Quote: The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.
South Africa has <25% vaccintion rate. "South Africa has a better vaccination rate than most countries on the continent: Just under one-quarter of the population has been fully vaccinated" [1]
Wouldn’t that be inconsistent with the other, related data:
Quote:
“National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection.”
How do we treat Covid before hospitalisation? I just caught it at the weekend and feeling pretty crappy. I'm not aware of any particular treatment I should be taking.
This is another problem of the modal Western approach. Few people have any knowledge of mitigating strategies or medications because we've moved so aggressively to eradicate discussion of those things.
We have entire industries and research institutions funded to the tune of billons of dollars doing exactly that, using the very latest technology and scientific techniques. If there were effective treatment strategies that were easily discoverable, It'd have been patented, clinically trialed and be available from a counter near you at an affordable price extremely quickly. If it was cheap or safe enough, whole foods and such places would have shelves full of it. Capitalism is pretty good at that sort of thing, just look at all the vaccines we got in less than a year.
No, what we've done is that some parts of our press have denounced shilling of snake oil that doesn't work. There's no shortage of that shilling still taking place, though.
And as for knowledge, step into a hospital, and you'll see plenty of medications being used to treat actual cases of COVID. Doctors don't just put an oxygen mask on your face, and wait for you to die. You'll find a bit more knowledge there than you will in a deraged InfoWars rant, or a Joe Rogan podcast.
Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn't have 190 million monthly listeners. [1]
[1] If the most popular podcast[2] in America is your definition of 'eradicating' discussion, it's certainly an odd one.
[2] Or, if you're looking for variety in your media, you could always tune in to AM radio. Or the biggest television news syndicate in the world.
Sorry, 'Western' was lazy shorthand for 'Western civilization', which covers most places geographically. I meant to exclude from my statement only poorer societies that don't have the luxury of being stupid in their healthcare approach to this disease and time.
Shutting down qanon snake oil like hydroxy-c and ivermectin was sensible and necessary. Also injecting clorox was a bad idea as well. I didn't see any successful "non mainstream" treatments come out there were worth a lick. Certainly acupuncture isn't going to work either.
Fluoxetine as well:
"Fluoxetine use is associated with improved survival of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia: A retrospective case-control study" – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34856085/
"Mortality risk is confirmed to be significantly decreased among patients with #COVID-19 prescribed SSRI antidepressants, and particularly #fluoxetine, and fluoxetine or #fluvoxamine, in a large (n>80,000) US observational study." – https://twitter.com/HoertelN/status/1460309793558646785?s=20
Platelets and serotonin are involved in the disease. Serotonin tends to cause inflammation, clotting, and vasoconstriction. A significant feature of COVID-19 is elevated plasma serotonin. (Here's an almost random source for this: https://twitter.com/ivanajpavlovic/status/146071264917663334... ... another: https://twitter.com/__ice9/status/1345194722055385091 ... these are tweets, yes, but they link to papers.) Platelets have serotonin transporters and serotonin receptors. SARS-CoV-2 does a lot of things; One of the things it does is that it kills platelets by inducing necroptosis (source: https://twitter.com/DrKoupenova/status/1418558896390688776?s... ). This releases the serotonin inside them, causing other platelets to clot. SSRIs block platelets from picking up serotonin produced and secreted by enterochromaffin cells in the digestive tract; This is the source of the platelets' serotonin payload (more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterochromaffin_cell ). If an SSRI is taken early, platelets will have reduced serotonin payloads, which limits the serotonin-induced damage to the lung.
Monoclonal antibodies, Florida is taking a early treatment approach and you can receive monoclonal antibodies as prophylaxis if you have been in contact with someone who has been infected[0]. Apparently it reduces the risk of death by 70% and the risk of even having symptoms in the first place by 82%.
First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020."
and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”"
Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
Don't forget this part:
"South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection"
So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
> every year more vulnerable people are added to that set as population ages, gets fatter, has more advanced coronary or metabolic disease, etc.
The number added each season is not necessarily the same number as the ones removed in the previous year - see the prevalence of really bad flu seasons for instance, which occur every 2-3 years or so.
After the pandemic the mortality could be lower for some years because some timed sooner because of COVID. At the same time the "normal" deaths from operations will be added when the postponed operations are rescheduled.
Infection risk but not hospitalizations risk or death risk.
That's what I meant, the previous infection doesn't protect against infection but might prevent severe cases.
The link you specified specifically says that previous infection could be why Omicron appears less severe..
> “Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.”
Furthermore SA got hit quite badly by Beta. Beta and Omicron are closer than either to Delta, so there may be some immune protection from the prior Beta wave. Beta never got established in Europe/US.
I read it somewhere - sorry can't pull up a source right now, but it made sense to me. Purely speculation at this point of course, but perhaps some solid data will come in.
> Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
In this very specific demographic. Other countries will have different outcomes, as seen with the current state of the pandemic (looking at Europe, for example).
I think we have to be very careful with data from around the world. There are a lot of co-factors. We already know that generally being immuno-compromised makes covid a much riskier proposition for those groups. In a recent deep dive into the Ivermectin studies done around the world, it was shown and proven that in Bangladesh that Ivermectin reduced covid mortality. However, when digging deeper, Bangladesh has a 80%+ infection rate of worms with most people having 7-23. So taking Ivermectin helped save patients from covid mortality but only in the sense that it made them less immuno-compromised. The US population (e.g.) doesn't have worm infections like that. Any data from a specific geographic area/country/race/etc. may only have validity within that same group.
The worm hypothesis is a hypothesis, and a good one. But it is a hypothesis. assuming good sounding hypotheses are true and running with it have been the root of a lot of problems in this pandemic.
I mean the other side of that punchline though is that Ivermectin is completely ineffective in clinical trials at reducing severity or mortality from COVID-19.
The worm hypothesis is practically a curiosity to solve later.
No, the reason the worm hypothesis is good is because it would explain the clinical trials where it appears to be effective. (If there were no such trials, as you claim, the entire discussion about worms would be moot.)
I don't understand this study. Why not compare the hospitalization/fatality rates between _current_ omicron/delta infections between similar cohorts?
Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off.
Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting?
edit from the summary :-/ :
Vaccine effectiveness:
The two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination provides 70% protection against severe complications of COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation, and 33% protection against COVID-19 infection, during the current Omicron wave.
Reinfection risk: For individuals who have had COVID-19 previously, the risk of reinfection with Omicron is significantly higher, relative to prior variants.
Severity: The risk of hospital admission among adults diagnosed with COVID-19 is 29% lower for the Omicron variant infection compared to infections involving the D614G mutation in South Africa’s first wave in mid-2020, after adjusting for vaccination status
Children: Despite very low absolute incidence, preliminary data suggests that children have a 20% higher risk of hospital admission in Omicron-led fourth wave in South Africa, relative to the D614G-led first wave.
Thank you for removing the uncertainty on that! Agreed regarding the unspecific reporting. Seemed to me to be one of those areas where the author assumed you'd assume... I dislike that as it introduces the possibility of misinterpretation.
Now the next question is what is the percentage reduction in deaths for Omicron vs prior variants. It seems like more than the 29 percent reduction in hospitalisation given the first death from Omicron was reported in Britain last week right?
Most countries are not doing very many full genome sequences, so confirmed cases of Omicron are very low. For this to coincide with a death is unlikely. Deaths also typically take ~3 weeks from infection. 3 weeks ago, there weren't many cases.
Omicron cases are 'suspected' via a partial match in a PCR test (widely done), but this isn't definitive.
A death with Omicron has been reported, however the UK government have refused to release further details, so at the moment the confirmed # of deaths from Omicron is still 0. This will change of course.
it isn't apples to apples. Some studies show that SA has >70% seroprevalence [1], most of which from infection. If it holds that recovered immunity confers __better__ protection than naive vaccine immunity [2], then that 30% decrease might as well be from the protection conferred mostly by the former, and we have no idea how that would translate to vaccine naives, who are the majority in highly vaccinated developed countries.
Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.
If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.
Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.
So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.
With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.
Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.
It's a simple concept that about 95-99% of the general population does not understand at any level. This includes most politicians, civil planners, even scientists and medical staff.
When the pandemic first started, people were flabberghasted about how FAST! the numbers were going up. Faster and faster, new records broken every day! Meanwhile, on a logarithmic plot, it was a dead straight line. It wasn't changing, not really.
People don't "get" this. Even now, two years in, people are clinging to constant factors.
I've had similar conversations with people who just don't understand Moore's law, Nielsen's Law, etc...
I had to use pictures to explain to IT network professionals that upgrading a 15-year-old 2 Mbps site office link to 4 Mbps is hilariously under-specced when the mobile phone in my pocket can exceed 1 Gbps while I'm sitting at the bus stop. They just hadn't "grokked" that their mental models are off by orders of magnitude. They're used to x*2 instead of x*10^2.
Hi, I'll admit I didn't fully understand that, and your explanation helped. I'll also use this for when my friends and family miss the point too, thanks :)
The human population is finite, and exponential growth hits its bounds pretty quickly. In the long run, if you assume that most non vaccinated and a large part of the vaccinated will eventually get COVID (probably the case), then the 29% reduction in mortality does, actually result in a 29% reduction in mortality, and the exact same number of people will have been infected either way.
The difference will be in timing; the people will have been infected more quickly, with the (severe) problems that entails.
The title is misleading. It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine.
> South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.
It would be nice, and seemingly feasible, if they could compare to recent Delta infections (or even current one, seeing as both variants are present right now). Presumably any kind of acquired immunity is more comparable to 3 months ago vs. 21 months ago.
It could still be that among people infected with Omicron, there is a larger proportion of vaccinated people, due to vaccines being less efficient, but that's still a better yardstick.
I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk.
Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker!
EDIT: Also, on a side note, the actual doctor who found Omicron said it was less dangerous. She even described it as "extremely mild." https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-inter... Needless to say, politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it.
Someone out there is doing a study on meta-communication during COVID. The internalization of dominant narratives on social media is such an unspoken axiom, that merely SUGGESTING optimism results in a flurry of "we can't be sure!" finger-waves.
One could hypothesize that those who derive greater self-esteem or self-worth from social dynamics would engage in behaviors where the long-run probability of increasing self-esteem is higher. In other words, the most adaptive posts on both sides of a social media debate would be those which: A) maximally increase self-esteem via ingroup loyalty, and B) cause the debate to be prolonged or not resolved, thereby increasing the duration of A. The "we can't be sure" defense in response to optimism is B.
> COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker!
Probably naive to think we could totally eradicate it within a couple of years, particularly as far as vaccine fearmongering is concerned. Would be nice to see it join Smallpox and Polio though.
That said, we've accepted an annual winter uptick in flu infections and we just tell people most vulnerable to get their yearly flu jab; less vulnerable folks can stay at home for a bit and manage the symptoms. If that's what we have to do for covid every winter then so be it.
Just so other commenters can understand: are you saying that you haven't seen the charts with enormous spikes on them every time a place enters a cold season? Or that you find them to be uncompelling for some (as yet undisclosed) reason?
Most of Brazil is pretty temperate year-round, so they don't really have a very sharp flu season, but what they do have typically peaks around June, which fits with when the covid drop started.
> In the Fourier analysis, the seasonality of influenza in Brazil was characterized by a semiannual pattern, peaking in the winter month of June (amplitude = 27 percent), with a second, smaller peak during the summer (January; amplitude = 13 percent; figure 2).
That said, we've accepted an annual winter uptick in flu infections and we just tell people most vulnerable to get their yearly flu jab; less vulnerable folks can stay at home for a bit and manage the symptoms. If that's what we have to do for covid every winter then so be it.
Accepted? I would call that normalizing as well. According to an estimate, about 290,000 to 650,000 globally died of the flu each year.[1]
Normalization means it's a problem out of mind out of sight. We stop demanding these problems to be solved.
Just because our economy cannot withstand further lockdowns and restrictions doesn't mean that the normalization of COVID is any more excusable. It just means we failed.
It has nothing to do with the economy. Humans are social creatures. You can pay me $100,000/mo to sit in my house indefinitely and I can almost guarantee you it'll end in depression and suicide.
To take this to extreme: We’ve failed to solve deaths. We should have solutions to aging and indefinite life.
Since we have 100% death ratio, show us your health history along with your verifiable ID. We are the ministry of Truth and Safety.
In all seriousness: We need to push back on robbing of civil liberties. No one cared to check for flu vaccine. It should be the same for COVID now that it’s getting weaker and it won’t end forever.
At a certain point we accept the tradeoffs and get on with it. A few hundred thousand people die of the flu every year. So what? It's tragic, but that is life.
56 Million people die a year. There are vaccine's and treatments available for the Flu. The deaths aren't 0 but don't think it's something to moralize about and call a defeat.
Humanity declared victory over every single pathogen to date (eradicated, contained or seasonal) because we are still here and thriving. We should go on with our lives.
