and often people tested positive after being admitted because of something else than COVID.
Those dates'll be 24 November and 26 November for non-USA (etc) peoples.
Thank goodness bad things didn't happen in the earlier-in-the-year months like 7/6 or 6/7, for example.
I saw some charts out of South Africa today showing that deaths are starting to rise with a three week delay. I'm optimistic that Omicron is less severe, but it's also possible that it's just taking a little longer than expected to start killing people.
Yeah deaths have been creeping up for the last week, hospitalizations for the last two and a half weeks. Hospitalizations are actually now at about 1/3 of the Delta peak. This is all roughly consistent with the timeline for previous strains (hospitalizations lag cases by about 10 days, deaths lag hospitalizations by about 2 weeks). The specific growth rates are a bit lower than what would be expected based on how quickly cases went up, though.
I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.
They might be, but the fact that the case rate is now falling means that whatever increase is seen in deaths will be very short-lived. That is something to be thankful for, since Delta has been killing large numbers of people worldwide over a very long period of time.
I can't find the ones I saw before, but the OWID charts show that deaths in South Africa are still rising, and Omicron case counts just started rising 3 weeks ago, so I'm still holding my breath. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string.
On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death chart you can clearly see the graph shifted away from the word "average".
By the same reasoning, the death count could still spike albeit not as high.
7-day average graphs are pretty misleading when you have a new variant that grows at the rate that Omicron does. You might have no Omicron at all at the start of the seven day period and majority Omicron by the end of it, at which point the 7-day average really doesn't mean anything useful.
That graph is also incapable of clearly showing that deaths didn’t budge even if that actually is the case. The stroke on the deaths line is like half the total height indicated when the cases started to surge. Based on that terrible graph deaths could have tripled since cases started to surge.
This isn't unexpected though: Besides a much higher vaccination rate COVID-19 has been doing the rounds now for two years and at some point the people that were highly susceptible will have simply died off. The remainder of the population may deal with current strains better or worse depending on what differences those strains bring to the table, and not all of those differences may end up targeting the same populations.
The people who were killed last winter can’t be killed again. They were definitionally the most susceptible and we haven’t replaced that demographic. You can’t naively compare the two waves without a control since they effect very different populations. In other words, if you ran the same experiment backwards, you could plausible get the same results.
1. The quip was that people who don't want to get vaccinated will get immunized through infection. Yes, using "vaccinated" in this context ("the variant that will vaccinate") is not proper usage of the term unless we allow the interpretation that vaccines are milder than the disease and Omicron might be milder than Delta.
2. "obscure, experimental, for older strains": Look, the vaccines are not obscure. Billions had them. Experimental: Sure. Much as not getting vaccinated is. Remember, we haven't seen that virus before. Older Strains: Turns out protection against severe effects is still strong. I'd say experimentally you're better off partially immunized with one of the well-known vaccines than when waiting around for one of the variants to catch you naive.
GP meant that they will just get infected and thereby acquire a degree of immunity, with higher risk of death than the vaccine, but (hopefully) not as high as with previous variants.
I think the parent meant that people who had not gotten a vaccine will get omicron, which is hopefully mild, and will hopefully provide good protection. So they probably should have used immunize vs vaccinate.
I think a lot of the panic can effectively be ignored if you're a bit savvy technically and follow some benchmarks.
I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red:
- RT > 1
- Cases/100k > 10
- Test Positivity > 5%
- ICU Usage > 85%
If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my social activities. This seemed about right to me for Delta. For Omicron, I'm holding steady with that strategy for now, but if it turns out that Omicron isn't as severe for unvaccinated people, I might relax the strategy to only look at ICU usage.
What's been interesting over the past six months is that it has tended to turn red when everyone was partying, and it'd turn green again when people were still freaked out.
At any rate, it means I can ignore a lot of the rhetoric, because if Omicron subsides quickly, it just means my benchmark will turn green sooner.
lots of people following that advice would create a bullwhip effect actually.
instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doesn't (exceptions like a holiday family gathering would still need to be handled exceptionally).
[0]: i'd suggest 'overall health' is the more accurate (if more vague) factor, but weight tends to inversely correlate with general health (overweight ==> weaker immune system, less efficient pulmonary/cardiovascular system, lower muscle tone, more visceral fat, higher diabetes risk, etc.).
My own personal health is such that I wouldn't have to be so conservative if I were thinking only of myself. But Covid isn't just symptomatic, it's also contagious, as in, I can pass it to others who may not be able to handle it as well as I can, including those that aren't merely antivax. So the idea is more that if Covid is doubling at some rate, I limit my social activity so as not to contribute to the spread.
that's factored in as 'sociability'. rather than limiting social activity, the exceptional mitigation could be to distance or wear a mask in indoor social situations (but no need to do so otherwise in most public spaces). you could also test beforehand if that was warranted (like visiting with elderly relatives).
