Plus, to preemptively address any assumptions that Dr Jetelina may have an optimistic bias, compare her "There is good news" article from 5th January, which is based on what we now know, with her article from 26th November when Omicron (initially called "Nu") was first detected: "New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529" https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-concernin...
At the time, little was known about this new variant except that it was extremely different from all that we had seen before, which would very likely result in escape from prior immunity, and may even lead to more severe disease (or not?). The only definitive silver lining that she found at the time was that 1) the variant could be quickly detected with PCR thanks to its S-gene deletion, 2) it was detected early thanks to South Africa, and 3) vaccines could be quickly adapted if necessary, thanks to mRNA vaccine technology. However, in all other regards, the variant was still very concerning.
In other words, do take her cautious optimism seriously. She's not a wishful thinker. Rather, she is a specialist in the field who works with the data as it becomes available and knows how to interpret it
" We can easily see that in many graphs, but my favorite is below from New York City, showing a clear distinction in hospitalizations among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people"
I don't see this as much here in Ontario. Among the vaccinated as of today there is a 10.10/100k hospitalization status vs 16/100k for the unvaccinated (and 11.9 for one-dose). The hospitalization rate among the vaccinated is climbing quickly. Yes, there's still a gap, but yikes.
ICU is better, though, with a 0.76/100k rate for the vaccinated vs 4.74/100k for the unvaccinated.
This may have to do with different hospitalization and testing criterion, I don't know. But hospitalization here is in full exponential growth and not just among the unvaccinated.
Obviously being vaccinated is still far preferable. I have had 3 doses (1 AstraZeneca and 2 Pfizer) FWIW.
Simpson's Paradox applies here: once you slice by age, the data tells a different story. Even when vaccines are highly effective, the confounding factor that gets lost when you aggregate across ages is that the most vulnerable (the elderly) are also the most vaccinated.
I highly recommend anybody concerned about hospitalization among the vaccinated read this post. It's about Delta hospitalizations in Israel 2021, but we should expect the same effect from Omicron and across countries: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
This still shows a greater than 10x difference in outcomes. Additionally, the "unvacccinated" population includes people naturally vaccinated by virtue of having a previous case.
It could very well evolve into a form that is mild enough and different enough from the vaccine spike that brings the unvaccinated and vaccinated hospitalization rates to convergence. Respiratory illnesses in general harm the elderly and immunocompromised disproportionately. But if that becomes the end game where COVID is still circulating, vaccines are no longer as effective at preventing serious illness, because the general severity has gone down, that is also a good outcome as it is what we have always lived with.
Colds and flus have always killed 10s of thousands a year. COVID killed many more because it was particularly severe. Just as the flu of 1918 is still with us today in a less harmful form (H1N1) This virus has a global reservoir and will never run its course entirely before mutating again most likely. Just like colds and flus before it.
The Ontario science table dashboard has the hospitalization ratio for unvaccinated to vaccinated still at 5:1. Where are you getting that these rates have become nearly equal?
ontario still conflates anyone hospitalized for anything testing positive for covid, with anyone hospitalized from covid; this alone could explain the discrepancy between a hospital bed and icu. lies damned lies and statistics...
Comparing the rates only makes sense if one believes the risk is distributed equally among the two populations. However, the most vulnerable are the most likely to be vaccinated, and the least vulnerable are the most likely to be unvaccinated, so the vaccine could still be very effective even if the rates of hospitalization are equal, or even worse for the vaccinated population.
My guess is that this speaks more to the cheapness of hospitals in Canada and the greater likelihood to go to a hospital with a lesser case of COVID. For instance, you quote a 7.6% rate of the vaccinated moving from the hospital to the ICU and a 29.6% rate of the unvaccinated moving from the hospital to the ICU. Meanwhile, the US blended average seems to be around 30% (eyeballing the data.) That could be because the unvaccinated are an overwhelming percentage of the admitted (it's the same rate), or it could be because there is a higher bar to go to the hospital at all for either class.
Thanks for this, just in those two blog posts she answered many lingering questions I had about how omicron has been changing things. the SEOd google results are always a flood of incomplete or speculative information when I try to find answers to covid questions so this is a dream come true.
If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.
I'm not a big fan of this new trend of some random Twitter personality suddenly becoming the go-to source of information on COVID.
Granted, it seems true that she's actually an epidemiologist, though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school. As far as I know she doesn't have unusual access to information, or a hands on role, she's drawing from public sources and doing analysis.
Which, is fine. But what makes me nervous about this trend is that she's now like almost a household name. She's built a personal brand around this image as being the up to the minute source of information, and the audience she's developed has a certain profile. They're basically looking for someone to tell them how bad everything is and how scary everything looks, backing it up with details so her audience can feel smart when they relay all this info to their friends.
The minute that COVID isn't actually something to worry about her audience is gone and she goes back to being a random obscure civilian.
