Wow: "There were two flights from South Africa that landed in Amsterdam late last night. Upon arrival, all 600 passengers were tested on the tarmac and 61 tests came back positive. A 10% prevalence rate on a flight is unbelievably high. [...] Especially given all passengers were negative before take off."
Hopefully there was some contact between them before the flight to help explain that.
The comment that passengers were "negative before take-off" is largely false. Only non-vaccinated passengers were required to show a negative PCR test (max 48h old) or RAG test (max 24h old), vaccinated passengers were allowed to board without any restrictions.
And receiving a negative test does not rule out being positive. The false negative rates - even for pcr - are high double digits (and depend on the phase of the infection). Lots of good research proving it, and yet not widely publicized.
From the local Dutch rules and news: Not all required testing. Fully vaccinated EU citizens could be on that flight without being tested. They changed the rules to require testing for everyone after these two flights were already in the air.
Out of the 61 positive tests, today 13 were confirmed to be the omicron variant.
Based on…? I’ve been on 4 Delta flights in the last 3 months and the flight attendants were militant about masks. They told a woman in front of me on one flight that if they had to tell her to keep it above her nose a third time she was going to be banned from future delta flights.
My suspicion is falsified test results. Since there is no control over lab results nor any verification, falsifying test results is trivial. ...easier than even getting the test even if you think you are negative.
This is why travel bans need to be much much more rapid in response to outbreaks.
An interesting thought experiment is, what's the correct public health response if it appears that Omicron is more contagious but less serious than Delta, and catching Omicron is mutually exclusive with catching Delta or any other strain.
I know I wouldn't want to be the public health people trying to wrestle with the pros and cons of response in this kind of setup, must be really tricky to get things even close to right.
Those are big "ifs", and especially "catching Omicron is mutually exclusive with catching Delta or any other strain" seems a bit unlikely. Namely, if there's a mutated strain which is resistant to vaccines targeting the previous strain, then it also implies that it's likely that the immune response from one won't fit the other much, just as previously with different strains of flu allowing reinfection.
I mean the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission/infection for Delta (or Alpha) either, it just makes the symptoms milder.
Edit: For whomever downvoted, here you go:
> Prior to the emergence of the delta variant, it was reported that the risk of symptomatic cases in household contacts of vaccinated cases was about 50% lower than that among household contacts of unvaccinated cases(22). However, the impact of vaccination on reducing transmission in the context of the more transmissible delta variant appears to be lower(23).
Even if Omicron is less serious than delta, we can't strictly consider it harmless. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a new deadlier variant created if Omicron keep spreading.
Yep exactly part of the problem, if such a thing occurred you'd be weighing off a short term apparent gain with a very real risk of it leading to more problems down the line.
Interesting, but not especially relevant. Omicron has biologists worried because it appears to be different enough that it may be able to evade the immune defenses that we have to the existing SARS-Cov-2 strains. The thing they are afraid of is that you can catch both viruses, and get the disease twice.
Your first statement is based on a misquote from a health official, and your second quote is false. If indeed there is some antibody evasion then you could catch both variants at once or sequentially.
I kind of skimmed the article, was there a mention of the mortality or long-haul rate that I might have missed? Since viruses mutate to become less deadly with time, we would expect later variants to be less dangerous than earlier ones. Without knowing the mortality rate of Omicron it's hard to do any useful risk analysis.
The effect that viruses mutate to become less deadly over time only counts for a specific subset of viruses.
The evolutionary goal for a virus is to have more copies of itself. Killing a patient 3 days after infecting them is a poor strategy for this, so the only option for these kinds of super deadly viruses is either kill a population outright and die out with the population (dead people don't spread viruses), OR if the virus is lucky it will mutate into a less deadly variant to be able to spread to more people.
The specific subset of viruses that will evolve to become less deadly have two properties:
1) They kill quickly
2) They kill most people
The problem with Covid is that it doesn't have these properties. It's only deadly for approximately 1% of the population, so it will continue spreading even if it ends up killing the host, because for every 100 people only 1 has stopped spreading.
The other problem is that Covid doesn't kill quickly, if I recall correctly, most people die after week 2-3. Covid will spread even before the host is symptomatic, so again there is no evolutionary advantage to mutate away this trait.