So it's not like this is some new threat. "2 weeks to flatten the curve" came along with some understanding that hospitals would increase their resources. Instead, in many states, they've spent more time working out which unvaccinated staff to fire and how than they have increasing staffing levels.
Sounds good. 2 years on with enough vaccines and antiviral pills on the way if you still believe hospitals are "filled to capacity", I'd like what you're smoking.
> It's almost completely a staffing issue at this point
So these politicians should treat this like an emergency and drive dumptrucks of money up to healthcare staff not working and get them back. Get nursing students. Do whatever it takes. Think outside of the box. This is supposed to be an emergency, is it not?
I mean, if it was an emergency and healthcare was truly an issue, why aren't those hospital tents and hospital ships docked in the harbor of every major city? "Lack of staff" is just an excuse in an emergency. You work around it. Make it happen. It's an emergency, right?
And if it isn't an emergency, why are we mandating anything at all? Shouldn't we all be going about our lives like we did prior to march 2020? If it isn't an emergency why are governments still using emergency powers to push mandates onto citizens instead of actually dealing with hospital shortages?
None of this makes any sense at all when you really start thinking about it. Absolutely none of it... Never did, never will...
>Probably naive to think we could totally eradicate it within a couple of years, particularly as far as vaccine fearmongering is concerned. Would be nice to see it join Smallpox and Polio though.
We would have to completely redesign our current method of vaccination, then. We do not have a sterilizing vaccine for COVID (like we did for smallpox and polio). The current vaccines all use spike proteins to prepare a body's antibodies against the main infection tool of the COVID virus. This method indirectly prevents the virus from efficiently infecting cells in vaccinated hosts, but it does not and cannot eradicate the virus.
I think that is what we need to figure out. I think our current method of vaccination was a clever hack, designed to do something in the early days of the pandemic. I think there were good reasons for this, too: a traditional vaccine aimed at early COVID would not have been very effective, as once we were alerted to the real danger, the cat was already out of the bag, and new variants were only a matter of time, but likely could not be reliably predicted.
However, more than a year later, I think now we should not only catalogue the arising variants, but we should also make a serious attempt to move away from spike-protein based vaccines in favor of traditional, weakened virus vaccines.
That article strikes me as largely playing a semantic game. From the article:
>The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells never get involved, a bit like an intruder smacking up against an electric fence around a building, leaving the security guards inside none the wiser.
and
>This is a very neat story. And it is “almost impossible to prove,” Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Oregon Health & Science University, told me. To show sterilizing immunity, researchers have to demonstrate that an infection never occurred—a big ask, considering that microbiologists can’t even agree on what an infection actually is.
If that is the definition used, yes, you are right. It is also basically useless as a term, as it is 'almost impossible to prove.' If you wish to use another term, we can do that. Instead of sterilizing, I could simply say 'highly effective.' Suffice to say, the mechanisms used by the COVID vaccine and the polio vaccine are very different. At most, the polio vaccine only included 3 strains (or variants)- the Salk vaccine, the first, only targeted type 1, but two more were added later over the course of years.
All of this is to say- the highly effective polio vaccine works because there are very few polio variants and people are immunized against them directly.
The COVID vaccine does not make one immune to the virus, or immune to the spike protein. The presence of the spike protein in the vaccine provokes an autoimmune response in the form of antibodies that will target that spike protein. This is somewhat effective, and a clever 'hack' that allows us a measure of protection. However, different spike proteins can be used by different variant viruses.
I am not antivaccine, and while autoimmune systems can be fairly complex, it is certainly worth discussing. Frankly I find the obfuscation and sloppy, ideological reporting to be frustrating. On all sides I see a lack of rigor and emotional attempts at control.
The argument that this is a semantic game is not a very good one. The whole point of the article is to demonstrate that there really is no such thing as a sterilizing vaccine; As our scientific knowledge and technology has improved over the years we see that.
The Atlantic article says, and I quote: "microbiologists can’t even agree on what an infection actually is." This seems to have the sole aim of shutting down discussion, basically throwing up one's hands and saying 'who knows.'
In any case, the term 'sterilizing' may not be one hundred percent biologically accurate any more, but denying that there are no sterilizing vaccines isn't really addressing the issue. So there are no 'sterilizing vaccines.' I think we can all agree that we want a COVID vaccine that is as effective as the polio or smallpox vaccine, a vaccine capable of eradication. Currently, that may not be an option due to how the disease mutates, but we should still talk about it, and discuss why we are not at least attempting to come up with a vaccine that is the flu vaccine (which may include 50 weakened or dead variants). Acting like the current vaccine options operate mechanistically like the old, very effective vaccines is misleading, and I think part of what is driving a lot of the consternation.
> Another hope could be that omicron is actually not as virulent as delta, but only spreads so fast in South Africa, because people can get reinfected.
It's seeing a pretty explosive growth rate in Denmark.
Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Even if it turns up to actually be true, the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true.
The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “it’s too soon to be sure”, then pay attention.
Based on? The second part seems logical tbh and the first part actually did happen ( 1200 employees and a decent company, so I doubt their would be lies. We're no better.com ).
Also, it is similar enough to what i heard before from a conference about covid previous year.
COVID update from work is actually a weekly online meeting that started because of COVID. I forgot by now that it would sound weird for an outsider. Everything is discussed what's happening in and out of the company ( supply chain shortage, COVID variants, cyber security,...) There's a q&a if someone has questions/concerns.
It's actually a worldwide and European meeting ( so 2 times/ week for me actually) and it's a pretty good alternative for keeping company culture and bringing it somewhat online.
Yes, it's not required if you don't want to attend :)
Don't all viruses become more mild over time? Even Ebola gets much less lethal towards the end of an outbreak as it evolves to preserve its habitat. Small pox is a possible counter ecample it seems like it was pretty lethal for millennia.
In the context of a pandemic there's also the relative fitness (strain vs strain) optimization.
So a more lethal virus during a pandemic must also be more transmissible, as it's actively competing for the same susceptible hosts with other circulating strains. If another strain gets there first, chances are it's going to prime that host's immune system sufficiently to prevent reinfection.
Which means it needs not just more lethal mutations, but also more transmissible ones. The probability of all of those coinciding seems low, as the former are more likely to arise in immunocompromised hosts, and the latter in circulation among dense populations, no?
> The claim makes a broad generalization about pathogens that’s not supported by science. It has been well-documented that pathogens can evolve to be more virulent. And many viruses, including HIV and Ebola, have in fact become more lethal over time.
As you note, smallpox disproves the idea that viruses automatically become mild. It had thousands of years to do so and carried a 30% mortality rate still.
No, they tend to become more spreadable, but there's no reason they couldn't become even more harmful as they evolve, rather than less. The strains that will win out are those that do less immediate harm (thus become more spreadable as people don't stay in bed ill), but that doesn't mean after a week or two they couldn't get really harmful (we saw in the first wave that covid was generally a week of nothing, a week of symptoms at home, a week in hospital, a week in intensive care, and then into the grave, with a certain chance of recovering each week. Imagine a mutation which reduced that recovering chance, that would cause more death, but not affect the spreading in the first week)
Only if you restrict to viruses that haven't killed their host population ;) But even then you could just wait until another higher-intelligence species appears and give them the same pathogen.
If everything survives, the resulting community can live with each other and that requires a sufficiently mild virus. However that doesn't help predict the future, because you can't enforce the precondition of everyone surviving.
> Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Indeed. And wanting something to be false does not make it false. People on both sides of this debate are far too eager to run with their preferred opinion and accuse anyone who disagrees of "misinformation".
"I don't like this paper, and I see arguments against it, therefore it is dangerous and wrong."
The thing is that even the pessimistic explanation of the data (high immunity due to prior infection) should give everyone (except maybe some countries) hope. After all, most industrialized countries should have a double digit percentage of prior infection by now.
Sure, for this immediate wave [more transmissible less virulent] is better than [more transmissible more virulent].
But that's awfully myopic. What happens after that?
Since mutation rate is a function of the number of viral particles, and more transmission means many more hosts incubating many more particles, we should expect to see more new variants, faster.
So the probability just went up that we'll get a new wave of a new variant that's [more transmissible more virulent] and will kill 10x more people than alpha through omicron will.
That's a probability and not a certainty, but life is probabilistic and our risk level just went up a lot.
Are you arguing the equivalent of "something increasing the chance of another world war is not a concern, because previous world wars clearly didn't drive humans to extinction"?
> It's a miracle that the human race has survived this long
It's not a miracle or anything close to that level of implied bafflement (devoid of being able to explain it rationally). We're excellent survivors overall, and a lot more than that. We're very skilled at resource utilization, we're relatively talented at conceptual thinking, we're competent tool builders on a planet ripe for it, we possess the ability to plan far ahead and understand consequences numerous steps out, we have memory capabilities that are quite effective across most of our lifetimes, most of our species is not particularly violent and is generally good natured & friendly (only a very small fraction of the population will ever commit serious acts of violence), we function quite well together in groups/tribes/cities/nations (compounded, shared outcomes), and so on. It's not particularly complicated, despite the doomsayers that will never stop existing amongst us (their mentality says more about them than it does the human race).
The Spanish Flu was over a hundred years ago and hit the world the same way Covid did even though there was no McDonald's or obesity epidemic back then.
Yes but Spanish Flu was really really bad. Affected everyone. Covid is not the Spanish Flu or even the Flu. The flu kills children and is indiscriminate. 80% of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid are related to weight.
We should have prioritized health and Vitamin D in April 2020. At that time it was clear it was mainly affecting overweight people. Of course even almost 2 years later people still don't think that as a whole. They say comorbidities. Just say it like it is... it's mostly fat people. The news and society won't say that.
WWI actually caused the epidemic. The first cases appeared in Kansas, and many doughboys were infected at Fort Riley before carrying the illness to Europe. Woodrow Wilson, who lied about staying out of the war until the day after his reelection, may have been the USA president who harmed the world the most.
You mean post-viral syndrome? I mean yea it's a thing with viruses but it will go away eventually. I had a cold a few years ago and was sick for like 3 months. Some of long covid is mental, so there's that aspect. Some say vaccination can help but that might just play into the mental aspect.
The human mind can create symptoms very easily, especially if every day you get bombarded by social media and news about Covid.
> Also by some definitions America is “mostly fat people” so your point is not that meaningful to begin with
True, but I'm just saying this wouldn't have been an issue 30 - 50 years ago.
80% of hospitalizations and death globally or in the US specifically?
Globally that is one thing, but if that data point is in the US, then the baseline population is something like 60-70% overweight/obese to begin with. In which case, that elevation from baseline isn’t as significant as implied.
OK, that says something slightly different. Because 42% of the US population is obese, even if Covid hospitalized completely at random you'd expect 42% of those admitted to be obese (not that obesity is the cause of 42% of admissions). They saw 50% admitted were obese. This implies that being obese increases the risk of hospitalization by ~20%.
I mean I think it says something very blunt. If you're not overweight you probably don't need 5 boosters and you can probably go about your day and play the odds. People still know how to play the odds right, they do it everyday? It's funny to me people are so scared of Covid when they're going to die of Heart Disease or Cancer.
There's just no nuance in any conversation related to Covid.
I honestly don’t think you understand the data even after I explained it to you. Unfortunately this is why even basic headlines get misunderstood by the public.
Let me ask you a question. If weight had absolutely no impact on Covid then what expected percentage of Covid hospitalizations would be with overweight people?
40% of US Democrats think COVID hospitalization risk if you're unvaccinated is 50%! Fifty percent! The real answer is less than 1%. Other polls have shown similar things for fatality rates, like estimated 16% IFR on average in France. It really makes me realize why people act in such extreme ways, if that's what they think.
COVID is to a large extent a total failure of our societies ability to disseminate accurate information. Unfortunately this misinformation catastrophe is largely the work of the very same people who are constantly complaining about misinformation.
How is it possible that anyone thinks 50% of all unvaccinated people have been hospitalized -- for just about anything! Seeing polls like this give me so little faith in our ability to make judgments as a country on anything non-trivial.
How do you reconcile this with the human race existing for so long? I guess you could make the argument global travel has changed things, but I’m not sure.
> How do you reconcile this with the human race existing for so long?
For a disease to make us go extinct it would have to be highly transmissible and have a fatality rate of close to 100%. Anything less than that, and evolution will produce a generation of humans that are resistant to (or otherwise able to protect themselves from) the disease, and from there the population will replenish itself. The great plague had a fatality rate of 30% and it didn't even come close to threatening our existence as a specie. (In fact, the resulting redistribution of wealth arguably contributed to the advent of the renaissance.)
This. When omicron and delta mate and produce offspring, we’re going to be screwed. Deltas virulence + omicron transceptability = the Great Wave of summer 2022. It will be a good year for Pfizer investors and Russia.