Which is an incentive structure that makes me pretty sure I know what she'll be posting tomorrow, and a week from now, and so on.
I realize the mainstream news media isn't any better. But still, it's an odd new development that people are mostly seeking out the level of fear/concern they want in their news rather than the other way around.
> though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school.
We really, really need to get away from this academic obsession with prestige. If she does solid analysis and communicates it effectively, with a record that looks increasingly good as time passes, she's already ahead of the curve. Meanwhile many other highly-credentialed, prestigious experts have been wrong over and over and over again in this pandemic.
Academic/scientific institutions are polluted by the credentialisim/prestige focus. It's the ugliest aspect of the whole space.
If it matters almost the same thing has been happening in my country (Romania), only that around these parts of the world we have FB as a replacement for Twitter.
I personally regard it as a coping mechanism for the people that follow these newly created Covid personalities, the bad thing is that in most of the cases the mainstream media copy-pastes those posts/messages and presents them as the truth, even though there are many devils hidden in the statistical details most of the time.
> In certain jurisdictions, though, we’ve met or exceeded last winter’s hospitalization peak. We can see this in many states in the Northeast, including New York.
When presented with a new source, I tend to judge people based on their perspectives on things I know about. This one is a case study in being misleading, while not technically lying. New York state has only "met" last winter's hospitalization peak if you look at trend lines. If you look at hospitalizations per day, we clearly haven't. Also, of course, "last winter's peak" was not really any sort of stress for the hospital system at all (compare to the spring 2020 wave, which was), and it happened at a time when things were much more restricted than they are now:
...but it's still misleading, because again, this is a fraction of previous waves in NYC, but also, a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing. Government officials are pleading people to stop going to the hospital for trivial things:
I don't know if she is intentionally trying to mislead, or just doesn't have a good handle on the data, but this is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of a person's other claims.
> But it's still misleading, because a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing.
I don't think this is correct. Going to the ER is not the same as being admitted to the hospital. From everything I've read, ER visits are not counted as hospitalizations anywhere.
Just a thought after reading the good news - ok this is great for the US and the west where there is decent vaccination.
What the hell is going to happen with the omicron spread in countries with hardly any vaccination? I mean if it really is like measles, this could be terrible.
It's been getting to the point or already is that you can't get treatment. Plenty of urgent care centers are simply closing down for now. Hospitals won't even treat covid.
Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished.
You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.
I have omicron right now (4-5 months after 2nd jab, so pretty much no effect from that) and it's just like a common cold (certainly wouldn't call it "battling omicron"). I have zero problems with getting this each year.
You say "over and over" but Omicron is the first variant that actually evades immunity (both natural and vaccine-induced) in a meaningful way. What we don't know is the level of immunity that an Omicron infection will provide. It could actually confer immunity to both itself and previous variants, which would effectively end the pandemic.
Are the unvaccinated catching it over and over again? That seems to me a vanishingly rare occurrence, admittedly within a rapidly shrinking set of people. It would be interesting to get some figures for this, hopefully without being lynched for asking the question.
> This is the first evidence to show us that the rate of reinfection with Omicron is high—3 times higher than Delta. In other words, infection-induced immunity is not doing a great job at stopping Omicron.
Can you give us some indication of how severe your symptoms are? Mostly we're hearing that if you've been vaccinated and/or you've had covid in the past that omicron is relatively mild.
> You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.
I think at this point, the likely endgame is endemic virus with tolerable consequences. Humanity probably isn't capable of the level of cooperation required to drive this virus to extinction (I'm guessing that would take a massive, coordinated, well-complied with vaccination campaign undertaken over just a couple months).
As far as I know previous immunity still protects against serious disease, even with the variants, so hopefully we'll see less deaths and hospital admissions.
Correct. I know several people who are vaccinated yet caught Covid twice. The principle thing to keep in mind,
- vaccination is a risk reducer on severity of infection. Nobody said immunity; nobody said prevention.
- and on that point not getting into the hospital is important. From a management standpoint, we've got to insure demand for hospital resources does not dwarf those same resources. That's the key management function here.
Here's a thought experiment. Compare the reddit "the button" with Covid staying with us. Even with only 1 person at a time trying to hit the button it stayed alive for 3 months. And that's with people trying to keep it alive, 24x7 - just enough people to keep it going. Enough people being interested in getting a low time and staying with it.
With covid, it's just automatic, but you just need 1 foolish move between 2 people, and there's no server making sure only one person gets it at a time, it's totally a distributed network. And the timeout, instead of being 60 seconds, it's 2 maybe 3 weeks (perhaps a lot longer - we don't REALLY know).
The thought experiment here is that if we TRY to keep something alive that's actually kinda hard to and it lasts 3 months, how is covid EVER going to end?
The epidemic ends when the unusually high threat of serious illness or death ends, though, right?