1) if people with mild or no symptoms keep moving among the population, but people with severe symptoms stay at home, then there would be a strong evolutionary pressure to cause milder symptoms
2) "dead people don't spread viruses"...UNLESS it's a zombie virus
Viruses don't necessarily become less deadly over time. That's just a frequent side effect of natural selection. Living people without debilitating symptoms are better spreaders. But the COVID virus already tends to be spreadable before the illness peaks.
But yeah, other than the virus flaming out completely, the second best scenario is an extremely mild variant dominating and yielding immunity to all the others.
I tend to disagree. I think we have it wrong when we think of infected or not. I think the reality of it is many slight exposures over periods of time where people's bodies have higher immunity and lower immunity towards things. For example if I am breathing covid at a rate of 5% of everyone else and I don't get "infected" but I get a few particles that replicate but don't take hold - I probably will get labeled one of the "asymptomic" folks. Compare that to someone that get's a mouth full of it - will probably get sick because of the viral load.
When there's a crap-ton of it in the air, even without a mask say at a public park where you're standing far away from someone - someone's covid particles are probably being inhaled - again, since the virus is now "everywhere" it offers a chance for more people to get that slight infection that doesn't take hold. And I say slight because while there's a lot, it's spread over a a large area due to wind, so it's like getting a 1% infection instead of the 100% indoor infection.
It's too early to say, but the on-the-ground anecdotal reports suggest it is not particularly severe or lethal, based on observations so far. But it will take weeks to start knowing about mortality and months to see evidence of long illness.
The best case scenario is that the mutations that make it more infectious also make it less virulent/lethal, and the super-early evidence suggests that is at least possibly true of this variant.
Do predators mutate to the point where they live in symbiosis with prey? No. Not always. While symbiosis exists it is erroneous to think that this is always the outcome. In fact, in biology cooperation is just a side effect. Competition is the norm.
Every biological entity on the face of the earth only cooperates because it helps them better compete.
Viruses simply diversify through mutation. They can be more or less infectious, more or less deadly, etc in any combination and selection pressure over the long term tends to lead to less deadly more infectious variants dominating. In the mean time more dangerous variants can do a lot of damage.
What the Spanish Flu, most deaths occurred in the second and third waves from more virulent and deadly variants.
"A 10% prevalence rate on a flight is unbelievably high. Like defies imagination..."
No, it isn't. Past experiments (aimed at measuring the impact of elderberry on cold virus resistance, btw) found about 10% of people on a flight getting infected with a respiratory virus.
It wasn't a coronavirus, but my point is that a respiratory virus spreading to 10% of the people on a flight is so common, the researchers could just pick a normal plane flight and find 10% infection. So, for a virus to spread to 10% of the people on a plane flight is not "unbelievably high", it's apparently not uncommonly seen for other respiratory viruses.
You only test positive on PCR after a few days (at least for the Delta variant). So the infections can't really have happened on the plane, but before. And at that point 10% would be unbelievably high if the people on the plane were all independent and not in previous contact.
It's a bit hard to put this number into context though if you don't know anything about the passengers. It would be much more plausible if e.g. a large part of the passengers were in the same hotel before or something like that.
Unless Omicron is different, which is possible and consistent with other evidence. It's spreading 500% faster than the original strain did; Delta was only 70% faster. The two asymptomatic Hong Kong patients both have sky-high viral loads.
That's why this data is so alarming. Either you've got a 10%+ base rate in the population and they all skipped (or false-negative) a pre-boarding PCR test. Or Omicron spreads fast enough that it can infect 10% of a plane during a 12-hour flight and multiply enough to show up on a PCR test upon landing. Or the 61 cases knew each other beforehand (same hotel, same tour) and it's bad for that travel operator but better for public health, which is why they're trying to get the facts on that.
The study you are linking to was not comparing flying to not flying, only two different groups flying. Consider that the baseline rate of colds in a seven day window (their before travel to after travel survey window) is very high:
When I saw someone with a cold going on the same plane as myself, I could be 100% sure I will get off of the plane with a cold...
So it seems like sensationalising indeed, at least from my anecdotal experience.
Yeah anecdotally I’ve hopped on a couple planes this year where masking is required. Normally my wife and I get sick from the plane. But since we’ve been wearing KN95s the whole time starting when we get to the airport we haven’t been getting sick at all.
If it remains at that number, that's a serious blunder of the testing concepts.
