I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true.
Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.
I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
A place where it hit exponential levels with really bad results is here in NY at the beginning. We had no precautions, testing, or vaccines in place yet, and hospitals were overwhelmed. It was honestly a scary time. That was where we started "flattening the curve". Now with vaccines available if there are surges and they are not literally building hospitals on fields like they were near me that is something we have to just live with. COVID will never hit 0 cases. People will still be hospitalized and occasionally die of COVID as was always the case with winter flu seasons.
Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.
We are currently sitting at at total of over 800,000 COVID deaths in the US and 1,500 COVID deaths per day, which is roughly where it’s been since September 1st. That’s approximately an additional half a million dead people per year.
So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.
hospitals werent overwhelmed in New York, we didnt even use the hospital ship. Also the primary reason our numbers were high was because of the errors of putting sick people in senior homes.
It wasn't a cakewalk but it was nowhere the nightmares of many other places.
Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.
You're right, but there are a number of factors at play here.
First and foremost, we can only make predictions based upon the data we have. The data we have is mostly based upon people going for voluntary testing. Given the variability in symptoms that motivate testing, varying levels of awareness to potential exposure, varying willingness to get tested, and the availability of testing, the number of known exposures will make it look like we're in an exponential growth phase even when things are tapering off. It is hard to blame public health organizations for accepting this data at face value since the potential consequences of not doing so are extremely bleak.
The other consideration is that people will modify their behaviour based upon perceived risk, whether or not restrictions are imposed. People will tend to comply with restrictions, go about life as normal, follow some sort of middle path, or impose tighter restrictions upon themselves. It takes a truly special person to put themselves into a position of greater risk. Even then, there is a good chance that they are doing little more than translating one high risk circumstance into another (more or less balancing out the growth). We are facing a situation where scientists can make predictions based upon what is known, e.g. the outcome of restrictions, or making predictions based upon anticipated behaviour. Given there is not enough data to model anticipated behaviour, the natural response is to rely upon models that use expected behaviour (e.g. compliance with restrictions or no response). Since the average actual response will prefer over compliance, more bleak predictions are made.
Finally, everyone has a different understanding of life now as compared to life before the pandemic. I remember when the coronavirus first caught my attention: it was when major U.S. universities started shutting down. I remember when I first started taking it seriously: it was when my provincial government issued a shelter in place style order. Since that time, I have paid attention to what is happening and thinking about how I should respond. Sometimes it is in an acute manner. Sometimes is in a cursory manner. Either way, I am more likely to notice and respond preemptively to outbreaks. I suspect that many, if not most, people are the same even if their only actions are stocking up to prepare for the worse. Again, this will affect outcomes.
In real world I got critized badly even for pointing out media only showing "numbers of infected" and walk into any hospitals now one will see significant less patients than during the peak.
We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.
And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).
My mom had a heart attack about a month ago and while the hospital system in Seattle isn't hitting the redline of having to triage, the level of care you get is definitely lower than what I've seen in the past and its very busy all the time. You're going to have to put on your best "can I talk to your manager" level of aggressively trying to get through the system. Everyone there is overloaded and burned out from what I could see. Normal rates of influenza in the winter don't do this.
I remember Trump saying 50K people die from flu each year. Maybe slightly lower maybe slightly higher but let's use that number. We may be losing that many or maybe at least half that much every month despite 70% vaccination, despite masks, despite many companies still being remote. Basically the vulnerable population is smaller but the death rate is very likely an order of magnitude higher even if you consider the flu season is not a full year.
There is a lot to unpack but I doubt you are as right as you think you are. For instance in new variant outbreaks there ate usually harsher responses than for known variant outbreaks, so it is very difficult to identity the real infectivity.
But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.
In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.
I can’t tell what your point is but nothing here seems to contradict anything I said. It’s just some facts about diseases.
I didn’t say every one was going to survive omicron. I said the spread was unlikely to be materially higher than its predecessor and likely have a lower negative impact.
A disease that spreads twice as fast is unlikely to infect twice as many people (over the long term). A disease that causes fewer adverse effects, let’s say half as often, needs to, by definition, infect twice as many people over the long run in order to cause the same amount of harm.