If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.
Do you know what was the test that distinguished omicron from delta? Asking because my local county health department seems lacking in that technology.
I will say beforehand that I'm heavily pro-vaccination and reducing risks regarding covid.
Do we know at this point what are the hospitalization rates of omicron compared to the flu?
p.s. I hope your wife gets better soon.
But even after mutations, the next time you catch it, symptoms will likely be a lot less severe than the first. At that point, we can stop tracking it and write it off as a variant of the common cold.
I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.
My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.
My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.
The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.
The data is now this:
People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)
See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:
FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.
Yes, welcome to the endemic. Covid is here to stay, it doesn't matter if 100% of the world were vaccinated tommrow, covid would not go away. It doesn't matter if you get the vaccination or not, in your life time you WILL get covid (just like the flu, no one escapes it, you typically get the flu about every decade or so regardless of shots).
We need to just accept this and move back to "old normal".
I think that may be a completely rational perspective from within the United States... however, from the perspective of countries with effective containment strategies, that sounds prematurely defeatist, and also ignores the vast good that comes from containing spread for mutagenic purposes.
I, too, think that Omicron is the beginning of the transition back to "normal" with Covid becoming endemic. Everyone is going to be exposed to Omicron if they haven't already.
I expect that for the next year or two, boosters will be recommended as a yearly "flu shot" to give you a decent chance of being minimally affected if exposed. Omicron will continue to be the dominate strain, finding hosts in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. The difference will be that we will have a myriad tools at our disposal to prevent serious illness and treat it when it does happen.
Can't say that 'it is the end' yet - but given that pandemics end when there is no more 'room' for the virus to move through naive hosts (places to infect). The fact that Omicron is SO contagious means it will effectively find any pockets of 'fuel' in the adult human population in the coming weeks and months. Everyone will be exposed.
It is probably more accurate to say it is the likely start of the transition between 'pandemic' and 'endemic' phase. We say endemic as it LOOKS like the gap between coronavirus immunity length to viral instability (number of changes) is longer than for influenza. (T-cell response still very strong, original SARS patients almost 2 decades later have cross immunity to SARS-Cov-2, Omicron immunity effective against delta, etc) That said - it is VERY unlikely to be eradicable at this point due to its ability to infect so many different species and circulate and breed in the wild (more so than even influenza).
So new variants down the line in the coming years/decades is more likely (not different than swine flu, bird flu, etc pandemic risks in the recent past). But, if longer term immunity holds up - none of these will have anywhere near the impact given the absence of billions of naive hosts to burn through.
So if we call the transition from pandemic to endemic the end (likely, yes) - then probably.
It's been over ever since the vaccines became widely available. After vaccination many of us went back to normal and haven't looked back. Huge bureaucracies just take a long time to change course and some simply refuse to recognize that it's endemic for whatever reasons.
> A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals.
> An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time
In no way has "rapid spread of infection disease across multiple continents" ended. The past few weeks should make that a bit more clear. Being vaccinated reduces the negative effects of infection, and may also reduce infectiousness and spread, but it didn't end the pandemic.
it’s nice to believe, but a lot of our ability to return to normal requires these bureaucracies to be on board. it doesn’t matter that you individually are comfortable sending your kid to school, that school’s not going to be open if the consensus and bureaucracies are against you.
somehow we failed to coordinate the back-to-normal in my region when the vaccines arrived. this seems like the next best opportunity to admit that we’re ready to lift restrictions, so here’s hoping we can keep the majority on board this time.
And Omicron is an order of magnitude less virulent on hospitalization/deaths per infection basis.
The pandemic is never going to be "over" on a case basis, and the virus is never going away, spread will never be zero, variants will always keep happening for decades.
Omicron is telling you that its going to be time soon to start thinking about this virus more like a normal cold/flu virus based on its impact.
It's hard to imagine a more transmissible covid variant for a layman such as myself. I wonder if microbiologists are able to model the maximum theoretical transmission Sars covid is capable of.
Omicron is infecting fully vaccinated people and those with previous infection. In the early cases detected in SA, many had already had COVID and/or Delta.
It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.
If it’s largely immune to the vaccine and doesn’t produce antibodies against COVID/Delta, we might as well label it a new disease instead of a variant.
Luckily it seems to be incredibly mild. I wonder if we had such robust data on the common cold of it would look similar to Omicron.
> It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.
There has been a study that suggests Omicron infection provides protection against previous variants. This correlates with data from the UK that suggests Omicron is displacing Delta.
You're thinking about it all wrong. Omicron and Delta are the same virus, and there's not particularly any good data that Omicron is less intrinsically virulent than Delta.
Omicron infects those who are unboosted, and likely reinfects a lot of the population that is >6 months recovered from prior single infection.