If it turns out that 60ish people went on the same trip, or stayed in the same hotel and subsequently caught a new, even more contagious variant, roughly at the same time, it is easy to assume that they tested negative on departure and positive on arrival. But if they caught it on different occasions, it is highly probable that they did not test negative at all.
This situation seems a lot like two years ago with the CDC saying "there are no confirmed cases in the US", while it looking really likely that the virus has already established itself here and we simply haven't tested for it.
I wish they would just come out and be honest about the situation. It was frustrating two years ago and they're frustratingly silent now too.
I mean, they are saying all they know right? Fauci has come out saying he expects Omicron to be present in the US already, but he is explicit that it is a guess. CDC could formally say it is probably here, but like most large organizations are being conservative with their language.
I only hope if they DO receive word of the variant they make it known quickly. The nature of the PCR assay suggests it is easy to detect.
That's a true statement and does not exclude that undetected cases possibly exist. To claim that CDC are going to be shown to be wrong is what feeds the "See, they tell us different things!" narrative. Of course CDC will say, if and when Omicon appears in the US, that there are detected cases.
I want to agree with you, but I would be very careful not to fall into paranoia. It's easy and destructive.
The CDC is probably silent because they're slow and inefficient, so they have nothing very certain to say. If there's dishonesty, it's not the main theme.
Furthermore, there are talented people at the CDC. Plenty of those.
If they don't get a lot of work or communication done, it's organizational inefficiency.
I don't think they're necessarily being dishonest, just misleading probably unintentionally.
Speaking of paranoia, I think their poor communication led to plenty of paranoia two years ago, and it seems like there's plenty of paranoia now again.
I think being more truthful and communicative would lead to less paranoia, not more.
GP: > This situation seems a lot like two years ago with the CDC saying "there are no confirmed cases in the US"
P: > I would be very careful not to fall into paranoia. It's easy and destructive.
Two years ago, paranoia might have helped. (Although considering how many places are now starting to abandon the zero-COVID goal, it might not have worked forever).
Being slow and inefficient in the middle of a war is the same destructive result as being dishonest or malicious. It still costs lives. It doesn't matter that there was no malicious intent.
> I wish they would just come out and be honest about the situation.
Isn't this honest? You want them to speculate, but what's the point?
Don't we all already know Omicron is likely already here? So what does the CDC add? What we really need to know is how serious it is -- how deadly X how infectious -- and the CDC doesn't know that (yet).
Sequencing efforts are quite decentralized. If it hasn't been detected yet, either organizations haven't reported it to the CDC yet or it's still below the limit of detection.
I believe it is impossible for the government to be honest with the public in anyway. Too many competing interest trying to "manage" the public response from too many angles like Stock Market, Politics, Panic, etc.
They are simply incapable of giving the public the unvarnished truth, as such I think we the public need to be looking to non-governmental sources for the actual truth. This becomes a problem because historically that has been the role of journalism sadly today journalists have the exact same competing interests thus are also incapable of telling the public the truth.
I dont know the solution, but truth is the causality of the current age of information.
Readit News
Hopefully there was some contact between them before the flight to help explain that.
Source (in Dutch): https://nos.nl/l/2407382
Source: https://www.gov.za/covid-19/individuals-and-households/trave...
Out of the 61 positive tests, today 13 were confirmed to be the omicron variant.
It's just security theater, we pretend to obey the rules, and they pretend to check.
This is why travel bans need to be much much more rapid in response to outbreaks.
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Could there be another source for this?
Hasn’t uniformity in test / detection standards been a source in region to region variability in some instances?
I know I wouldn't want to be the public health people trying to wrestle with the pros and cons of response in this kind of setup, must be really tricky to get things even close to right.
Edit: For whomever downvoted, here you go:
> Prior to the emergence of the delta variant, it was reported that the risk of symptomatic cases in household contacts of vaccinated cases was about 50% lower than that among household contacts of unvaccinated cases(22). However, the impact of vaccination on reducing transmission in the context of the more transmissible delta variant appears to be lower(23).
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-11-2021-interim-statement-o...
And/or: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
The evolutionary goal for a virus is to have more copies of itself. Killing a patient 3 days after infecting them is a poor strategy for this, so the only option for these kinds of super deadly viruses is either kill a population outright and die out with the population (dead people don't spread viruses), OR if the virus is lucky it will mutate into a less deadly variant to be able to spread to more people.