As a dumb mental model, if omicron is 30% less dangerous, then omicron needs to infect 42% more people to be as harmful to society. That is very difficult to achieve, especially given our collective immunity achieved so far. I would say there is little chance of this occurring.
COVID isn't particularly deadly. The selection pressure that can cause a virus to become weaker is mediated by the virus dying off in the corpses it creates. People aren't dropping like flies from COVID, so that selection pressure isn't there, and the virus is free to mutate into more virulent forms. There's no reason to expect a relatively mild, yet still deadly, virus to become weaker, especially if our medical infrastructure keeps people alive that would've otherwise died from infection.
Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.
At the start of the pandemic, when downloadable data became available, I started charting it every day. The curves for many countries were uncannily exponential. Of course I knew that those curves had to tip over at some point, but I decided that I would use the exponential growth curve as a baseline and watch for deviations from it.
I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.
It’s not uncanny, it is, literally, how disease spreads. It ceases to be exponential when the people infected people are exposed to are no longer all susceptible because they themselves had been infected. At least in simplest terms.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Of course there is a limited pool of people to infect. And various effects can cause infections to spread in multiple waves even far from herd immunity.
And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.
1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad
2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right now.
The big problem is that people think an increase in the spreading rate will cause an exponentially higher number of infected. But it won’t. The model is not appropriate.
> it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower
Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.
You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.
Maybe you should, I dunno, ask why your government hasn’t built up healthcare capacity instead of forcing some dystopian “new normal” nonsense on people?
what is the point of those lockdowns when 1. practically everybody is vaccinated and thus gets no symptoms or only light disease (and according to the latest science - superimmunity after that) and 2. the delta's and now omicron's transmissibility is so high among both - vaccinated
as well as unvaccinated - that everybody susceptible to it (i.e. 30-70% of population, and anecdotally it seems to me that for covid it is on the lower end, ie. like 1/3rd) will get it (or omicron++) in the near future anyway (and the thing becoming endemic like flu).
I mean technically the lockdowns possibly make sense as a way to control the spread until a spread controlling vaccine (the existing mRNA ones aren't such) is widely applied - ie. that seems to be the case in China where initial spread was effectively controlled and they use inactivated covid virus vaccine instead of mRNA - though we don't know for sure because Chinese government info can be very different from reality.
This is of course true, but I'd imagine the counterargument and concern is that healthcare runs out of capacity well before the growth slows to a sub-exponential run.
If you're right, that would be disappointing, because it means there's less immunity gained than I was hoping, for the (relatively small) amount of hospitalization we've seen. And I (uneducated on the matter) would expect that if it's not really getting around that much, it would not displace delta.
But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.
I don't know how well this relates, but the topic of logistic growth (exp. growth with a limit) is common in undergraduate differential equations classes. I guess it can work well for simpler models.
What you're saying is supported by the data, but do you (or does anyone) know why infections slow down when they do? I can't think of any intuitive reason for it, and haven't been able to find an explanation why the waves crash, so to speak.
My guess is the non-uniform nature of the graph of human contacts, which is probably made up of several densely-connected clusters each with relatively weaker links to other clusters.
E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.
So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.
On the subject of oversimplified exponential models, we don't even need covid data to know this to be true. The fact that there is a duration of an individual case being contagious is enough to make that obviously incorrect.
That's not right, you can build a maximally simplistic SIR model with a finite infectious period. That will initially display approximately exponential growth, and slow down as acquired immunity increases.
> it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off
While this does appear plausible, doesn't this depend to some degree on what exactly is the immunity conferred by vaccination or past infection? If vaccines and past infections are effective against severity of case/symptoms but ineffective against new/re-infection, then you could still see greater numbers with omicron than even with delta. No?
Indeed. That’s true. But thankfully that’s not in the table, or anything close to it. I only bring that up because it’s the natural conclusion of what will happen if you misunderstand how the exponential growth works.
> Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.
I’ve seen a lot of people saying this. Again, it’s not wrong that deaths are a factor here. But by far, FAR, the largest factor is vaccinations. We should acknowledge this.