It is all about the fact that Omicron infects people who already have T-cells and aren't immunologically naive. The way out of the pandemic is our memory B-cells and T-cells.
The gov and media are never going to straight up tell us the pandemic is over. We have to take our way of life back and let big bro silently move on to something else.
As far as I can tell, there ends up being no practical difference between "the pandemic is over" and "this virus will be in circulation forever". People use one phrase or the other to emphasize different concerns.
I think people don't think of "the pandemic" as a state of having virus around us, but as a bigger political picture of lockdowns, mandates, vaccine passports, travel limits, mandatory testing, masks and all that.
If omicron means we'll all get it in the next few months, and (for the 99.x% survivors) that means that covid is "just another cold/flu", we can stop with the "pandemic" (political), and live as we did before 2020. Old people will need vaccines and boosters and all that (as they did for the flu before 2020), and young people can finally live a normal life again.
People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving. It's been almost two months. It's time to stop hoping for doom and gloom and accept that it's over.
Depends on if politicians believe they can lift restrictions without negatively reflecting their career or not. There's a lot of Twitter mobs out there promoting "extreme caution" that will tank your political career if you aren't catering enough to their caution-comfort-level.
I don’t know. Anecdotal but I know a lot of people who had prior strains (many even vaccinated) who have gotten it. The numbers are so high that natural immunity from previous strains/vaccines seems to be very low.
If delta or OG Covid didn’t do much about omicron, I don’t think we can assume omicron will do much about some future variant.
The pandemic will truly end when therapeutics are mature. My liberal relatives become visibly upset when just the concept of therapeutics is brought up. Thanks liberal dogma/media…
I read article from Israel. It wrote: "severe covid cases are low, but flu season just started". Pandemic will finish at spring, and hopefully will not start next winter.
Of course it'll start again the next winter... as will the cold season and flu season.
The only question here is, will there be lockdowns, mandates, masks and vaccine passports, or will we finally give up, focus on the risk groups, and let the young and healthy live their normal lives.
What you're missing is that we're eventually (arguably right now) going to be referring to colds and other weak mutations of COVID as "COVID" still, and by virtue of still calling it COVID and still having these COVID dashboards, it's never ending. There is no end, it is a new normal for millions. Too many people's brains short circuited, too many people got anchored to March 2020.
It means that among recent PCR test confirmed cases, 100% of patients were infected with the Omicron variant rather than Delta or some older variant. The number of asymptomatic carriers is unknown and probably large, but can't possibly be anywhere near 100% of the populace.
Omicron evades the "natural immunity" that people were getting a hard on for. That explains a lot (not all) of the massive fitness it has - it can infect people that previously had Covid infections again.
Immunity is a spectrum, not a binary condition. Infection by previous variants appears to still provide a significant level of durable cellular immunity against Omicron.
It's not the end if governments keep playing covid theater games.
In Europe they definitely will with increased surveillance and digital IDs that have proven to do nothing to stop covid (as initially portrayed), but that won't stop govs from pushing them onwards and dehumanising any group who doesn't want to comply with their coercive measures.
It's an interesting time for people who really value freedom and human rights.
It’s just politicians trying to save face at this point. Trillions of dollars lost and total debasement of western currencies was all to arrive at the natural solution to a virus that was destined to become endemic from the very start: let it play out.
Two administrations, one from both parties. Same fed chair. Same people at the CDC and WHO. It’s not partisan. It’s institutional failure.
I'm not sure what you mean. Vaccine was a success, it saved millions of lives. What's becoming endemic is a less deadly variant, otherwise we would be back to square 0, confinement and developing a new vaccine. So, instead of calling it a failure I would call it success with a lucky ending, if everything continues like this of course.
Just giving my 2 cents. Got boosted 3 weeks ago. Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast. I did wear a ffp2 mask with nearly every social contact and if we didnt wear mask we would test ourself. I am sure I got it from the streets from people passing by. That said I am in the french alps and it was vacation time here.
And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare
I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation
I'll give my two cents then. People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important.
I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day).
I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms.
I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice.
[0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.
> People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important.
Thanks, I hate it. :-)
Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused.
Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one.
But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias!
For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave.
* Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.
Similar story - boosted mid Nov. Travelled over Christmas. Have been wearing K95 masks as properly as I can as often as I can when out in public. No real symptoms to speak of, but took a PCR just to be sure. Bing! Positive.
Not sure from where I got it, but the contagiousness of Omicron is impressive.
At this point that is the best case. COVID zero is a pipe dream, there are just too many vaccine refusers and too many people refusing to do anything to avoid spreading the virus. If COVID follows the typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous, we can get back to normal life -- the question is how long that will take.
Honestly I hope that one day it is gone for good but until then an endemic situation would be somehow better than a pandemic one.
I didnt say that clearly and hoping for a, also, bad situation is not the best thing to whish for but after 2 years of pandemic I am whishing for something less bad….