While there can be recombinations of some similar viruses, that's not the common way that viruses propagate, and it's not mating. Point mutations are much more common. And if they do recombine there's no reason to (automatically) expect that the results will be the worst characteristics of both.
Covid can't just mutate to become more and more transmissible off to infinity. The likelihood of a new variant being able to out compete Omicron is lower than a variant that can out compete Delta. There's also selection pressure towards milder disease, because someone with milder disease is more likely to be out in the world spreading it than they are to be quarantined at home.
The probability of a more transmissible, more virulent strain just went down, not up. It certainly isn't zero, but "more transmissible less virulent" is exactly how viruses tend to evolve. Mutations are a dice roll and it there's no way to be sure of anything, but being a little optimistic is completely appropriate.
> I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk.
You are forgetting about the most vulnerable group of all: immunosuppressed people.
They cannot mount a sufficient immune response, in severe immunosuppression like after a transplant event months or years after. In some cases the covid mortality for these people can approach 40% for young adults.
We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such. Or "whoever's not vaccinated dies of their own fault". Not 100% true.
We as a society must protect those most vulnerable.
This may come off wrong but... COVID is not the first virus. Immunosuppressed people for all of human history have been falling victim to the common cold, the flu and other infections most humans can deal with safely. You can't stop the world economy and the benefit that brings to the majority of society to save a fraction of a percentage point of the population that is Immunocompromised.
I personally go out a heck of a lot less with these insane mask mandates. I hate wearing a mask.
Plus many of these people arguing to keep them around forever forget that actual living humans work at these businesses. It takes a lot of privilege to suggest employees should continue wearing masks forever to make a small set of extremely fearful customers feel "safe". I bet 99% of the "pro mask" people on are not in a place requiring them to wear a mask 40 hours a week.
Try having a 3 year old child with a speech impediment that has to wear a mask in childcare for 6 hours a day. Does wonders for their ability to communicate.
I live in a state where mask mandates are essentially gone. Very few people wear masks here and they are not required in schools so only ~5% of kids are wearing them at my children's elementary school. Everything seems pretty good so far, no marked rise in cases and almost no cases in my kids school over the last year, maybe 25 total, all mild. I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do. With that said, I have not worn a mask in a long time, I am fully vaccinated including a booster and essentially figure that is enough. I work from home so if I get covid its going to be from my kids.
"We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such."
Not arguing with you, just genuinely interested on how long you would advocate for mask mandates? Would you be willing to accept mask mandates in perpetuity?
> I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do.
This is still so hilarious to me. It's pretty obvious that some masks work, that is, n95 or whatever actual respirator masks. It's pretty obvious that other masks don't work at all, that is, 99.99% of masks worn by the public at large.
I was putting on two N95s until someone said three was three times as effective so I started wearing three, then one day I did the math myself and don’tcha know, 95% of 95% of 95% is 86%! So I’m back to one mask now, underneath my motorcycle helmet.
Given that surgical masks stop droplets from spreading as much (especially when you sneeze), and given that bugs spread via droplets, clearly they do something. You may argue on the level of that reduction, or that your right to go out in public without wearing a mask outweighs that reduction, but to just say "masks don't work" is disingenuous.
> Not arguing with you, just genuinely interested on how long you would advocate for mask mandates? Would you be willing to accept mask mandates in perpetuity?
This is the problem, isn't it? For how long will these mandates be in place for? Right now, it's clear that they won't end until populations start revolting.
> Right now, it's clear that they won't end until populations start revolting.
That's not at all clear. My very cautious Northern California county dropped the mask mandates when cases started dropping this summer and only re-implimented them when cases and hospitalizations started to rise again.
I don't see any reason for them not to drop the mandates again when infection/hospitalization rates drop down to acceptable levels.
Define acceptable levels? And does this suggest we continue masking every winter when "cases surge"? There will always be a variant of covid. Always. It's never going away. Basing mask mandates of any metric, be it cases, hospitalizations or deaths means every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask.
Are you trolling or do you really think that "every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask"?
We've been in this pandemic now for close to 2 years. At every single point, government rules and guidance have lagged recommendations from the experts. I'm confident that there is exactly 0 chance that any governmental body in the US is going to continue to mandate masking after it's no longer necessary.
> Are you trolling or do you really think that "every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask"?
At this point, in the states that have mandates? I'm honestly not sure. There sure seems to be no rush to remove them despite having low "cases" and hospitalizations not being an issue. And given none of these states have given a single hint as to when they will go away... who knows?
States that continue this are absolutely normalizing mandated masks. Vaccines were sold as the end of masks (and they morally should have been regardless of what politicians say). Vaccines are the best we can do. Mandated masks in a post-vaccine world makes absolutely no sense at all. What other target could a government reasonably set after a vaccine? "Cases"? "Hospitalizations"? Well... those will always be there. So do we just keep doing this forever?
And if you say "hospital capacity" shouldn't these governments have fixed that already? We gave them two years and it was an emergency so where is the hospital capacity we put our lives on hold for? I mean, its still an emergency right? Shouldn't people be super pissed that government hasn't dealt with the actual problem they keep saying we have?
We are maybe a couple months from Pfizer's new antiviral becoming widely available, and it will probably work for immune compromised people. There's also a recent EUA for a long-acting antibody PrEP injection that should help immune compromised people avoid infection in the first place.
Both of these may be widely available in the US quite soon.
This is a good response and I think would be something that should be taken into account. I am still not going to start masking again unless a much more severe variant rises but I can understand setting a firm deadline based on an emerging technologies. Issue is that there will never be a 100% solution and some states more willing than others to let mandates run forever. What happens if those emerging technologies are not as effective as hoped? It becomes a slippery slope with the deadline kicked down the road. Personally I think we are all going to get covid eventually in much the same way we all get the flu. Everyone that wanted to get vaccinated (in the US) and boosted has had a chance to do so now. Most Americans that want to avoid human contact can for the most part via amazon and food delivery services, work is obviously a different matter for most people. Perhaps I am selfish which I am open to, but at this point after having taken 3 shots and been very mask conscious for the first ~14 months I am tapped out and willing to roll the dice as the risk ratio seems relatively low to my age group and I have no pre-existing morbidities.
The Pfizer data on their new pill Paxlovid is very good. It's not emerging, it's here and will be available to people very soon. We will probably all get covid, wouldn't it be better if we all got it after treatments that cut deaths by 90% are widely available?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/
'Ivermectin is an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'
That's not an NIH report -- that's a random paper posted on the NIH domain. IVM may have some benefit in countries with parasite problems, unfortunately it doesn't do much in the rest of the world. Has already been discussed to death, there's no conspiracy, everyone would have loved for it to help but it really just doesn't;
Yeah, it's so silly. It's not like there aren't studies and doctors willing to investigate cheap, effective treatments for covid with existing drugs.
We know that steroids work because they were studied, they definitely work, they're cheap and now they're the standard of care. Why didn't the anti-ivermectin conspiracy come for dexamethasone? It's left unexplained...
> Would you be willing to accept mask mandates in perpetuity?
I think it depends on location. In key environments like public transport and supermarkets and other spaces that everyone needs to be able to access it seems reasonable to me that we might keep them for at least a 5-10 year horizon if that proves necessary. It just doesn't seem like a big deal to wear a mask, and it would cut down on the need for more restrictive measures like lockdowns.
> It just doesn't seem like a big deal to wear a mask, and it would cut down on the need for more restrictive measures like lockdowns.
My wife has a medical exemption from wearing a mask. She cannot live a normal life when the standard response to her being out in public is disgust, constant questioning, or outright rejecting her due to "in-store policies."
My father has been wearing a mask, but constantly deals with hyperventilation issues. He's working with his family doctor to determine next steps.
Some things are a big deal for some people. I support anyone wearing a mask if they so choose. I oppose mask mandates as a one-size fits all solution.
> Why can't we do mandates with exemptions (maybe an exemption card from a doctor)?
I expect my wife would have to strap her card over her mouth to satisfy the social pressure to conform. It's not in most people's imaginations that anyone else could suffer from something that doesn't bother them.
> It just doesn't seem like a big deal to wear a mask
What about the fully vaccinated, boostered employees who work at these places? Should they also continue wearing masks despite being at virtually zero risk of major covid issues?
But yeah, no thanks. We didn't do masks in 2019 and we sure as heck shouldn't keep doing them going forward. Masks were a hack to get us to vaccines. They aren't something we should be keeping around anymore.
But do they show how much mask mandates work in the real world, do they explain why Edinburgh and Glasgow are indistingishable from Mancehster and Birmingham in numbers of cases detected?
Via what mechanism? Were people not wearing masks in Scotland despite the mandate? Were they wearing masks in England despite no mandate? Is there enough difference in behaviour between Glasgow and Manchester to explain the difference?
All conducted in the heat of the moment where saying anything that gives the slightest wiff of "masks don't work" gets you shunned, your career destroyed, and all social media platforms labeling your content as "misinformation".
Yeah... I'm sure all these studies done post-2019 are totally legit though.
Obviously, the material a mask is made from stops medium sized particles from flowing through some highish percentage of the time. No good faith actor is disputing that. Studies don't control for real world usage, actual public adoption, actual masks, etc. They also do not control for changes in behavior that we'd expect to occur contemporaneously to the time periods mask mandates are adopted (ie, during spikes in infection). When infections go up, I personally stop going places where lots of people congregate - a huge percentage of people change their behavior in ways that are both germane and impossible to track in response to perceived risk. They also do not or can not control for the differences in behavior in the societies that can actually adopt and enforce mask mandates in the first place; ie, a city that refuses a mandate in the face of a spike has citizens that are more risk tolerate (or something) as compared to eg SF.
"At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were divided into a group wearing medical/surgical masks and a control group found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review found nine trials (of which eight were cluster-randomized controlled trials in which clusters of people, versus individuals, were randomized) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness. Two trials were with healthcare workers and seven in the community. The review concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI) (RR 0.99, 95%CI 0.82 to 1.18) or laboratory confirmed illness (LCI) (RR 0.91, 95%CI 0.66-1.26) (44); the certainty of the evidence was low for ILI, moderate for LCI."
Look, I'm not qualified to evaluate a study like this, but between Science and "el gato malo" published on Substack, I think I'm going to have to go with Science on this one, pending some recognized expert in the field with a human name saying otherwise.
Skepticism and methodological criticism are definitionally "science". Not cult like faith. Ad hominems and appeals to authority are not valid arguments.
Paying more attention to information in a peer-reviewed journal than information in a pseudonymous substack is not "cult-like faith." Of course the study could be wrong.
The author of the study that the bad cat is trying to discredit wrote a long, persuasive rebuttal to the simplistic critiques he's been reading on Tyler Cowen's blog;
They saw a significant reduction in covid presence in communities with more masking -- even though total masking was still only 40% in those communities -- which is very much in line with all the other literature.
I literally can't believe people still pretend like masks (especially surgical/KN95s) don't protect people when it's completely self-evident since we've used them forever to protect people in medical settings.
It doesn't address the primary criticisms of the bad cat, and you should really read the comments on the article you linked, as well as they meta-analyses I provided on mask effectiveness when it comes to respiratory illnesses in healthcare and community settings.
They don't work, at all, across decades of research and dozens of studies. They're not going to magically start working for COVID when they haven't worked for the flu or any other respiratory virus in the past.
>forever to protect people in medical settings.
Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
> and you should really read the comments on the article you linked, as well as they meta-analyses I provided on mask effectiveness when it comes to respiratory illnesses in healthcare and community settings.
Unfortunately, Tyler Cowen's blog has worse Covid commentary than even HN does, which is pretty impressive given the amount of HCQ/Ivermectin/bioweapon conspiracy theorizing here.
> Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
This is patently untrue.. you're not one of those "virus particles can fit through masks" people are you? As just one example of how obvious it is that masks protect against viruses in HCW from the last SARS outbreak;
You should perhaps read the studies you've linked a bit closer? When mentioned (as several of them are explicitly about masks in non-healthcare settings) - they all advocate for universal masking in healthcare settings specifically to limit the spread of Covid...
> Although more research on universal masking in heath settings is needed, it is the expert opinion of the majority (79%) of WHO COVID-19 IPC GDG members that universal masking is advisable in geographic settings where there is known or suspected community or cluster transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
> 1. In areas of known or suspected community or cluster SARS-CoV-2 transmission, universal masking should be advised in all health facilities (see Table 1).
> All health workers, including community health workers and caregivers, should wear a medical mask at all times, for any activity (care of COVID-19 or nonCOVID-19 patients) and in any common area (e.g., cafeteria, staff rooms).
> Other staff, visitors, outpatients and service providers should also wear a mask (medical or non-medical) at all times
Opinions not supported by empirical evidence are not opinions worth listening to.
"Experts" supported eugenics, antibacterial soap, breakfast cereal, the food pyramid, lobotomies, and all kinds of other things on the basis of popular "consensus"
See now you've gone and boxed yourself into the typical HN corner...