You're wrongly assuming that all incidence data of COVID-19 accurately represents its real spread. E.g. it may just be that beyond a point of exponential growth testing ceases to be accurate. The German Robert Koch institute has pointed out many times that there's a hidden incidence number of all actual cases and the official one that represents everyone tested and recorded.
Omicron easily breaks through immunisation (see Norway superspreading event: 60 out of 120 fully vaccinated negative tested people in 3 hours indoors). Question of severity is still open, let's hope for the best.
I wonder how many of these increasing share variants you would expect to observe from just random walk. I.e. how much more infectious does a strain need to be to be measurable.
It depends on many things and will vary wildly by geography. I’m not suggesting this is a population level trend one can safely piggyback on, unvaccinated. If you are unvaccinated in a community with spread, your odds of getting it are likely comparable, plausibly higher, to previous periods.
Look into random graph models. Or exponential random graph models.
Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.
You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.
More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.
It's a bit silly to go "it's less severe" based on death statistics when after two years of Corona waves, there are plain less individuals around for it to kill.
Death of the vulnerable is a thing, which I referenced, but it’s a relatively minor factor compared to vaccinations and immunity build up from past infections. Most people who would die from covid if they caught it did not catch it.
I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.
no viral infection happens in a vaccuum. Each year's seasonal and nonseasonal flu comes on the backs of years of "less people" for it to kill, and people who have gained immune responses to any of its closest relatives, and people who have been immunized, and even humans who have been culled by similar viruses milennia ago during migratory bottlenecks.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise
Every virus infection can turn into a long recovery. There is no proof this is longer for Covid-19.
The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make you tired for months or years.
I am not saying long Covid isn't a thing, but it is not 'special' in any way.
Virus infections can cause damage. Years ago I had an infection that damaged a nerve. So virus infections can leave marks. But most of the time, as with Covid, you will recover from it.
My understanding is that this is still different from other viruses.
So if large swaths of a country get that damage from delta vs omicron vs some future weaker variant, that could have very different public health consequences in the coming decades...
Disclaimer: In tech for over a decade, but once upon a time I did an honours degree in biochemistry, so I'm only maybe half-capable of musing my way through some of these papers :)
From what I've seen there seems to be a growing body of evidence that "long COVID" is very much overblown. Eg. See this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most of the symptoms disappear. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
Those with severe respiratory symptoms (ARDS) sometimes have very long recoveries. But this is distinct from vague, self-diagnosed “long covid” in the absence of ARDS, which seems to mostly be hysteria.
Ok I know it's off topic but I have got to ask, what is up with archive.md links? I have never in my life successfully loaded an archive.md URL. I either get straight up DNS errors or very occasionally I see a spinner that never finishes loading. Yet they must work for others because they're constantly being posted here.
Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking?
I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?
Does it even matter? Covid is here forever. Doesn't matter if the next variant is "good" or "worse" or "horrible". It's here forever. We cannot continue playing this restriction / mandate game any longer. We have something like a dozen vaccines globally, multiple treatments, etc. We've had 2 years for government's to build healthcare capacity to handle any "surge" we get and it is no longer fair to the public to keep blaming them any time some hospital gets full.
It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.
Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.
And that theory about viruses becoming less deadly isn't an universal rule in the first place. For example, smallpox and measles never got less deadly. In many cases, the virus becoming less deadly is because the population acquired immunity from vaccinations or previous infection, not because the virus evolved that way.
In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.
It does seem to be true of respiratory viruses though. Asiatic flu is still around, probably HCoV-OC43, now a nearly harmless common cold virus. Spanish flu is still dangerous like all flus, but not the killer that it was.
It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.
I wonder if there's extra selective pressure among relatively smart creatures like us. Supposing there's a really nasty disease that manifests after a week, and we're contagious for a few days before. Eventually we'll get wind of it and start being more careful. If it's a less nasty virus, we just won't care enough and let it spread.
There's been no time to have real, peer reviewed science to make a definitive conclusion either way. All we have is preliminary data which seems to be trending towards the positive.