I added the original source so you can explore in more detail. You can see that in previous spikes there was a short delay, but in general they rose in tandem. All evidence points to Omicron as far less lethal than Delta.
The chart towards the bottom of this page [1] provides another source.
Like others my initial reaction was “deaths lag” but upon closer inspection the data is more nuanced: While deaths do lag, in previous waves deaths had risen substantially by the time cases peaked, but with omicron in South Africa cases have already peaked but deaths have barely risen. This could be partly because the omicron wave has peaked faster (~3 weeks) than previous waves (~1 month or more), partly because the population has more immunity, and partly because omicron is less severe?
I’m not sure yet. All in all, I’m optimistic but will wait another week or two to be convinced.
Hospitalization lags cases, and deaths lag hospitalization.
So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure.
In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).
Agreed, if any major US markets reintroduce restrictions, I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out in favor of some hardcore health gambler like De Santis.
I played along, now they’re done.
edit: the responder assumed something that wasn’t said, and then wrote an essay about something thats not happening and an example from Mississippi. Maybe to save time from having a natural flow of conversation, maybe its what they actually beleive. Either way this is called a strawman argument.
> I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out.
Am I correctly understanding that you intend to move to a different region for the sole purpose of voting against restrictions that otherwise would not apply to you? You’re literally trying to be a problematic immigrant.
I remember when I was in college a bunch of people did exactly this. They registered for residency in the state solely so they could vote a single issue in a state election. Specifically they registered so they could vote for Mississippi to keep the confederate flag as part of the state flag. So you’re in great company.
Honestly, isn’t the whole “state’s rights” thing about telling other people to fuck off and let them manage themselves? And here you are thinking you should meddle in someone else’s self-governance.
Jurisdictions set their own rules for time of residency before being allowed to vote (e.g., registration X days before an election, Y days of the past Z days in the district, etc). Some people do decide where to live based on political considerations. If they are voting in accordance to the rules set by the relevant jurisdictions, I don't see a problem. This happens on "both sides."
I will note that it's easier to break the rules and commit voter fraud when you can vote by mail. In person voting at least requires that you be physically present on Election Day. I moved to California and got voting materials from whence I came. I did not elect to commit voter fraud and vote, but I could have pretty easily.
> I will note that it's easier to break the rules and commit voter fraud when you can vote by mail. In person voting at least requires that you be physically present on Election Day.
Haven’t most (all?) jurisdictions supported vote by Mail for absentee ballots since a long time ago? All that vote by mail has actually changed is that people can vote from their homes.
I’ve usually voted by mail a few cycles before COVID. Previously it would depend on jurisdiction. In the jurisdictions I’ve lived in, the voter would have to request a ballot well ahead of the election and sometimes claim some allowable hardship, such as an illness that confines them to their home.
This is the first year I’ve gotten election material I didn’t request. I had forgotten to deregister, but the crazy thing is the post office told them I had moved because they forwarded a previous letter. They then sent me more material at the new forwarded address in another state.
I don’t think this is nefarious, mostly incompetence. I think fraud happens, always has. Voting by mail probably increases opportunistic fraud. It probably also increases voter participation, so maybe it’s worth it in that sense, not sure. However, I think we need to have rock-solid verifiable and trustworthy elections, even if it’s inconvenient and the fraud it is meant to prevent is theoretical (hacked voting machines, other schemes). It’s very unhealthy for a democracy when large fractions of the population distrust the results. We’ve had both major political parties suggest electoral fraud/shenanigans multiple times over the past 20 years. It’s bad stuff.
> It’s very unhealthy for a democracy when large fractions of the population distrust the results.
I fully agree with that. I also think it’s unhealthy for democracy when large swaths of the population feels disenfranchised, though, and there is a lot of that sort of shenanigans going on. I think the push against vote by mail is a mostly a 1)scheme to disenfranchise more voters, and 2) stir up unfounded BS about fraud.
It’s well established that high turnout favors democrats. And it’s well established that vote by mail increases turnout.
one thing that isn't communicated very much is ICU capacity goes up and down with need. "ICU at 98%" means it's 98% at that point in time, ICU capacity can be added as needed up to a point. In the other direction a hospital can be at 50% ICU capacity, decide they can dial back ICU beds and then percent util jumps even though they may have fewer ICU patients. Hospitals likely have a target ICU utilization and add/remove beds to hit that target as much as possible.
But I’m still stuck on why. What is the point in getting yourself involved in something that doesn’t affect you personally? Why is it worth getting yourself involved with someone else’s self governance?
Its almost as if I live in and am registered to vote one of the few major counties and states that are prone to reintroduce restrictions, and am not currently physically there right now.
The goal being that there would eventually be one less county and state that would consider restrictions.