The people making those recommendations are experts in the field and have all read the relevant research. Weighting the good studies vs. the bad ones, measuring evidence, etc. They literally exist to give guidance on world health matters based on the spectrum of results from all these different researchers.
And here you are, telling me that in your opinion, we should ignore their assessment and only trust these few specific papers that you choose to emphasize. (At least you've stopped advocating for ivermectin now?)
A bit of a paradox to get people to rely on your opinion when you've previously said we shouldn't rely on opinions isn't it? Or is it just that you don't like the WHO's opinion on World Health issues because they might be in the pocket of "big surgical mask".
I haven't boxed myself in anywhere, I've maintained the same position throughout.
I'm not telling you anything in my opinion. I'm telling you what the empirical evidence says or doesn't say.
I have not stopped advocating Ivermectin. The empirical evidence shows that it is still an extremely cheap, safe, and correlated treatment demonstrated across populations of billions through a mechanism of action that has been well established.
There's literally no reason not to try it, and there's a reason it's part of treatment regimens across several countries. Its use doesn't involve eroding the liberty of the populace or solidifying absolute power of state. It has virtually zero side effects medically or socioculturally, unlike things like masks or vaccines that have zero long term data
you should really read the comments on the article you linked
Even if I disagree with TC on something, I still think he's pretty much intellectually honest, i.e., is not beholden to one political agenda or another simply because it matches his world view or completely unaware of competing data. And he often does a good job in striking a balance on ideology & practicality (State Capacity Libertarianism comes to mind)
However the comments section on MR are often a hot mess of cherry picking or misinformation parroted back by people trying emulate TC's style without anything approaching his intellectual rigor.
Perhaps, but given there's doesn't seem to be a clear difference between Scotland and England, that leads to questions like
1) Were people in Scotland (with higher masking) being less cautious in other areas (washing hands, staying further away, etc)
2) Was the weather worse in Scotland, leading to more closed windows
3) Are people in Scotland more likely to be tested and thus more cases caught
The problem I have is that
The Scientific method comes out with great studies (wearing masks, all things being equal, reduces transmission)
That leads to a prediction (enforcing masks reduces cases figures)
That prediction doesn't hold out (Scottish cases figures)
So we need to revisit the prediction,
1) Does a mask mandate increase mask usage (anecdotally it appears so, but I only went to Glasgow and Manchester in October)
2) Does increased mask usage lead to other behaviours which would increase risk
3) Does increased mask usage lead to more awareness in testing
4) Do anti mask people go round licking door handles to try to spread covid to prove their points
These are perfectly valid questions, yet you can't ask them, because half the responses will be some idiotic cultish anti-mask covid denier, and the others will be some cultish mask worshiper
Your solution is a good one and makes logical sense but do you think that this pandemic is going to end? It shows no signs of abating currently and the new variant is even more communicable. How does one determine when the pandemic has ended, what is the benchmark? Covid will always be with us going forward. your solution also involves kids wearing masks in school for potentially years and years. I noticed a massive difference in behavior with my youngest kid during his year of wearing a mask in school and after the mandate went away. He went from a reserved almost sad little kid when I picked him up each day back to his prior outgoing happy self after a few weeks. Obviously my experience is anecdotal but I have spoken with other parents that observed the same.
> Just wear a mask in indoor public places until the pandemic is over.
I'm fully vaccinated, so why should I? And when will the pandemic "be over"? Covid is here forever and ever. As long as we keep testing at the level we do, we will always find new variants and always see "spikes" of cases every single winter.
When, specifically, do the states with mask mandates remove them? Why not today? What makes a month better? Or a year? Or never?
Pushing for masks at this stage is arguing we wear masks forever. That isn't a world I care to live in.
There shortages of hospital beds across many states [0] If you want a full perspective on things, look further than your own state.
Unless you live in Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska, North Dakota, or Montana then everything is not going very well. Most people don't live in these states, and many of the states with loose mask mandates are not in that short list. A small are just about holding their ground, but about 40 states have seen a >= 15% increase in infections just in the last two weeks, and one of the least restrictive states for mask mandates (Texas) has increased by 80%. [1]
Increase in infections does not equal death. It does bring the population closer to herd immunity. Infections and recovery bring sterilizing immunity, which is not provided by the shots.
Infections have been a lagging indicator for deaths this entire time and immunity from infections does not appear to last as long as immunity from vaccinations. The people most resistant to right now are those who had covid already and get vaccinated.
I also don't understand your assessment that we are reaching (or can reach) herd immunity: We're not there on the common cold or influenza, and it seems COVID mutates at rates that will keep it around as well. Early evidence on Omicron indicates that it in particular is better at reinfection than other strains, so I hope the data in the next few weeks confirms its milder nature, but reinfection provides even more opportunity for variants to emerge.
We're much better off than we were a year ago: The holiday spike is (so far) not as bad, deaths are lower than last year at this time, and vaccines are widely available. But we're not back to normal yet (probably never will be) and I don't think we're doing as well right now as we could be, and I think we can make a lot more progress before we declare this thing over and adjust to a new status-quo.
"cases" is not really a relevant variable anymore. It's been two years of a "pandemic" and I don't know a single person who's died from this ting yet. Of course, none of my Seattle neighbors will go out to walk their dog without wearing 3 masks.
Cases are absolutely relevant: they have been a lagging indicator for deaths the entire time. It will take another 2-3 weeks to see how the current spike in cases plays out in deaths. Hopefully Omicron actually is less lethal, but we'll see soon enough.
As for your experience, it is not predictive or representative given the ~800,000 US deaths. Especially because you live in an admittedly very cautious area.
Yes-- and yet just about anyone in this community would roll over laughing before pointing out the obvious if someone said "Why are we devoting so much energy to computer security? We've never even been hacked"
Just as an anecdote -- I moved from a very cautious place (SF) to a place on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I knew a handful of people who were infected in SF but none who died, but I know a ton of people here who have got the disease, including a bunch who have died. The local Facebook group is filled with prayer requests for loved ones who are being admitted under very dire circumstances and my healthcare worker friends here are completely shellshocked from all the death they've seen in the community.
Give me "unnecessarily wear a mask while walking the dog" and no deaths every day if my other option is "never wear a mask anywhere" and be surrounded by death.
Death is merely the most extreme outcome. Not dying doesn't mean you're OK.
Long COVID is a big deal, and it apparently affects half of those who get COVID [1]. Furthermore, even double-vaxxed, while protected against hospitalization or death, are still at risk (reduced about 50%) for long COVID [2].
Until/unless Omicron has been proven to have less severe long covid symptoms, yeah I'm treating it with the same caution that I'd do with Delta.
Long Covid is not a defined term. It comprises everything from "post-hospitalization syndrome" -- which is something that has existed since long before Covid -- to "slight cough for a few weeks". If you're young (under 65) and otherwise healthy, you are highly unlikely to have anything more than a minor illness. Particularly after vaccination.
> In this cross-sectional analysis of 26,823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with [loss of smell].
In other words, in a large study out of France, the only "long covid symptom" actually correlated with SARS-CoV2 infection was loss of smell. All of the other various symptoms were associated with self-reported illness, but not confirmed illness.
This is a fairly strong argument that "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic. We'd probably see this more clearly if the various "long covid" studies didn't rely exclusively on self-reporting of symptoms, and mix together all levels of illness.
Ironically if this is true, then the people loudly handwringing about "long covid" are the ones who are inflicting it on others, by encouraging people to fear it.
To combat this, perhaps we could swap the masks out with gags. /s
I suspect many people would go especially if they knew 243 people were going, the types of people who believe it wouldn't happen to them, only to others (probably someone who made the "bad choices" in life because god/fate/karma/etc)
Except COVID is not the end goal here, it is living a full life in proximity to other human beings that comes with a risk of getting COVID. It is no different in purpose than driving for the most part.
There's a wide spectrum of precautions available. I traveled overseas recently, but I KN95 masked on the plane and tested before departure and on arrival. I felt like I was living a pretty full life in Bora Bora, while also taking steps to ensure the safety of myself and others around me.
Same thing with driving; we have a variety of safety precautions - quite a few of them mandatory - involved that help tilt the cost/benefit balance in our favor.
With our Eco-Skies® CarbonChoice carbon offset sponsorship program, we’ll purchase carbon offsets on behalf of our customers so all their corporate air travel with us is 100% carbon neutral.
So they will buy carbon indulgences for your corporate trip to Bora Bora but not regular travelers?
It's presented as an option on checkout for any United flight, or you can do it directly after the fact at https://united.conservation.org/. $34 for my round trip.
Getting back to life with COVID with the appropriate amount of precautions and restrictions has benefits. Current hysteria and alarmism shows we are not there yet.
'Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits?'
Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.
That risk is an order of magnitude lower. Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.
Correct. It is about 1 death per 100 million miles driven per the table given by the other commenter. Those are actually much better odds than I was expecting!
Right. The 100m miles is more useful because it sets the scale of usage. 1 in 100 odds over your lifetime doesn't say anything about how likely you are to die at any given point in time. It's just that when you do die, there was a 1% chance it was in a car accident.
> Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.
The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.
>Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people
This is a ludicrous abuse of statistics. 11 fatalities per 100k people is 11 fatalities per 100k people's worth of trips. That is a few orders of magnitude less than executing 11 people out of every 100k who show up to a stadium.
For context, the cancer death rate is 153 per 100,000 in the US, so about 60% of the risk from Covid. Am I living in constant fear of cancer? No. Am I taking reasonable precautions to avoid getting cancer? Yes.
Depends on what you consider reasonable. Per this study [0] NYC had, as of June 2020, about 100 deaths under age 65 from people without comorbidities. During the same time period there were about 200,000 cases. This made the chance of a healthy person dying from COVID about 1 in 2000.
Given the option, I'm not taking that bet. I wouldn't play Russian roulette even with a 2000-bullet revolver. Especially when there are pretty simple steps I can take to further minimize the risk.
(It would be nice to have more-- and updated-- data than this. If anyone is aware of a source, I'd love to know about it)
That's also discounting other (and possibly not yet known) complications from getting COVID. There might not be much of any, but we it will be some time before we know that so I wouldn't discount that factor in my risk analysis.
Serious measure to mitigate transmission rates still seems like a very reasonable practice, even for healthy people.
Yep, we all draw our own lines on that. The complicating factor with COVID is that acting on your own higher risk tolerance impacts other people too. That's why we've seen such disagreement in society over the types & level of precautions to take. (Apart from when it is just outright politicized for political gain)
Optimism on the part of news outlets can be dangerous here. It may cause people to prematurely relax their precautions, and if it turns out to be wrong it will further erode trust in media outlets that jumped the gun. Considering the study was comparing Omicron to the initial wave of 2020 infections (a strange choice) I am not confident in the results. If it turns out to be correct, it will be more of an accident than accurate analysis.
As for the doctor that discovered it: Here experience with infected individuals is anecdotal data. She has not, to my knowledge, been involved in systematic studies. She is a general practitioner so here experience with this has been on the ground, primarily with the patients she has seen. Certainly this is useful but it is not a replacement for well-formed studies. Medical research and epidemiology are distinctly different activities from medical practice, even if many people involved in both have a medical degree.
There may be more but that was a quick Google search. You said "politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it." but that's incorrect
It shouldn’t be surprising that the people that complain most vociferously about “The media panic” are selectively hearing only what reinforces their view of the media.
That being said there are a lot of people hand wringing about “we don’t know yet, we don’t know yet” in this very thread. Three weeks into it, and the evidence is almost overwhelming: it is not likely to be nearly as bad.
I followed the original covid news in early January and I fought against the narrative that it was “just the flu”. We would know by now if the news was bad.
That being said, folks should continue to remain vigilant in those areas where spread is prevalent.
> Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic?
I'm optimistic.
A version of Covid that is much more contagious, but less likely to be severe is a great way to get the immune system of the vaccine avoidant trained on how to recognize and fight Covid.
For those who have already been vaccinated, a mild breakthrough infection would serve the same function as a booster shot.
30% less severe with twice the rate of spread does not seem like a good tradeoff. You have an exponential increase in cases but a linear reduction in hospital admissions.
The doctor who found it, isn't a psychic. She doesn't have any information the rest of us don't. She's just describing her personal experience.
And her experience is entirely consistent with Omicron appearing less virulent because it's infecting the previously infected and vaccinated who already have some degree of immunity.
How do I know "her experience is entirely consistent with Omicron appearing less virulent because it's infecting the previously infected and vaccinated who already have some degree of immunity."
1. We know that break through infections are less serious than infections to the unvaccinated and uninfected.
2. We determine virulence by # of hospitalizations (or other serious outcome) / # of infections
3. If we add more infections that don't have serious outcomes (because they are break through cases) that greatly increases the denominator without affecting the numerator.