The sensationalist flip-flopping media reports have been mostly unhelpful. I've been swinging between "this is wishful thinking and it's going to be really bad" to "this is overly dramatic and it's going to be ok" for the past few weeks. I've been feeling more of the latter recently, but I'm still not 100% certain. Call it cautious optimism.
There is a recently released preprint that concludes that omicron-infected have an 80% reduced likelihood to be hospitalised compared to non-omicron infections.
This paper is interesting and I agree seems like good news. It was posted yesterday BTW.
There is a wrinkle though: the 80% reduction in hospitalizations is compared to this summers delta infections, but they found no difference in hospitalizations compared to non-omicron infections this November (the time period of the study).
They have some discussion of maybe if that’s due to prior immunity or something, but it seems like things are still just not clear, and more data is coming down the pipe.
There was a brief spike in daily new cases that was extremely high, then it lowered. It will take more than a day or two to know if it is truly subsiding as fast as it’s growing, and what the meaning of that spike was, so this seems premature.
"case counts" are also a really bad way for measuring. Media likes to use it because they love sensationalizing things but if we already know this is a "mild" variant with little to no increase in hospitalizations then using "case counts" is really poor unit of measurement.
Media reports about case counts are useful because they precede hospitalizations by days or weeks. This allows the risk averse to modify their behavior sooner.
All the reports about how severe omicron is say they are preliminary. It’s just more jumping of the gun by news agencies. We’ll know more in a week or two
I think we should take advantage of Omicron right now and let it rip through the population as it's most likely less deadly. Not doing so could be catastrophic and lead to more deaths in the future if the virus mutates to be more deadly.
Yes, but couldn't it also be catastrophic if 1) the virus mutates to be even less deadly and infectious or 2) Omicron has long-term, currently unseen consequences?
I mean, not saying your strategy wouldn't be the better strategy in the end, just think it's hard to know the risk equation at this moment.
edit: not sure why someone downvoted this, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you did
Readit News
Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.
I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.
So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.
It wasn't a cakewalk but it was nowhere the nightmares of many other places.
Or Italy where they had to call in the military to cart away corpses:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/italian-army-moves-coronavir...
Dead Comment
First and foremost, we can only make predictions based upon the data we have. The data we have is mostly based upon people going for voluntary testing. Given the variability in symptoms that motivate testing, varying levels of awareness to potential exposure, varying willingness to get tested, and the availability of testing, the number of known exposures will make it look like we're in an exponential growth phase even when things are tapering off. It is hard to blame public health organizations for accepting this data at face value since the potential consequences of not doing so are extremely bleak.
The other consideration is that people will modify their behaviour based upon perceived risk, whether or not restrictions are imposed. People will tend to comply with restrictions, go about life as normal, follow some sort of middle path, or impose tighter restrictions upon themselves. It takes a truly special person to put themselves into a position of greater risk. Even then, there is a good chance that they are doing little more than translating one high risk circumstance into another (more or less balancing out the growth). We are facing a situation where scientists can make predictions based upon what is known, e.g. the outcome of restrictions, or making predictions based upon anticipated behaviour. Given there is not enough data to model anticipated behaviour, the natural response is to rely upon models that use expected behaviour (e.g. compliance with restrictions or no response). Since the average actual response will prefer over compliance, more bleak predictions are made.
Finally, everyone has a different understanding of life now as compared to life before the pandemic. I remember when the coronavirus first caught my attention: it was when major U.S. universities started shutting down. I remember when I first started taking it seriously: it was when my provincial government issued a shelter in place style order. Since that time, I have paid attention to what is happening and thinking about how I should respond. Sometimes it is in an acute manner. Sometimes is in a cursory manner. Either way, I am more likely to notice and respond preemptively to outbreaks. I suspect that many, if not most, people are the same even if their only actions are stocking up to prepare for the worse. Again, this will affect outcomes.
Dead Comment
We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.
And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).
But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.
In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.
I didn’t say every one was going to survive omicron. I said the spread was unlikely to be materially higher than its predecessor and likely have a lower negative impact.
A disease that spreads twice as fast is unlikely to infect twice as many people (over the long term). A disease that causes fewer adverse effects, let’s say half as often, needs to, by definition, infect twice as many people over the long run in order to cause the same amount of harm.