The plot doesn't show that. You're looking at the moving average which doesn't move much, but the underlying data (daily, presumably) shows a drastic increase in the last one or two data points, in line with the expected lag time.
Others have already pointed out the other major issue with your comment, that the situation in South Africa doesn't transfer to many other places in the world due to the exceptionally high pre-existing immunity rate there.
One report [1] (of many now) about Omicron being less severe than Delta:
"Overall, we find evidence of a reduction in the risk of hospitalisation for Omicron relative to Delta
infections, averaging over all casesin the study period. The extent of reduction is sensitive to the inclusion
criteria used for cases and hospitalisation, being in the range 20-25% when using any attendance at
hospital as the endpoint, and 40-45% when using hospitalisation lasting 1 day or longer or hospitalisations
with the ECDS discharge field recorded as “admitted” as the endpoint (Table 1)"
A Japanese study showed that Omicron is reproducing 70 times faster in the bronchi but 10 times slower in the lungs than Delta.
That's why it is giving less lung problems and therefore doesn't make people as ill as Delta.
One of the questions asked early on with COVID19 was how we managed to end the Spanish Flu 100 years ago without vaccines. When I saw this question posted it was typically met with shrugs and "not sure".
I think Omicron offers a possible explanation. An even more infectious variant with lower mortality should out-compete the deadly variant over time. After a few mutations like that it should be no worse than the seasonal flu--which has its own death toll each year, remember.
People come up with endless excuses to remain hysterical. There will never be enough evidence to show omicron is less severe. There is always some excuse as to why some data should be discarded or is not applicable.
But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all.
Some people just want the world to continue burning.
People want to believe the headlines that confirm their prior beliefs, when if you read the actual research reports your will find that there is still just a lot of uncertainty on the question of intrinsic severity.
Those that want to report that omicron is milder focus on overall stats and average symptoms, and gloss over confounding factors.
Those that want to report that it’s just as severe as delta seem to be just picking up the status quo of poor science journalism, and equating “insufficient evidence” with “conclusive there’s no difference”.
This preprint from today out of SA lays out some prospective good news, but still with a lot of uncertainty over how much the lower severity is intrinsic vs mediated by prior infection/vaccination. And there are plenty of limitations, not least of which that their study only includes confirmed omicron infections up to the end of November (they study hospitalizations, and even had to prune their dataset because some patients are still in hospital).
There is just legitimately not enough data yet to answer the questions that most need answering.
I hope omicron is a gateway to the virus becoming less and deadly until it's essentially like the common cold.
But it seems unwise to be certain that will be what happens. Worst case scenario is omicron running wild mutates into something much more lethal and a bit more contagious.
With a variety of uncertainties imaginable, it's understandable that authorities are currently taking omicron as a serious threat even if it seem like there's a significant chance it will be a "good thing" as you say.
I don't think there is any panic surrounding omicron and deaths. The panic is around whether omicron has an extreme effect where lots of mild and moderate disease happens in a 2 week period. So saying "look it's mild stop panicking" isn't really correct. If Omicron has even a tenth of the cases the delta wave had, but concentrated in a smaller period of time, it could be just as bad or worse.
Hindsight is 20:20. It's easy to say after the fact once you've got the data, but I think the response was perfectly justified when an unknown strain was tearing through the population and it would be over a month until we start to see the physiological effects
Just because you're presenting a more optimistic narrative based on two charts without context doesn't mean the panic is absurd. There's a lot of uncertainty that could end up the wrong way with potentially devastating effects.
Genuine question as I haven’t been following COVID news closely. What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID? Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
Long term effects? It hasn't even been known to exist for a whole month.
Look around this thread and you will find many links to data that indicates Omicron might have less severe outcomes, but it's really still a bit early to really have confidence in that data because there are a lot of confounding factors.
My current Best Guess from reading Reliable Internet Sources(tm):
> What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID?
Hospitalization could be about the same. While we see decreased hospitalisations in South Africa, the assumption is that this is due to widespread immunity from exposure to earlier waves and vaccinations. For the last two weeks, Omicron has been hitting populations that have higher shares of naive subjects. Now the first results on hospitalizations are coming in. Refreshing my tabs constantly :-)
I assume that long-term damage is related to immediate severity, so it's likely not going to be worse. But I'm out on a twig here.
> Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
Suggestive evidence of mildness is being discussed. No conclusions.
For us young people (probably most everyone on here), the fear is not and has not been death for some time. The fear is long COVID, which remains poorly understood.
3 day average is only 48 deaths per day in all of South Africa. We are at the 3 week mark. If Omicron was half as deadly as Delta we'd be seeing a corresponding spike as we saw the initial burst of cases weeks ago. We're not, it's a slight uptick. Another week and we can be quite confident.
Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all.
https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it.
1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...