4. This is how you could have Omicron be just as virulent as the original but look less virulent to a doctor. (Because of the break through cases)
Just look at well vaccinated populations like UK or Spain and then look at not well vaccinated like Bulgaria to see if it holds.
Unfortunately, in Bulgaria you see that the size of the deaths wave still follows the size of the infection wave.
The “no vulnerable people to die are left” hypothesis doesn’t hold. Those who survived survived because they were lucky, careful or vaccinated. It’s not true that the virus burned through the population and the remaining are the immune or resilient survivors.
The UK has basically indicated that it is going to be bad and are relying on boosting before the new year to blunt the impact. If that doesn't work, lock downs are coming..
Why I’m sensing a tone of desire to cancel the virus? As if, not fun anymore let’s do something else kind of canceling.
A few months back I was in Bulgaria, where the majority of the population is antivaxx virus deniers mask sceptics. It’s true that mask free virus free worry free life is much better, it was liberating to be in Bulgaria. However, at the same time everyone knew someone who died from covid. Much more than Turkey, where I have been since the start of the pandemic.
The situation we are in is not a choice. The virus is real, the damage is real and we can’t simply refuse to play. We can but a lot of people will die and I’m not convinced that this is the way to go.
I bet, when the things start getting real with other issues like the global warming, the inconveniences will create similar reactions. I appreciate the drive, the desire for freedom and convince but these things happen to people all the time when they fail to address the slow moving issues beforehand.
The situation we are in is absolutely a choice. We can choose right now today to move on from Covid. All we have to do is decide to stop being afraid of it. Accept the risk and move on.
Everything we’ve done in the last two years is not caused by the virus but our reaction to the virus.
PS: eventually even the most hardcore fearful will have no choice but to move on. Omicron is not the last variant and Covid will be with us forever. Expecting every member of society to treat Covid as if it is the only problem from here on out is not going to happen.
Get your vaccines. Stop being scared and move on. It’s quite literally as simple as that.
Do you understand that your level of fear is irrelevant from virus perspective? Sars-cov-2 doesn’t care about your feelings.
We will eventually move on, the idea is to do it with least damage possible. People moved on from the plague, the black death ve will move on. It’s just doesn’t need to lose so many people in the name of conspiracy theories and inconvenience.
The handling of the situation is different everywhere. It’s a management issue, not really a virus issue.
> Do you understand that your level of fear is irrelevant from virus perspective? Sars-cov-2 doesn’t care about your feelings.
The way you talk scares me more than the virus. It is so authoritarian and creepy. So many of my tech worker colleagues talk the same way. It’s abuse. People that talk your way are the kinds of people that commit grave atrocities in the name of some cause you are 100% bought into. You do not have the moral high ground you think you do. Stop now before you let very evil people use you to commit very bad things to your fellow humans.
You’ve already allowed your government to destroy our kids, caused old folks to die alone in care homes, gutted the working class, transferred enormous amounts of wealth to the richest in society, and divided the population in a way never seen before. You are committing great evil and you foolishly believe you are doing it for a proper cause. You aren’t.
Covid ends when you personally decide it does. Covid has no feelings. It’s a virus. It does virus stuff. It’s a part of nature just like earthquakes or tornadoes. We have very little control over it. Accept that and move on.
End your fear and Covid is no longer a problem. It is literally as easy as that. Nobody has to “accept” the virus requires them to sacrifice their very short amount of time on this earth unless they allow it to. And anybody who tells them otherwise is not to be trusted at all, for they have nobodies interest in mind.
The virus can’t have feelings, it’s not even a living thing and will not react to your courage. If that’s authoritarian so be it, the meaning of the word must have changed.
You know what’s part of the nature? lions, crocodiles and sharks and yet I’m not going to let them eat me. Earthquakes are natural too and you build accordingly, actually the evil governments even implemented building codes for it. 20 years ago I survived an earthquake that wiped out the neighbourhood because the previous governments couldn't bother to be evil and authoritarian over building standards.
What's up with this obsession with naturalism and personification of events?
We have mitigation strategies. Vaccines. We've had them for a year. Anybody can get them. Boosters even. You can even mix & match your preferred make & model at this point!
We don't need any further mitigation strategies. Vaccines were the only real mitigation strategy we ever had.
Could you imagine a company where lawyers had complete control over product development and the entire company designed their goods around whatever the lawyers said? Every square inch of the product would be covered in legal disclaimers, everything would have foam padding on the corners, and the box it came in would have you sign a 40 page document before you could even open it. I have no clue how the actual product might function but whatever it does, there is no way its failure would result in a lawsuit; which means it probably doesn't work very well at all.
Sometimes I feel this is what people want when they say we should be listening to "medical and scientific" people. They want us to build society around the advice of exactly one profession to the exclusion of everything else.
It takes way more than just a very narrow expert to run a society. For two years we've handed the keys over to exactly one form of expert and completely ignored every other form of expertise.
These "medical and scientific" folks you talk of can yell "not enough" until they run out of air but that doesn't mean we should listen to them. Of course they are gonna say "it isn't enough"! That is their job! That doesn't mean we should to listen to their advice.
It may come as a surprise to some people but at some point you have to move on from covid no matter what these "experts" say. There are vastly more problems with the world than one specific form of illness.
This blind adherence to a small set of "medical experts" is completely myopic and is resulting in a cure that is much worse than covid ever was. We've had a vaccine for a year. You can mix & match boosters at this point. Party is over. Covid is here to stay. Move on, people.
Another quote from the press-release of the study:
>“Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.” [1].
So, to actually make the comparison we'd need to compare new Delta infections with new Omicron infections time-matched, comparing people who were seronegative to start with. This would be really hard to do in South Africa since there is a high proportion of seropositive people.
You can easily disprove your theory by using the number of vaccinated vs unvaccinated that were exposed. We are talking about severity and not spread, that is easily done.
It's not the commenter's theory, it's the theory proposed in the article itself and that the commenter quoted. It's somewhat possible to account for the vaccination rate, but not really for resistance due to prior exposure because there are so many unknown variables in that.
> It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine.
All viruses are severe if you have no immune protection from them. A small number of people die from the cold every year. The only thing that matters is how severe the infection is given the immunity you have.
Well, yes, but if you’re naively comparing the severity of omicron infections to that of the previous strains then that’s just apples and oranges because the degree of immunization in the population is not the same, even if you only consider non-vaccinated people.
> severity of omicron infections to that of the previous strains then that’s just apples and oranges
Comparing the severity of the viral strains on some objective scale, if that’s even possible, is at best an academic curiosity. Severity comparisons only really matter in giving us an accurate idea of how likely severe illness and death will be so that individuals, families, and public health officials can make any changes necessary.
Additionally, severe illness and deaths are a lagging indicator. Cases are going to wildly outpace those figures because of how transmissable this is, until they don't. Deaths especially often take months from onset.
Hence the credulous articles about how India was 'special' when the virus first started spreading there because there were so few fatalities. Turns out it was spreading incredibly fast so cases were surging, but it took a month or more for the wave of deaths to follow. But follow it absolutely did.
Doesn't e.g. "a 73% relative risk of reinfection" mean being 0.73x as likely to be infected?
These numbers show (as one would expect) that prior infection makes you less likely to get Omicron, and that prior infection with more recent strains does so more effectively. (Which might be because they're more Omicron-like, or because the infection was more recent. I'm guessing more the latter.)
There always are. Average hospital staffing and resource levels mean at its minimum ICUs are at ~78% capacity. Come low vitamin-D season, January or February, most ICUs hit capacity every year.
Google doesn't run its data centers at 5% capacity for the same reasons ICUs don't.
Sure. It's normal for hospitals to be delaying routine surgical procedures (where they make most of their money) due to not enough staff and beds. It's not just about ICU capacity, it's the overall hospital capacity. My small town has three primary hospitals, and all are seriously overloaded now.
It's also early days for the new variant. I would love and do hope this is true, but it's previously take weeks and months to start seeing fatalities after the first reported cases, so it may be too early to make this statement yet; waiting for the law of big numbers to kic in.
Why is it ok to to be skeptical of findings if they are optimistic when it comes to covid, but if you challenge a pessimistic finding you are an anti-science anti-vaxxer piece of work? Let's be consistent here.
The study adjusted for vaccine status [0] but was still comparing things to the initial wave in 2020, which is strange and I would like to know their justification for that.
For a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison they should be comparing omicron hospitalization & fatality rates to those of non-omicron variants over the same period of time. It doesn't look like they've done that, and I'm not aware of a study that has systematically done this (yet).
It would certainly be a holiday-season gift if we shifted to a more virulent but less serious variant, but I'll hold out for a bit more information before I completely buy into that narrative. That can be difficult: people want to believe some good news here. Heck, my initial gut reaction was to push back against your objections but my career has trained me to resist that sort of thing. It won't be good for the erosion of trust in the media if they've jumped the gun on this and Omicron doesn't turn out the way we hope it will.
Not that I can tell (EDIT: They did, see comment further down) This seems to be research release by PR, not a published study. Although even if they adjusted for prior infections they should still be comparing comparable time periods. It is really odd if they didn't, and odd if they did do it but the results weren't included in the release. The initial 2020 wave is a reasonable baseline, but not a good measure of relative risk factors between variants right now especially because 2020 didn't include Delta.
Just because you disagree with something does not make it "misleading". The question of prior immunity is not unknown, is an obvious question, and in fact is mentioned in the article and discussed in the study.
The title accurately reflects the contents of the study. I have many issues with Washington Post's coverage of Covid, but this is actually fair.
Again: Just because you disagree with something does not make it "misleading". Your opinion is not truth.
No research paper stands alone, and we never have all context on a given question. You disagree with the conclusion for reasons -- that's fine. Make your arguments, and see if you can convince people. That's how science works.
Few headlines work without context so what we want is for them to choose the most obvious, pertinent context. I think we all care a lot more about what Omicron means to us now, not what it would have meant if it were the main variant at the start of the pandemic.
And, of course, anyone who cares about the topic should read past the headline.
Yup, it is definitely too soon to be sure of anything like this headline, and that's the word of the leading epidemiologists I follow.
Plus, this combination could be a lot WORSE for the hospital capacity situation.
Even if the virulence/severity is only a fraction, the severe consequences will still grow exponentially, just further to the right on the curve.
Meanwhile, the curve will grow a lot faster to the top of the graph because the greater exponential growth among both the unvaxed and the vaccinated.
So, higher percentage of severe cases and lower transmisability would be less bad — fewer sever cases and much greater trensmissability is almost the worst case.
I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation.
For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to normal behavior after vaccination, and (iii) the vaccines inhibit the other variants much more than Omnicron. So Omicron gets more opportunities to infect and spread. Of course, all this is just conjecture and could be true or false.
What matters from a practical point of view is that, Omnicron is less severe in the general population today(for various reasons), as compared to the original strain back in 2020.
It is misleading if you compare a country with 80% infection rate with countries with much fewer infections. If the milder cases are because of previous infections it could be a hard hit for unvaccinated first timers.
> I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation.
I think it is misleading. AIDS is much more survivable in "the current situation" because of various drug advances we made in the past few decades. Does that mean 2021 AIDS is "less severe" than 90s AIDS? I guess you could claim it's technically less severe, but the wording definitely suggests it's something about the virus, rather than the environment.
I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve?
I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
From what I know as not being a professional doctor, I would say that it appears to me that viruses get less dangerous over time, not more dangerous. This appears to be because viruses that are overly dangerous kill off their hosts too quickly, limiting their ability to spread, whereas the milder forms don't kill their hosts as easily and spread more broadly, building immunity against the stronger variants over time.
Edit: The result of this, if you look at previous diseases that have plagued humanity (see Black Death), is a high initial death count when the virus breaks out, but the death rate declines as the milder variants spread and people survive them, building immunity to stronger versions, until eventually the virus mostly disappears.
It's not something you can count on; smallpox remained highly lethal across thousands of years. There's probably also a bit of an element of natural selection against humans involved; the people who died early of the Black Death may have been genetically more susceptible to it.
I’ve heard that it depends on the virus. Some become less severe as they become more contagious, but sometimes their severity stays the same.
Naively, you’d think selection pressure would decrease severity, because severity is not how viruses spread. However, if (some of) the same mechanisms that ar causing the virus to spread better are also responsible for (some of) its severity, then things may not really get better over time —unless our immune systems themselves adapt, but that generally requires a first infection…
You are right about the trade-off: A more infectious, less deadly virus is the natural evolutionary path for them.
But about the breeding ground, not really: If one day some super deadly variant evolves, it's not popping up in all of the infected hosts at the same time. It'd still need to infect everyone from scratch, and since we all have our guard up right now, it'd definitely have an incredibly hard time doing so.
"I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe..."