As I understand it, wearing two masks was only recommended for those wearing surgical or cloth. If your wear an N95 or equivalent you only need the one.
omicron has solidly taken over Vancouver BC. Anecdotal evidence: in the past two years (except this past week) I have only known 1 person who got covid. In the past week I know over 20 people who have got covid.
I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.
It seems to give partial protection to Delta like 50% reduction in infections.
Different aspects of immunity seem to last different times. Antibodies fade over six months or so but T Cell immunity can last decades in general. Though obviously Omicron hasn't been around that long to check on.
> to what extent does recovering from Omicron prevent Delta?'
If Omicron is reaching 100% prevalence in so many locations, I wonder if Delta will not be as much of a threat anymore? It seems like there haven't been any infections with older variants for a long time now.
Last night on NPR there was a scientist cautioning people who think this means the end because it'll burn itself out.
His point was that nobody predicted delta, and nobody predicted omicron. There's no telling how serious the next variant will be (and arguably there's much greater chance of a variant given how many people are getting infected.)
+1, I work in a small, fully remote company, and up until the past 2 weeks, I know of only one colleague who had been infected. 5 people were out last week because of COVID. 5 people who live in different states.
Anecdotally from the people I know who've got covid since omicron was identified, none have had to go to hospital (all are double vaccinated, some had booster), but it can still be a rough few days/week while ill and some are still coughing/feeling overly tired a few weeks later
Also in Vancouver and similar numbers. I know at least 10 people who currently have COVID, including myself and my partner.
It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream".
I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.
13 people in my immediate circle got it in the last 7 days. A few had 2 days of fever, a few a slight cough, a few sore throats. Everybody is fine now.
I still know no one in Germany who ever had covid, only one person in the US and one in South Africa (who also died from it), so I’m not sure about that.
Yes, it’s called a filter bubble. Covid was extremely easy to avoid pre-Omicron even without vaccines if you don’t go to nightclubs and don’t work in an office and have no kids.
The CDC publishes a weekly chart showing the proportions of circulating variants for the US as a whole. The Delta variant had previously driven most other variants near extinction, and now Omicron is doing the same to Delta.
i wonder what countries like China and New Zealand who are taking a zero COVID approach are going to do. COVID is endemic in the rest of the world except for those places where it doesn't exist at all? I don't see that working.
Omicron isn't significantly more contagious than Delta for the unvaccinated, however. It's just that the vaccinated can spread omicron, so anyone who wasn't vaccinated and managed to dodge infection for this long is now in nightmare-level difficulty when it comes to remaining uninfected.
That's a potentially misleading visualization. Delta can be steady rolling even if its share falls from 100% to 5%, as it apparently has, if the denominator has increased by the same factor.
There are 15k covid RNA in every ml of sewage coming out of boston right now. Figure 200l a day of sewage per person and that is a lot of covid. I would hold off on eating oysters for a bit.
Most people are relying on arbitrary testing to figure out how many people are infected. I think this totally under reporting number of infections because the whole population is not tested on a regular basis. To get an accurate picture of people are infected, you have to look at whole populations.
One whole population group to study to get a better understanding of how bad this wave is is to look at the cruise line industry. Everyone has to get tested, and thus you are studying a whole population. According to a recent CDC report [1], between Nov 30 - Dec 14 of 2021, 162 cases were reported on cruise ships. Then the next two weeks 5013 cases were reported. This is roughly a 30x increase!
If you look at the NY Times infections chart[2], in the same time period, their 7 day average only went up like 3x. This is grossly under reporting of infections.
The sewage chart looks at a whole population and it is easy to see the increase in infection is more in the 30x scale than it is the 3x scale.
Be safe out there everybody. If you look at whole population groups, Covid is way more infectious than what a lot of news media outlets and their data would tell you.
This sewage report is about a whole population and it is clear to see infections many more times higher than what a lot of news agencies are reporting.
I’d be surprised if coronavirus can infect non-mammals. I don’t think there’s been any scientific evidence of this. For the reports of contaminated fish and what not, it’s suspected the contamination happened on the supply chain (e.g. someone at a fish packing plant coughed on food.)
Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.
Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.
why? RNA detected != active virus. e.g. in room temperature, virus can survive the maximum of 5 days (on plastic 3 days, cardboard 24h). It's an impossible vector of transmission.
Don't forget about long covid. My covid infection was mostly gone in 3 days; yet 7 days after that I'm in the ER for peripheral neuropathy. Several days later I am still here with perhaps permanent loss of function. There are a few other youngsters like me with covid complications on the neurology floor, most with less than 2 comorbidities. Oh yea, the ER was packed, 6h to triage.
Sorry to hear about your peripheral neuropathy. Check out some of the treatments for dysautonomia. There are some cutting edge treatments that have been developed over the past few years, they just haven't become mainstream knowledge or trickled down to the medical schools yet.
Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.
Everyone in my house had COVID in September and now we all have it again. Vaccinated, boosted, prior infection - none of it matters when it comes to avoiding the virus. I think we’re at the point where the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.
i don't know why the parent was modded down. It seems to me the governments are beginning to change the narrative to "the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.".
Readit News
The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...
The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good...
Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.
At the time, little was known about this new variant except that it was extremely different from all that we had seen before, which would very likely result in escape from prior immunity, and may even lead to more severe disease (or not?). The only definitive silver lining that she found at the time was that 1) the variant could be quickly detected with PCR thanks to its S-gene deletion, 2) it was detected early thanks to South Africa, and 3) vaccines could be quickly adapted if necessary, thanks to mRNA vaccine technology. However, in all other regards, the variant was still very concerning.
In other words, do take her cautious optimism seriously. She's not a wishful thinker. Rather, she is a specialist in the field who works with the data as it becomes available and knows how to interpret it
I don't see this as much here in Ontario. Among the vaccinated as of today there is a 10.10/100k hospitalization status vs 16/100k for the unvaccinated (and 11.9 for one-dose). The hospitalization rate among the vaccinated is climbing quickly. Yes, there's still a gap, but yikes.
ICU is better, though, with a 0.76/100k rate for the vaccinated vs 4.74/100k for the unvaccinated.
This may have to do with different hospitalization and testing criterion, I don't know. But hospitalization here is in full exponential growth and not just among the unvaccinated.
Obviously being vaccinated is still far preferable. I have had 3 doses (1 AstraZeneca and 2 Pfizer) FWIW.
I highly recommend anybody concerned about hospitalization among the vaccinated read this post. It's about Delta hospitalizations in Israel 2021, but we should expect the same effect from Omicron and across countries: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
Unvaccinated people in Canada are overwhelmingly very very young, in Quebec most of them are too young to be vaccinated.
That's why they don't get hospitalized as much :)
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
This still shows a greater than 10x difference in outcomes. Additionally, the "unvacccinated" population includes people naturally vaccinated by virtue of having a previous case.
It could very well evolve into a form that is mild enough and different enough from the vaccine spike that brings the unvaccinated and vaccinated hospitalization rates to convergence. Respiratory illnesses in general harm the elderly and immunocompromised disproportionately. But if that becomes the end game where COVID is still circulating, vaccines are no longer as effective at preventing serious illness, because the general severity has gone down, that is also a good outcome as it is what we have always lived with.
Colds and flus have always killed 10s of thousands a year. COVID killed many more because it was particularly severe. Just as the flu of 1918 is still with us today in a less harmful form (H1N1) This virus has a global reservoir and will never run its course entirely before mutating again most likely. Just like colds and flus before it.
edit: sorry had that written backwards
https://imgur.com/a/Actj5Tf
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.
Granted, it seems true that she's actually an epidemiologist, though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school. As far as I know she doesn't have unusual access to information, or a hands on role, she's drawing from public sources and doing analysis.
Which, is fine. But what makes me nervous about this trend is that she's now like almost a household name. She's built a personal brand around this image as being the up to the minute source of information, and the audience she's developed has a certain profile. They're basically looking for someone to tell them how bad everything is and how scary everything looks, backing it up with details so her audience can feel smart when they relay all this info to their friends.
The minute that COVID isn't actually something to worry about her audience is gone and she goes back to being a random obscure civilian.
Which is an incentive structure that makes me pretty sure I know what she'll be posting tomorrow, and a week from now, and so on.
I realize the mainstream news media isn't any better. But still, it's an odd new development that people are mostly seeking out the level of fear/concern they want in their news rather than the other way around.
We really, really need to get away from this academic obsession with prestige. If she does solid analysis and communicates it effectively, with a record that looks increasingly good as time passes, she's already ahead of the curve. Meanwhile many other highly-credentialed, prestigious experts have been wrong over and over and over again in this pandemic.
Academic/scientific institutions are polluted by the credentialisim/prestige focus. It's the ugliest aspect of the whole space.
I personally regard it as a coping mechanism for the people that follow these newly created Covid personalities, the bad thing is that in most of the cases the mainstream media copy-pastes those posts/messages and presents them as the truth, even though there are many devils hidden in the statistical details most of the time.
> In certain jurisdictions, though, we’ve met or exceeded last winter’s hospitalization peak. We can see this in many states in the Northeast, including New York.
When presented with a new source, I tend to judge people based on their perspectives on things I know about. This one is a case study in being misleading, while not technically lying. New York state has only "met" last winter's hospitalization peak if you look at trend lines. If you look at hospitalizations per day, we clearly haven't. Also, of course, "last winter's peak" was not really any sort of stress for the hospital system at all (compare to the spring 2020 wave, which was), and it happened at a time when things were much more restricted than they are now:
https://covid-19.direct/state/36
The statement is more correct for NYC data, where hospitals have exceeded last winter's peak on a trend-line and per-day basis:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-totals.pag...