The specific subset of viruses that will evolve to become less deadly have two properties:
1) They kill quickly
2) They kill most people
The problem with Covid is that it doesn't have these properties. It's only deadly for approximately 1% of the population, so it will continue spreading even if it ends up killing the host, because for every 100 people only 1 has stopped spreading.
The other problem is that Covid doesn't kill quickly, if I recall correctly, most people die after week 2-3. Covid will spread even before the host is symptomatic, so again there is no evolutionary advantage to mutate away this trait.
2) "dead people don't spread viruses"...UNLESS it's a zombie virus
But yeah, other than the virus flaming out completely, the second best scenario is an extremely mild variant dominating and yielding immunity to all the others.
When there's a crap-ton of it in the air, even without a mask say at a public park where you're standing far away from someone - someone's covid particles are probably being inhaled - again, since the virus is now "everywhere" it offers a chance for more people to get that slight infection that doesn't take hold. And I say slight because while there's a lot, it's spread over a a large area due to wind, so it's like getting a 1% infection instead of the 100% indoor infection.
The best case scenario is that the mutations that make it more infectious also make it less virulent/lethal, and the super-early evidence suggests that is at least possibly true of this variant.
Deaths lag on the order of two months.
Every biological entity on the face of the earth only cooperates because it helps them better compete.
What the Spanish Flu, most deaths occurred in the second and third waves from more virulent and deadly variants.
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No, it isn't. Past experiments (aimed at measuring the impact of elderberry on cold virus resistance, btw) found about 10% of people on a flight getting infected with a respiratory virus.
https://ergo-log.com/elderberries-help-against-colds.html
It wasn't a coronavirus, but my point is that a respiratory virus spreading to 10% of the people on a flight is so common, the researchers could just pick a normal plane flight and find 10% infection. So, for a virus to spread to 10% of the people on a plane flight is not "unbelievably high", it's apparently not uncommonly seen for other respiratory viruses.
It's a bit hard to put this number into context though if you don't know anything about the passengers. It would be much more plausible if e.g. a large part of the passengers were in the same hotel before or something like that.
That's why this data is so alarming. Either you've got a 10%+ base rate in the population and they all skipped (or false-negative) a pre-boarding PCR test. Or Omicron spreads fast enough that it can infect 10% of a plane during a 12-hour flight and multiply enough to show up on a PCR test upon landing. Or the 61 cases knew each other beforehand (same hotel, same tour) and it's bad for that travel operator but better for public health, which is why they're trying to get the facts on that.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6914a5.htm
If it turns out that 60ish people went on the same trip, or stayed in the same hotel and subsequently caught a new, even more contagious variant, roughly at the same time, it is easy to assume that they tested negative on departure and positive on arrival. But if they caught it on different occasions, it is highly probable that they did not test negative at all.
https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/visiti...
Until Omicron was announced there were no current countries on that list as Delta had already spread everywhere.
I wish they would just come out and be honest about the situation. It was frustrating two years ago and they're frustratingly silent now too.
I only hope if they DO receive word of the variant they make it known quickly. The nature of the PCR assay suggests it is easy to detect.
The CDC is probably silent because they're slow and inefficient, so they have nothing very certain to say. If there's dishonesty, it's not the main theme.
Furthermore, there are talented people at the CDC. Plenty of those.
If they don't get a lot of work or communication done, it's organizational inefficiency.
Speaking of paranoia, I think their poor communication led to plenty of paranoia two years ago, and it seems like there's plenty of paranoia now again.
I think being more truthful and communicative would lead to less paranoia, not more.
P: > I would be very careful not to fall into paranoia. It's easy and destructive.
Two years ago, paranoia might have helped. (Although considering how many places are now starting to abandon the zero-COVID goal, it might not have worked forever).
Isn't this honest? You want them to speculate, but what's the point?
Don't we all already know Omicron is likely already here? So what does the CDC add? What we really need to know is how serious it is -- how deadly X how infectious -- and the CDC doesn't know that (yet).
They are simply incapable of giving the public the unvarnished truth, as such I think we the public need to be looking to non-governmental sources for the actual truth. This becomes a problem because historically that has been the role of journalism sadly today journalists have the exact same competing interests thus are also incapable of telling the public the truth.
I dont know the solution, but truth is the causality of the current age of information.
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[1]:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-59450988
To add; Supplement vitamin D, exercise, and eat healthily.
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