I've definitely seen outlets postulating that the endgame for COVID-19 would be it doing exactly this— becoming way more contagious but way less severe, basically a just a kind of cold. These "final" variants would quickly spread everywhere, choking off the supply of new hosts for the more deadly variants, effectively achieving herd immunity.
Any genetic mutation which causes premature death of the host, or fails to be communicative will generally die off. Any mutation which keeps the host alive (or at least longer), or makes it easier to transmit the virus to another host, will keep the virus around. This type of behavior can be muted if there is an animal host that acts as a reservoir.
> Any genetic mutation which causes premature death of the host, or fails to be communicative will generally die off. Any mutation which keeps the host alive (or at least longer), or makes it easier to transmit the virus to another host, will keep the virus around.
Not necessarily[1]:
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
Viruses evolve according to evolutionary pressures. I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests - perhaps it's too soon, or even, who knows, maybe they are there and we don't know?
The common trope is that if the virus is too deadly, then it doesn't have a chance to find new hosts. This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pass it on.
Unfortunately, this is only a weak effect in Covid. Most of the spread happens well before people are very ill; in terminal stages of severe Covid, many people in fact would test negative for virus presence. So there is little evolutionary pressure on the virus to be less deadly - by the time it kills people, we are spent vessels from its point of view.
I suppose a mutation that makes it completely benign would be beneficial, as current rules on self-isolation curb the spread of strains causing symptomatic disease.
There are pressures that make it more deadly: a mutation leading to higher viral load is both more deadly and more transmissible. So unless the transmissibility increases too much (and virus is way too deadly), we might even expect the virus to become more deadly. This hasn't happened yet, thankfully.
An example I used elsewhere was the introduction of Myxomatosis in Australia, to control the invasive rabbit population. Over time, the local strain evolved to be more deadly, but with a longer incubation periods. This way, bunnies had more time to pass the virus around, then once that job was done, the virus was happy to kill them off.
On the flipside (and very long timescales), since some people appear to be genetically more resistant to the virus, you can expect natural selection to do its job. But since overall death rate from Covid is low-ish (no more than 1%, you'd say, and skewed towards older, non-reproducing individuals) this would take a long time.
Another hope is that, if the disease is less serious in children, perhaps immunity it built up during the usual period of childhood infections. There is another coronavirus, which causes a mild cold in children, but can be very serious in adults (apologies, I can't remember what it's called). Thankfully, a single infection gives more-or-less complete lifetime protection - so most people have it as children and never worry about it again.
In either of these cases, we're talking about generational timescales.
> I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests
PCR tests for RNA or DNA, that's not something a mutation can change. I don't know for Covid, but usually a PCR test targets something fundamental & stable. That might need to be updated with new variants.
> I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests
The people who design the tests know which parts of the sequence are more likely to mutate, so they pick the more conserved parts. Also, most PCR tests check for 3 different parts of the sequence. Which is why Omicron can still be detected even if there is a mutation in one part checked by the test, since the other 2 parts still match (the so called S-gene-dropout).
The current PCR tests detect three different regions of RNA that are expected to be relatively well conserved, so there's no single mutation that can cause PCR tests to not detect them and we'll hopefully get a substantial early warning that allows the tests to be adapted if they ever head in that direction. One of the three markers detected by some of the PCR tests is actually invalidated by Omicron and some other variants but it's likely either bad luck or the result of some other benefit this mutation gives the virus. In order to get much benefit the virus would basically have to dodge all the things the PCR tests check for at once and that's hard to evolve.
I'm not a virologist by any stretch of imagination. Mutations seem to come in bundles; I'm just surprised that, given typical PCR tests only test for three RNA fragments, that we don't see mutations that evade it.
The main evolutionary pressure on Covid in developed countries is Public Health clamping down on it like a ton of bricks. A variant that quietly evades PCR tests, self-isolation etc. is set up for life.
> So there is little evolutionary pressure on the virus to be less deadly - by the time it kills people, we are spent vessels from its point of view.
A variant that infects more people from a single host (assuming everything else held constant) is a positive selective pressure. So increasing the contagious period is beneficial. But the length of the contagious period is inversely related to the timing and strength of the immune response. So we should expect the virus to become less deadly over time, assuming there's a hard limit to its ability to evade a typical immune system.
Viruses that evade the PCR test for Covid would be a different species almost by definition, and with enough mutations that could happen. These tests don’t detect other common cold causing coronaviruses for example.
> An example I used elsewhere was the introduction of Myxomatosis in Australia, to control the invasive rabbit population. Over time, the local strain evolved to be more deadly, but with a longer incubation periods. This way, bunnies had more time to pass the virus around, then once that job was done, the virus was happy to kill them off.
> This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pass it on.
Quick nit: while this is true, SARS-1 was also not particularly transmissible before symptoms appeared, in contrast to Covid, which made control much easier (in addition to the much higher fatality rate causing everyone to take it much more seriously).
gjsman addressed the issue of severity very well, so I'll just comment on tradeoffs.
The adaptations that affect severity and those that affect transmissibility generally seem to be different. These are two axes on which a new variant can very in either way. The most successful new variants will tend to be highly transmissible (for obvious reasons) but also tend to be lower severity for the reasons gjsman gave in a sibling comment.
That's only a tendency though, evolution will throw up variants on all sorts of different points on the transmissibility and severity scales and may the most successful virus win. Yes high severity variants will tend to kill off their victims sooner, but if also highly infectious that might overcome that effect. In any case killing off victims still leaves a trail of devastation. It can take a while for all of this to play out.
If severity means the host dies quickly rather than slowly, there's obviously selection pressure and that mutation will die off relatively quickly vs the rest, since it won't have as many chances to spread as the less severe strain. E.g. SARS/MERS.
If severity means the host dies more often, but it still takes a long time to die, the selection pressure is much lower, and it will roughly spread the same as the less severe strain, all other things being the same. E.g. Spanish Flu.
Eventually in this case being approximately 18-24 months from the first wave, which coincidentally is very close to where we are in the current pandemic.
The point isn't that Covid will be as fast as the Spanish Flu, it's that the Spanish Flu did not take a long time, and should not be dismissed as an example where it became milder eventually. In fact, we'd have to be quite lucky if covid became mild in the same time frame.
That doesn't make sense. We have seen regular waves of flu, some being more pathogenic than others. There has not been a "direction" of flu strains becoming milder. So-called Spanish flu came after weaker strains.
> All modern seasonal flu variants are descended from it.
I don't think this makes sense either. The more serious strains of flu we've had in recent decades have for example included contributions from bird and pig viruses.
Certainly there is variability, evolution is fundamentally a random walk, but no strain since 1918 has come close to that one's severity, and the genes causing cytokine storms in infected individuals, which was why that strain was so deadly, seems to have been quickly lost. Subsequent strains that were highly virulent seem to have evolved new mechanisms.
Viruses can pick up genes from lateral gene transfer. Basically in the process of copying their own genetic material while replicating, they might inadvertently copy some extra genetic material that was just lying around in the host cell, and it gets incorporated into their genetic code, producing recombinant strains. Further, just as animal strains can jump into humans, human strains can jump into animals. So for example in 1968 the H3N2 flu lineage started in birds, jumped to humans where it recombined with 1918's H1N1 making human H3N2, and then jumped into pigs to make Porcine H3N2. Indeed there's evidence that H1N1 started out as an avian strain that jumped to humans and swine around the same time, but this is still an open academic debate.
One thing that makes Covid-19 a bit different from other viruses that have trended towards milder infections is its long incubation time (while still being infectious). So it can already spread pretty easily even if it's killing those people, and thus there's not a lot of darwinian pressure to become milder.
It might still trend towards that over time, but it will probably be slower at it than other viruses, and thus the 'it gets milder over time' aphorism about viruses doesn't apply as strongly to Covid-19.
Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely.
This may (may!) be what we’re observing with Omicron. In any case, we’ll know much more in a few weeks.
I'd say that's normally true, but there's not a ton of lockdowns with even Delta right now, so while I agree that it probably isn't going to get worse, there's still not a ton of pressure from social response as it is right now for it to get milder (maybe you could argue pressure from vaccines I guess).
Yeah I think we can learn what society thinks is acceptable risk just by looking at death counts over the last two years. They've pretty much leveled out. So as the virus mutates into less (or more) harmful variations, we'll see the world react less (or more) strictly, but overall death count will remain stable.
Presumably the steady state will happen after the virus mutates into a less dangerous variant (as infecting more people will be evolutionarily advantageous for the virus), and eventually we all get it and build up antibodies, at which point its virulence further subsides.
Sure, and this is where the immune erosion comes into play: as vaccination rates go up, so does selection pressure for immune erosion.
Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up.
With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.)
From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.
Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control?
How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?
There's likely millions of virus variants out there already. Some will evolve to become much more contagious and most won't do much of anything.
When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out. As it dies out, and people go outside, variants that are milder will thrive because people won't lockdown as easily. This can repeat forever until eventually the virus is completely benign. Of course it's all based on randomness so it's not exactly predictable what will happen.
Except "Everybody goes inside and stops spreading" is not something that is unique to a variant of concern.
When everybody goes inside, all the variants stop spreading. The pressure is the same on every variants, so there's no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.
> no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.
Any variant that is able to co-exist with (rather than kill) its host during a full lockdown has a significant advantage. We co-exist with several coronaviruses already.
> Except "Everybody goes inside and stops spreading" is not something that is unique to a variant of concern.
But it is — this will not be the response to a variant that doesn’t cause an increase in hospitalizations or deaths.
A given response exerts pressure on all variants, of course. But a milder variant may be able to spread widely before a more lethal one shows up and ratchets up lockdowns.
> When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out
Except this doesn't happen, otherwise COVID would have already stopped spreading. Our social response to COVID isn't adequate enough to stop its spread. We can't get people to actually lock down or stop transmission.
But has this been true in practice? Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns? I suppose hypothetically if there’s a new strain with like a 10% fatality rate there will be new extreme measures where that could be the case, but it hasn’t happened yet. Even the extreme early 2020 measures failed to stop the virus.
Which lockdowns in our hemisphere had the goal of stopping the virus? All I know about (or have been part of) never stated that goal, only goal was to break waves and avoid overload of health care systems, which most at least helped with.
And then it goes on because measures are reduced, and zero-covid never was a goal... would even go so far that some few countries pretty successfully did zero-covid strategies and stopped their virus, though sure, that is a pretty futile thing if the world is not "globally" doing this and you are likely not isolating forever/completely - so we just start to live with it.
> Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns?
Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.
The mu variant, which caused a lot of worry, went away. It apparently escaped vaccines better than delta but spread much more slowly, so delta out-competed it. Perhaps if there were no restrictions it would have done better. Hard to say though.
Which begs the question of the long term utility and effect of symptom suppressing vaccines (that don't prevent transmission).
If a virus that would make make you very sick is contracted by someone who's vaccinated - They will now be in the 2nd category you describe ~'Sick, but not sick enough to stop them going out' -- They're now giving mobility to that virus that it would have otherwise not had (If they weren't vaccinated and were feeling too sick to go out and about)
So by usage of vaccines that only prevent severe symptoms, we pervert that normal negative feedback loop of virus spread and instead set the parameters to be more likely to propagate severe virus' that would usually keep you sick at home.
But prolonging the inevitable is still useful, in that it slows down the number of hospitalizations on your march towards the inevitable.
Most hospital systems in the USA are stressed to severe levels. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 even began, and the increased workload from COVID19 is clearly causing problems.
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Slowing things down gives more time for the old patients to leave the hospital, meaning doctors/nurses won't have to work as hard.
> Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control?
Very much so, and my post was carefully worded to refer to evolutionary selection pressure, and not any kind of agency on behalf of a virus.
I assumed the audience here would get it.
As an aside, there are much kinder ways to voice this kind of concern that don’t drip with contempt; consider taking a less accusatory tone in the future? That might trigger fewer downvotes the next time the reading comprehension module needs coffee.
I think that the basic severity-lowering gradient still applies, but now it happens in two dimensions. Furthermore, it seems plausible that the sequence of variants "Original" -> Delta -> Omicron follows such a pattern.
First, evolutionary pressure will select for a lower dormancy period, i.e. a lower time to contagion. This is because a variant with a shorter dormancy will spread faster than one with a longer dormancy period if both are present in the same population. This is also exactly what happened with the Delta variant, which is asymptomatic generally for a shorter period[1] than the original variant, because it replicates faster.
Second, the usual process occurs for the usual reasons. This may be happening with Omicron.
I can't find the excerpt, but I read "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History" by John M. Barry during this pandemic. It was an okay read if you're looking for something to pass the time.
There was a passage that suggested that virus evolutions happens all the time which sometimes gives us a super severe strain. But usually these super sever strains don't evolve into even more severe strains - generally they evolve back towards the "baseline" severity and the severe strain burns itself out.
From that, I had hope that the Delta variant of COVID was one of these outlier super severe strains and that all subsequent evolutions would fall back but it's not looking like that is the case when omicron was found.