...but it's still misleading, because again, this is a fraction of previous waves in NYC, but also, a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing. Government officials are pleading people to stop going to the hospital for trivial things:
https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1478353835793997827
I don't know if she is intentionally trying to mislead, or just doesn't have a good handle on the data, but this is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of a person's other claims.
I don't think this is correct. Going to the ER is not the same as being admitted to the hospital. From everything I've read, ER visits are not counted as hospitalizations anywhere.
What the hell is going to happen with the omicron spread in countries with hardly any vaccination? I mean if it really is like measles, this could be terrible.
I'd call that pretty scary
Or am I missing something?
Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms.
Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.
> This is the first evidence to show us that the rate of reinfection with Omicron is high—3 times higher than Delta. In other words, infection-induced immunity is not doing a great job at stopping Omicron.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
Can you give us some indication of how severe your symptoms are? Mostly we're hearing that if you've been vaccinated and/or you've had covid in the past that omicron is relatively mild.
I think at this point, the likely endgame is endemic virus with tolerable consequences. Humanity probably isn't capable of the level of cooperation required to drive this virus to extinction (I'm guessing that would take a massive, coordinated, well-complied with vaccination campaign undertaken over just a couple months).
As far as I know previous immunity still protects against serious disease, even with the variants, so hopefully we'll see less deaths and hospital admissions.
- vaccination is a risk reducer on severity of infection. Nobody said immunity; nobody said prevention.
- and on that point not getting into the hospital is important. From a management standpoint, we've got to insure demand for hospital resources does not dwarf those same resources. That's the key management function here.
With covid, it's just automatic, but you just need 1 foolish move between 2 people, and there's no server making sure only one person gets it at a time, it's totally a distributed network. And the timeout, instead of being 60 seconds, it's 2 maybe 3 weeks (perhaps a lot longer - we don't REALLY know).
The thought experiment here is that if we TRY to keep something alive that's actually kinda hard to and it lasts 3 months, how is covid EVER going to end?
If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.
1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.
Does anyone else still believe the shots prevent infection or transmission?
I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.
My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.
My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.
The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.
The data is now this:
People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)
See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-mil...
FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.
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Yes, welcome to the endemic. Covid is here to stay, it doesn't matter if 100% of the world were vaccinated tommrow, covid would not go away. It doesn't matter if you get the vaccination or not, in your life time you WILL get covid (just like the flu, no one escapes it, you typically get the flu about every decade or so regardless of shots).
We need to just accept this and move back to "old normal".
I expect that for the next year or two, boosters will be recommended as a yearly "flu shot" to give you a decent chance of being minimally affected if exposed. Omicron will continue to be the dominate strain, finding hosts in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. The difference will be that we will have a myriad tools at our disposal to prevent serious illness and treat it when it does happen.
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It is probably more accurate to say it is the likely start of the transition between 'pandemic' and 'endemic' phase. We say endemic as it LOOKS like the gap between coronavirus immunity length to viral instability (number of changes) is longer than for influenza. (T-cell response still very strong, original SARS patients almost 2 decades later have cross immunity to SARS-Cov-2, Omicron immunity effective against delta, etc) That said - it is VERY unlikely to be eradicable at this point due to its ability to infect so many different species and circulate and breed in the wild (more so than even influenza).
So new variants down the line in the coming years/decades is more likely (not different than swine flu, bird flu, etc pandemic risks in the recent past). But, if longer term immunity holds up - none of these will have anywhere near the impact given the absence of billions of naive hosts to burn through.
So if we call the transition from pandemic to endemic the end (likely, yes) - then probably.
> An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time
In no way has "rapid spread of infection disease across multiple continents" ended. The past few weeks should make that a bit more clear. Being vaccinated reduces the negative effects of infection, and may also reduce infectiousness and spread, but it didn't end the pandemic.
somehow we failed to coordinate the back-to-normal in my region when the vaccines arrived. this seems like the next best opportunity to admit that we’re ready to lift restrictions, so here’s hoping we can keep the majority on board this time.
The pandemic is never going to be "over" on a case basis, and the virus is never going away, spread will never be zero, variants will always keep happening for decades.
Omicron is telling you that its going to be time soon to start thinking about this virus more like a normal cold/flu virus based on its impact.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...
Omicron is infecting fully vaccinated people and those with previous infection. In the early cases detected in SA, many had already had COVID and/or Delta.
It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.
If it’s largely immune to the vaccine and doesn’t produce antibodies against COVID/Delta, we might as well label it a new disease instead of a variant.
Luckily it seems to be incredibly mild. I wonder if we had such robust data on the common cold of it would look similar to Omicron.