As a dumb mental model, if omicron is 30% less dangerous, then omicron needs to infect 42% more people to be as harmful to society. That is very difficult to achieve, especially given our collective immunity achieved so far. I would say there is little chance of this occurring.
Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.
I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.
That’s the big assumption in R0.
And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.
1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad
2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right now.
The big problem is that people think an increase in the spreading rate will cause an exponentially higher number of infected. But it won’t. The model is not appropriate.
Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.
You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.
I mean technically the lockdowns possibly make sense as a way to control the spread until a spread controlling vaccine (the existing mRNA ones aren't such) is widely applied - ie. that seems to be the case in China where initial spread was effectively controlled and they use inactivated covid virus vaccine instead of mRNA - though we don't know for sure because Chinese government info can be very different from reality.
But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Modeling_ear...
E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.
So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.
The exponential part is easy and that works, but it's more complicated with isolation of the infectious, refractory periods, etc
While this does appear plausible, doesn't this depend to some degree on what exactly is the immunity conferred by vaccination or past infection? If vaccines and past infections are effective against severity of case/symptoms but ineffective against new/re-infection, then you could still see greater numbers with omicron than even with delta. No?
Still not forever exponential, of course.
Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.
Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.
You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.
More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.
The graph of human social contacts is not even close to uniformly random, so it makes sense that simplistic formulas would not work.
I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.
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...
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.
Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (WHO) https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE
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]
[1]https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1473642495095496704 [2]https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.
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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.
The denominator is higher than if, let’s say, delta was let loose in the same population at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
> https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
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.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Dead Comment
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.
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.).
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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)"
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
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.
But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all.
Some people just want the world to continue burning.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes from a low base, but they have still done multiple doublings.
Fortunately they are on track to only rise 50% this week.
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Deleted Comment
This time last year it was over 400.
Dead Comment
Literally all data has shown that omicron is a non-issue for triple vaxxed individuals, with a baseline being the standard flu.
If someone has data showing that triple vaxxed people are dying at rates similar to March 2020 I’d love to see.
If someone vaxxed and boosted dies of COVID, the media spins it as "Look how deadly..."
If someone is on Ivermectine and dies of COVID, they're villified as spreaders.
As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise
The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make you tired for months or years.
I am not saying long Covid isn't a thing, but it is not 'special' in any way.
Virus infections can cause damage. Years ago I had an infection that damaged a nerve. So virus infections can leave marks. But most of the time, as with Covid, you will recover from it.
But isn't COVID novel in the damage it poses to microvascular systems (importantly brain and lungs), compared to other viruses? E.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7556303/
My understanding is that this is still different from other viruses.
So if large swaths of a country get that damage from delta vs omicron vs some future weaker variant, that could have very different public health consequences in the coming decades...
Disclaimer: In tech for over a decade, but once upon a time I did an honours degree in biochemistry, so I'm only maybe half-capable of musing my way through some of these papers :)
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
Deleted Comment
I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?
It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.
Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.
Move on.
In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.
It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.
The sensationalist flip-flopping media reports have been mostly unhelpful. I've been swinging between "this is wishful thinking and it's going to be really bad" to "this is overly dramatic and it's going to be ok" for the past few weeks. I've been feeling more of the latter recently, but I'm still not 100% certain. Call it cautious optimism.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...
Of course, it's not yet peer-reviewed, and doesn't model the possible outcomes based on the conclusions, but it certainly seems to be great news.
There is a wrinkle though: the 80% reduction in hospitalizations is compared to this summers delta infections, but they found no difference in hospitalizations compared to non-omicron infections this November (the time period of the study).
They have some discussion of maybe if that’s due to prior immunity or something, but it seems like things are still just not clear, and more data is coming down the pipe.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...
https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
This is direct from the SA government including archives of all the daily data for the duration of the pandemic.
Pay attention to the data lag. But it isn't _that_ laggy.
I mean, not saying your strategy wouldn't be the better strategy in the end, just think it's hard to know the risk equation at this moment.
edit: not sure why someone downvoted this, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you did