In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a week before the person shows severe illness
>In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread).
It takes far less than death to reduce spread. People who feel sick stay home from work (not guaranteed, but with enough frequency that it matters), don't go out to eat, don't wander around and go to parties, and so on. Any time they're sitting home, they've hurt the chances that their variant is the winning-est variant.
Again with the caveat about dormancy periods for Covid.
Asymptomatic spread is not nearly as prevalent as originally feared.
Also, those who do not get symptoms (that is, most who catch covid) do not spread the virus in general, which is why it's now called "presymptomatic" spread.
Every single press title the last two years can be related somehow to a single Game. New variants, new mutations, spreading faster vs killing more people, ... All these tradeoffs are quite well modeled.
Building a resistance to vaccines ("the cure") is also one areas where your virus can evolve, and -to be honnest- I prefer it to fight vaccines than to develop a "total organ failure" mutation.
It's a game, not a model. Real mutations aren't directed or instantly spread to all infected people like in the game. Iirc people also don't get better once infected.
Viruses evolve to be more fit. Presumably, a mild version and more contagious version may even have evolved in one of the billions that were infected these years, but it didn't spread much because of self-isolation and restrictions. A variand that s more debilitating would be less likely to transmit.
Imo part of the joy of hn is that this isn't actually true. Obviously not everyone knows what they are talking about, but some of the people who really do have serious knowledge on any given topic are on hn, and the average person here is at least slightly less likely to think they have knowledge when in fact they don't.
Yeah I remember in June of 2020 discussing the new aerosol data on HN and cringing about the 6 ft recommendation with cloth masks indoors. Finally a year+ later the WHO admitted as such (aerosol risk can be >50 ft for hours after a spread event), so sometimes we are ahead :)
> "aerosol risk can be >50 ft for hours after a spread event"
no, that's cringeworthy fearmongering. the virus is fragile and falls apart relatively quickly outside the body. the main risk behavior is having long conversations in close quarters where you're constantly exposed to a warm airstream of live virus.
In the right humidity conditions with poor airflow it has been found to be stable for hours, this is how there were super spreader events from 1>500 in certain types of factories.
no, any explanation of a ‘super spreader event’ is making a post hoc rationalization, arising from the biases of the explainers. thermo-fluid models of such conditions are often similarly biased, but have the additional proof burden of not representing observed phenomena, just assumptions and suppositions about it. it’s just as likely that factory workers having lunch together is the cause of such a ‘super spreader event’. occam’s razor suggests we start with the simplest explanations before considering convolutions like that.
make no mistake, if covid menacingly floating in the air to catch you unaware were actually a meaningful method of spread, we’d have evidence all over the place being reported feverishly by those very same biased reporting sources.
on this end, I do not want covid at all, straight up. I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.
before delta hit the US and the pfizer vaccine granted 95% protection from infection against the dominant strain in the US at that time, that was a place I was comfortable with. There will be more boosters tailored towards whatever variants have come down the pike and at the point where the risk becomes tolerable, then sure of course some form of covid will be inevitable but it would be mostly indistinguishable from any other minor flu. that is, no chance of requiring a lung transplant post-recovery. covid is not there yet, the current variants and inadequate vaccine protection still leave the chance of permanent and severe lung damage too high for me to "plan" on getting it.
to be clear, one component of minor vs. major covid is how large of a viral load someone is initially exposed towards. I'm fairly certain if I take a deep breath near an infected person, the N95 should reduce the load I'm exposed towards, hopefully significantly.
But would you also engage in these behaviors if you couldn't go online and A) project action onto an "army" that neither exists or has occurred; and B) gain social prestige by allying with a dominant narrative?
The question isn't intended to be rude, or suggesting your motives are tarnished. Just a query into the extent online projection (and presumptions about it) affect our choices. Note also that I am distinguishing between your stated choices and the choices themselves.
Since zzzeek is an online identity, how much social prestige is he getting? Does he direct other people to posts that he wears a mask?
Maybe on Facebook where people often use their real name I could see that as a possible motive but here?
Why is it so hard to think that people who disagree with you about masks are wearing them because they want to be safe? I wonder if the divide and anger is because each side believes the other is taking action to make a point and nothing else.
> I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.
The masks have never been about protecting yourself but have at it. I don't care what you do just stop forcing your attitude on everyone else. At this point you're just trying to make a statement, not protect anyone.
Cloth masks are somewhat effective at protecting those around you, but only slightly effective at protecting you; masks like the N95 do both quite effectively, if you wear them properly.
Almost no one is wearing any mask appropriately. Even the n95 needs to be changed more than daily. I highly doubt any decent percentage of people are doing that. At this point it's just a statement and nothing to do with protecting themselves or anyone else. Alternatively, they're suffering from psychosis.
That's for hospital workers wearing them 18 hours a day in highly contaminated environments. I am exposed to other people for an hour a day with social distancing, tops. The N95 is much more protective than a cloth mask and it is entirely for self protection, the last thing in the world I want to do is make a "statement" in the places i go. However the intolerance for my silent practice is fairly frequent.
You don't need a mask if you're social distancing. You've got some major cognitive dissonance going on. There's absolutely no scientific backing behind what you just said. Your own health anxiety is talking. People are looking at you weirdly because it looks like you're in full psychosis mode doing illogical things.
The biggest issue is that the minority of people like you are dictating how everyone else has to lead their lives. Dirty looks aren't "intolerance". Now, if they were telling you that you could not wear a mask that might be intolerant (see how that's similar to telling people they have to wear masks).
(I decided that I wasn't going to get a reasonable discussion out of this guy at his suggestion that people disagreeing with him are "suffering from psychosis", and that appears to have been borne out so far.)
IIRC, this was predicted, which is hopeful and good thing. I remember reading an article last summer that generally diseases become less severe over time.
Generally, statistically yes, but not always. Most of the people that died in the Spanish Flu epidemic died in the second wave, a year after the first. A couple of years after that and less dangerous variants came to dominate but there was huge devastation before that came about.
Yes. Covid will continue to mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. This is the natural progression of endemic viruses, they don't want to kill their hosts and they want to spread.
The one imperative they do have, in effect, is to replicate. That imperative translates into the real world into analogues of action that replicate to equivalent observable effects.
This kind of anthropomorphism is acceptable, it's not like the poster doesn't understand how evolution works... I'm pretty sure "experts" have used the phrase as well. The gist of the comment is correct though.
"Want" in this case is clearly understood to mean the option that is evolutionarily favorable.
Per this site's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
By the time people die of covid they've already spread the virus. Generally by the time people die they've cleared the virus. It's the inflammatory response that kills them. There's really no evolutionary pressure for covid to become less virulent since people can spread it prior to being symptomatic.
The data on severity is still difficult to transfer across countries. What seems reasonably certain is that vaccinations and previous infections do protect reasonably well against hospitalization and death. It is still not clear how the unvaccinated and not infected will fare.
And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
You gotta be careful with those doubling times. Is that due to the raw number of tests being done increasing substantially? If it is unnormalized raw reported numbers then they can't exactly be used to infer the doubling time without more information. I know this is something everyone must know by now, but you will still see incorrect comparisons in media.
Omicron has been found in 38 countries and there are still no deaths caused by it. [1] The media are running with the story that the first death from Omicron just happened in the UK, but read Boris Johnson's quote:
"Sadly at least one patient has now been confirmed to have died with Omicron," Johnson told reporters [2]
This sounds batshit crazy, because it is, but in the UK, if you die from something unrelated while infected with SARS-COV-2, it's counted as a COVID death. [3] The key word in Boris' announcement is "with".
Before that data point resolves itself, remember that n=1 doesn't really support either meta-narrative. Not saying you are doing this, but I'm sure there are many who are preparing to both sharpen this data into a spear for the "other side", and at the same time, preparing a cognitive dissonance process to explain the data should it not support their meta-narrative.
The end result is discussion that advance little in the Shannon information sense, but maximally clarify every individuals social net.
It won't be reported as an Omicron death unless it is sequenced, which excludes a vast amount of cases and lags cases by up to 2 weeks.
Initially reported Omicron cases in the US predate knowledge of Omicron, confirmed cases are from November, and today's story of 13% of samples in Washington state likely being Omicron is based on test data from a week ago.
0 or 1 deaths being reported so far as caused by Omicron is still consistent with "Omicron is roughly as bad as previous strains, and will result in a lot of excess deaths."
This is an unfortunate reality of this pandemic; the vast majority of deaths, even with Delta and the OG, were among those people with pre-existing conditions, including the most common: obesity and related disorders like type-2 diabetes.
I think Boris' statement is accurate, but you're right; our reaction to it needs to be taken in context. The media and government will talk non-stop about vaccination and treatments, which are incredibly important due to the reality of the pandemic, today. But, mentioning weight, eating healthier, exercising, critically analyzing your own risk factors (with the help of a doctor), etc; out of the question.
I wish I could scream at our leftist leadership right now: Managing fear is wildly important. Every spectrum has extremes. On the extreme right we have vaccine denialists; that's unhealthy. But on the extreme left, we have the opposite [1]; people who are so afraid of this thing they can barely live their daily lives, people who isolate, become depressed, and even kids who are so impacted by at-home learning and impaired social lives they commit suicide. That's blood; the rightwing media and government leaders spill the blood of people who won't get vaccinated, and the leftwing media and government spills the blood of people so caught up in the fear of this thing they neglect their own mental and socioeconomic health.
A (leftist) friend just told me three days ago: "Every other human is a threat."
At this point, we need to heal. Vaccinations, treatments; absolutely. But far more importantly, we gotta put COVID behind us, even if its still here. That responsibility falls on the media and government leaders. Early in the pandemic, we (probably) overplayed the severity of the disease to convince people to isolate; we didn't know how bad it would be, so it was the safer, correct route. Today, I think we need to underplay it. Don't lie; don't obscure. But the fearmongering will destroy our society far faster than COVID does.
Is the "less severe" part just from a roll of the dice? I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years. Be it a variant of Covid, or something new altogether.
That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
> I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years
We already know one such thing - bird flu (H5N1 - 50% mortality). Luckily it doesn't pass from one human to another. But scientists already built a version that presumably can (gain-of-function):
> (2019) Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. ScienceInsider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research.
But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
I think we aren't very confident yet that there's much selective pressure toward less severe disease - the reason being that the virus does a lot of its spreading before symptoms get to be their worst, so the severity of "worst" doesn't seem to factor into the evolutionary fitness of the virus. And this is supported by the fact that delta was both more contagious and more severe.
We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
> But doesn't this demonstrate that the selective pressures tend toward higher contagiousness but less severe disease? So if there were a new variant, wouldn't it likely be just more of what makes this one favorable?
Delta is more infective than Alpha. The mortality rate is comparable if not worse, but it's hard to say as we've had extensive vaccination, which has made it hard to assess. We're lucky for the moment with Omicron, but there is no guarantee.
The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid.
The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population.
The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent.
Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them.
The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
It probably makes no sense to talk of a virus having a strategy. I don’t agree with all of his stuff but the point of Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” is basically that attributing mental states to things is just a pragmatic matter. If it helps us understand virus behavior better to treat them as if they have strategies (which implies mentation), then we should do it. I don’t see how it would help at all here, though.
A strategy doesn't have to be planned to be executed.
A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans.
Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
The simplest version of survival of the fittest, continued existence. Entropy preserving entropy, it's more of an emergent property of reality than a strategy.
the random mutation concept is close to but not exactly the situation.
there is a low frequency event that results in mix and match of large regions of sequence. This is very different from error prone replication error, or point mutation.
this occurs when a host is coinfected with two or more viral strands of differing origin. most often virus of close familial lineage do this, but that isnt exclusive.
the mechanism is molecular promiscuity during replication, there is a jump from one strand to another in proximity, thus recombining.
cocirculation is required for this to occur, high frequency of co infection is required for recombinant mutants to occur with predictive certainty.
like the gatekeeper and the keymaster, we should avoid allowing delta, and omicron to contact each other, and surveil the sequences closely.
People think the virus has a strategy, like it’s playing a sport and deciding an outcome.
Tell the Black Plague its strategy of killing 30% of is suboptimal. Or to the species driven to extinction by a disease. “Inanimate object, that was suboptimal to your existence!”
It's a virus. If you grab a single grain of soil there's probably more things "having strategies" there than COVID. The media just makes it sound like it's alive but it's literally the less-alive thing that still evolves biologically that anyone knows about.
Pathogens can benefit from evolving in ways that allow them to spread more easily, and sometimes that means not killing your host too soon. But transmissibility with COVID is highest before symptom onset, so death of the host never comes into play.
A vaccine resistant strains is extremely bad news; if it's less severe that would be good, but that remains to be seen while it's obvious now that vaccines are less good against it.
We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.