There has been a study that suggests Omicron infection provides protection against previous variants. This correlates with data from the UK that suggests Omicron is displacing Delta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc (link to study in description).
Omicron infects those who are unboosted, and likely reinfects a lot of the population that is >6 months recovered from prior single infection.
It is all about the fact that Omicron infects people who already have T-cells and aren't immunologically naive. The way out of the pandemic is our memory B-cells and T-cells.
The possibility that a new variant arises that substantially evades both Delta and Omicron immunity.
But it will probably turn endemic after this. There won't be any virgin hosts anymore.
If omicron means we'll all get it in the next few months, and (for the 99.x% survivors) that means that covid is "just another cold/flu", we can stop with the "pandemic" (political), and live as we did before 2020. Old people will need vaccines and boosters and all that (as they did for the flu before 2020), and young people can finally live a normal life again.
- how long the immunity gained from having recovered from Omicron lasts
- how well that immunity protects against other current (and future) variants of covid
- what kind of new strains of covid appears in next several months / years that may replace Omicron
- how many people we are able to get vaccinated globally
- advances in new and better vaccines becoming available (complete with antiviral pills etc)
And probably quite a few other factors that weren't on top of my layman head...
- how much/long the media keeps the fear drum pounding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI5E8z89c9U
Depends on if politicians believe they can lift restrictions without negatively reflecting their career or not. There's a lot of Twitter mobs out there promoting "extreme caution" that will tank your political career if you aren't catering enough to their caution-comfort-level.
If delta or OG Covid didn’t do much about omicron, I don’t think we can assume omicron will do much about some future variant.
The only question here is, will there be lockdowns, mandates, masks and vaccine passports, or will we finally give up, focus on the risk groups, and let the young and healthy live their normal lives.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1
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In Europe they definitely will with increased surveillance and digital IDs that have proven to do nothing to stop covid (as initially portrayed), but that won't stop govs from pushing them onwards and dehumanising any group who doesn't want to comply with their coercive measures.
It's an interesting time for people who really value freedom and human rights.
Two administrations, one from both parties. Same fed chair. Same people at the CDC and WHO. It’s not partisan. It’s institutional failure.
And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare
I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation
I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day).
I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms.
I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice.
[0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.
Thanks, I hate it. :-)
Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused.
Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one.
But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias!
For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave.
* Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFP_standards#FFP2_mask
Not sure from where I got it, but the contagiousness of Omicron is impressive.
So you’re the least ill you’ve ever been from anything but it’s also “a beast”?
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I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.
Me too, I think at this point further lockdowns would be akin to trying to stop a freight train with your shins: futile and extremely painful.
- to what extent does recovering from Omicron prevent Delta?
- how long does that immunity last?
We probably are going to have to live with this, but I'm not sure many countries have caught up to the healthcare staffing implications of that.
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Different aspects of immunity seem to last different times. Antibodies fade over six months or so but T Cell immunity can last decades in general. Though obviously Omicron hasn't been around that long to check on.
If Omicron is reaching 100% prevalence in so many locations, I wonder if Delta will not be as much of a threat anymore? It seems like there haven't been any infections with older variants for a long time now.
His point was that nobody predicted delta, and nobody predicted omicron. There's no telling how serious the next variant will be (and arguably there's much greater chance of a variant given how many people are getting infected.)
It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream".
I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.
Dead Comment
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...
https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html
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Here are some links saying you can get both:
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/omicron-delta-en...
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1543522/can-you-...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1
https://outbreak.info/
https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
One whole population group to study to get a better understanding of how bad this wave is is to look at the cruise line industry. Everyone has to get tested, and thus you are studying a whole population. According to a recent CDC report [1], between Nov 30 - Dec 14 of 2021, 162 cases were reported on cruise ships. Then the next two weeks 5013 cases were reported. This is roughly a 30x increase!
If you look at the NY Times infections chart[2], in the same time period, their 7 day average only went up like 3x. This is grossly under reporting of infections.
The sewage chart looks at a whole population and it is easy to see the increase in infection is more in the 30x scale than it is the 3x scale.
Be safe out there everybody. If you look at whole population groups, Covid is way more infectious than what a lot of news media outlets and their data would tell you.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/30/us-cdc-says-people-should-av... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
This sewage report is about a whole population and it is clear to see infections many more times higher than what a lot of news agencies are reporting.
Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.
https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-int...
Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.
why? RNA detected != active virus. e.g. in room temperature, virus can survive the maximum of 5 days (on plastic 3 days, cardboard 24h). It's an impossible vector of transmission.
The two most effective approaches are using neuroplasticity exercises to retrain the limbic system (cheap, but time consuming - an hour a day for 6 months): https://ansrewire.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/
Or doing microcurrent neurofeedback (costs ~$150 a session, do one session a week for a couple months): https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/
Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.