Yeah, a highly infectious vaccine resistant strain spreading while the world opens up and people rely on the waning strength of their first two shots is pretty much a recipe for year three of this crap.
At this point I'm expecting this crap to be a thing until we have a winter of excess deaths at or below Pre-Covid levels. Once that is observed I think people will finally move on. It sounds like this is still going to result in deaths, so I am now expecting year three of this crap.
I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
At some point, it seems like you have to weigh the lifetime risk of dying from COVID against the loss of life enjoyment and decide “We shouldn’t subject ourselves to another 1.25% of our lifetime of this (whatever “this” is) to lower the fatality rate from Y to X.” (If you’re lowering from 5% to 1%, that trade makes sense for even severe social restrictions. If you’re lowering it from 0.5% to 0.4%, that trade makes no sense for anything beyond the very mildest of restrictions.)
I think it's better to consider some kind of "casualty rate" that includes long COVID, rather than just the "fatality rate". At the moment it's possible some people may never fully recover full function after contracting COVID even though they survive.
While I don't think you're wrong, in practice I think most people use fatality rates as a proxy that kinda implicitly includes non-fatal harms. How often do people talk about heart disease or obesity in terms of "casualty rates"?
The people who never fully recover are orders of magnitude more expensive than the dead. The latter are a one-time cost in lost productivity and care expenses; the former are an on-going cost. Since we, collectively, are the ones who are going to pay via taxation, we should IMO be a hell of a lot more concerned about COVID’s long-term consequences.
Beyond personal choice, in America statewise regulations and urban v. rural differences in mitigation techniques may mean citizens vote with their feet and gov'ts respond to properly shore up tax bases.
In any case I'm no longer thinking this has a clear end date, just a gradual fade into memory, the exact length of time it takes undefined/unclear.
Only in places that continue to consider covid the only problem society should focus on. It might be hard for some to imagine but we cannot continue to put the world on hold for exactly one specific form of illness.
For one thing, we've created a pandemic of untreated mental illness. All these people I see walking their dogs at night on a rainy day alone on the street wearing a mask with foggy glasses are gonna have a hard time getting over this... All the people who haven't left their house in two years are gonna need some help. People have lost their minds and it is gonna take a while to heal.
I don’t think this indicates omicron is vaccine resistant.
But rather that the current vaccines aren’t effect for because omicron is substantially different from the original covid strain used to develop those vaccines.
If I evades vaccines for more dangerous variants, I'm not convinced catching it will make me immune to those variants either. It might actually be different enough to be independent.
That omicron is able to so easily infect people who have had and recovered from delta points to it being almost a different disease from the perspective of the immune system.
Vast majority of those are mild illness or where it was a secondary finding. There's been a sharp decline in the number of hospitalizations requiring additional oxygen.
The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.
>The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune
The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild.
From today:
> lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference.
Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist:
> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.
It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
https://covidestim.org/ provides estimates of the percentage of previously infected individuals by US state. I happen to be in Massachusetts, for which they estimate around 50% previously infected, with error bars. So a bit lower than South Africa, but not too far in the big scheme of things.
The UK provides some estimates of seroprevalence in blood donors (thus a skewed sample):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-... (Figure 3). These estimates aren't quite what you are looking for, but one test is sensitive to previous infection and estimates 20% previously infected, whereas another test is sensitive to (infection OR vaccine) and estimates ~100%. Basically, in that population, pretty much everybody has some kind of antibodies.
To answer your question, I would say that SA doesn't look particularly unique.
One of the issues of fast spread is that hospitalizations and deaths lag behind infections for a few weeks.
If you don't correct for it, it's easy to see "10x as many cases but few deaths" just because cases went up so quickly that deaths didn't start yet. Of course, this can be corrected for, and I'd expect a good study to do so - but I would NOT trust a typical news article to make the distinction, nor would I trust it to skip the temptation to misinterpret the study for a more interesting headline.
The last paragraph of the WaPo article we are all commenting on:
“South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection,” she said. “We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.”
The lower vaccination rate is more than offset by the high rate of prior infection. This might also mean that omicron is mild if you have been previously infected. Populations with high vaccination rates and low infection rates might be at risk. Or they could be fine. We can't extrapolate to them from the situation in SA.
Hospitalisations and deaths will likely increase regardless, as so many more people will be infected, even if it's proportionately less dangerous to a given individual. But I agree, more data in the next few weeks are what we need to make genuine determinations.
"...or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune"
There are not a lot of people out there still who are not partially immune at this point, due to vaccine, recovery or both. It varies by region of course, but it's certainly true in most parts of the US.
> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections.
The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.
- Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote.
- Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms.
- Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild.
The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because:
1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease.
2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all.
3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view.
I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
Failed as in the vaccines, that were being advertised as being 95% effective with no talk of any boosters only 6 months ago, no longer provide any protection at all.
As for the vaccines forcing mutation, SA is only 25% vaccinated so that doesn't work.
Have the vaccines succeeded in preventing many people from dying? That is something for history to judge. There just isn't good enough data on vaccine deaths to judge that at the moment. The problem for COVID vaccines is that whilst they may some people from dying of COVID, not many life years are saved because almost all the COVID deaths are concentrated in the very elderly. Meanwhile vaccine injuries are a looming iceberg because they aren't being properly tracked or recorded. The number of random cardiac failures in athletes is well up this year and eventually people will stop being in denial about the reasons. The long term damage from this programme can be judged in five or ten years.
However, if Omicron does display Delta as it appears to be doing very rapidly, we can say that at most the vaccines were useful for maybe 6-8 months. Bearing in mind you aren't "vaccinated" until your second dose and there's a gap.
I don't think I've ever seen so many wrong sentences in a single HN comment.
I would love to go through and debunk them all, but I don't have the time or the crayons, nor would I think it would be effective in changing your beliefs. You're too far gone.
All I ask in response to this comment is that if you do get COVID, please post somewhere on HN so that you could be properly nominated for the Herman Cain award[1].
> Failed as in the vaccines, that were being advertised as being 95% effective with no talk of any boosters only 6 months ago, no longer provide any protection at all.
It's disappointing to see complete lies like this on HN. Vaccines have been, and remain, incredibly effective in preventing hospitalization/death, even without a booster (although everyone should also get their booster).
And why do we think that? Because public health agencies said so?
It's not because the trials proved it - they didn't. At only ~64,000 participants the e.g. Pfizer trial was not powered to show any difference to deaths and didn't use hospitalizations as a goal metric either, only infections.
And so we're forced to rely on the testimony of the same people in charge of the program, where their data is often missing or deceptive in some way. For example Germany has been claiming nearly all cases occur in the unvaccinated. It turned out this wasn't true. Rather, they don't have data at all on the status of most cases, and then reallocate all the "unknown" column to "unvaccinated" because ... well, why not? No matter what they do, plenty of people will still take their word for everything. This was revealed by Die Welt and the response was nothing. They still do it, as far as I know.
The UK data is usually considered to be the best, as in, the most detailed. And there, when the data on deaths is studied carefully it turns out to be riddled with anomalies and problems that cast doubt on whether vaccines did in fact reduce mortality (the numbers are low enough that statistical artifacts can actually matter). For example, in the UK data vaccination reduces non-COVID deaths in unvaccinated people. Don't take my word for it, ask a professor of risk management:
"Our research team have now analysed the ONS England November mortality data. We conclude that, despite seeming evidence to support vaccine effectiveness, this conclusion is doubtful because of a range of serious inconsistencies and anomalies", "The ONS data provide no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality."
I don't have to trust public health agencies. I can go look up the numbers in my local hospital or ask family members who work there. >90% of ICU cases and deaths are unvaccinated. Hand wavy arguments about "the data is bad!" from a non-peer reviewed paper with 0 citations does not convince me that you're arguing in good faith.
If your (English) family are telling you that then I wonder when they said it because the official figures were just updated and say >50% in ICU are vaccinated now. It's been changing over time because the vaccines wear off so fast.
In the case of my numbers, I'm based in the US. I wish we had a high enough vaccination rate to worry about the base rate fallacy. I'm surrounded by rural areas who unfortunately don't believe in vaccines until they show up in the ER. We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end.
How bizarre. You're the one who brought up that stat in the first place, I'm only pointing out that it's incorrect, at least for the UK - and the US isn't going to be very different. There's no base rate fallacy here because I'm not even building an argument on that data to begin with, you are!
"We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end."
You have a surgical backlog because your hospitals have been firing staff. Former "heros" who, quite sensibly, observed that as they'd already had COVID they didn't need a vaccine for it, and who were immediately demonized and excluded despite the hospitals supposedly being overwhelmed. You might want to meditate on that and consider whether that's the expected course of action during a crisis or not.
I get the feeling you are getting your information from highly political sources rather than getting out from behind the screen and talking to real live people.
Where I live, there is no vaccine mandate for hospital staff due to staffing concerns. Talking with actual local physicians, nurses and doctors are quitting in droves after seeing a huge amount of preventable death in the past few months, by patients who deny the reality of the disease they have, and whos families harass hospital staff about treatments that don't work (hcq/ivermectin/whatever the latest magic pill is now).
I actually am against vaccine mandates and don't think anyone who doesn't want the vaccine should be forced to take it. That said, if you don't take it, I don't want you in the hospital if you end up getting covid. Take hcq/ivermectin/whatever joe rogan is saying now rather than occupy a hospital bed, don't clog up the hospital due to your mistake.
> I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
I suspect that if this omicron had emerged in 2018 at least with the symptoms and lack of severe disease that we have seen so far…it would likely have been described as a virulent common cold and may have gotten an occasional news mention, but zero public and government panic.
I think the phrase “Look for the devil and you will find him” is going to describe virology and government approach to virology for probably the next decade. This is a shame, because it seems to create and feed tyrants at almost every level of government.
> Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
I see currently reported numbers of 75% and 81% for those rates respectively, which means unvaccinated people are over-represented by about 30% relative their percentage of the population. Now these numbers are still very new, and unreliable, have no confidence interval, and only for infection, not hospitalization. But I don’t think that difference would be irrelevant, unless it ceases to hold up after data is collected over the next few weeks.
It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir.
Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
The same selection pressure that applies to every other disease. Symptoms make you less likely to spread. Fatalities make you much less likely to spread. Most of the diseases you carry are completely asymptomatic.
This is why island populations all get sick when a ship comes in.
Don't most covid deaths happen after you're no longer infectious? I thought a lot of that was from the cytokine storm.
But to the other commenter's point, if omicron DID get a more deadly variant that kills you after you've already infected other people due to presymptomatic spread, then why would that variant be likely to die out? It's already reproduced before killing the host
it's overall less likely to reproduce because we take measures against covid collectively. What spreads more unhindered, covid or the common cold?
A disease that spreads before it's symptomatic may not face negative selection pressure for some individuals, but on the aggregate people wear masks, avoid contact, even entered lockdowns, are more likely to obtain vaccination, and so on.
There's a stronger behavioral response to a more deadly covid than there is to one that is entirely harmless. It's not just death that reduces rates of transmission, and it's not just sick or symptomatic people who avoid contact.
> It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir.
You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right? We still wiped it out.
Smallpox, Measles, Polio. We've wiped out diseases before, and we can do it again if we so try. I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases and are so pessimistic about this subject...
> You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right?
It seems unlikely that many cows caught smallpox, given the prevalence of cowpox. Cowpox is a different disease, and was the first vaccine, after which the very concept of "vaccination" is named. Milkmaids had long been known for their immunity to smallpox. If smallpox had been in cows, milkmaids would have been known for universal smallpox exposure instead.
> I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases
Rabies only has animal reservoirs, it isn't spread person-to-person. And it appears that the localities that have eradicated rabies have done so by dropping animal baits with oral vaccines.
So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines.
The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going to end this way.
Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological? Or that all "diseases" are equivalent? Perhaps I should read more into your confounding of cowpox with smallpox.
Leprosy is bacterial and treated with antibiotics. Same with bubonic plague, if that was next on your list.
> Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological?
I believe COVID19 continues because we have a ~60% vaccination rate in the USA, which is far below the needed vaccination rate to slow down the spread of the disease.
A lot of these other diseases brought up have substantial 95%+ vaccination rates, or treatments that can hamper the spread.
No disease is equivalent to another. Smallpox and Measles had much higher spread R0 / replication rates. Others are bacterial. Cholera is water-borne and solved with other methodologies.
Cowpox produced strong enough immunity to smallpox that a vaccine likely derived from it completely wiped smallpox off the planet, but it's very much not the same disease - cowpox doesn't spread effectively in humans and is much less deadly. There's just really good cross-immunity between the two that made vaccination possible using 18th-century technology and understanding of science, even though their last common ancestor seems to be way back in prehistory.
Agreed. But I don't hear anyone talking about making a old style COVID vaccine that prevents infection, disease or transmission. That's what's different in this case. We don't currently have what we many of us used to think of as a vaccine.
We are lucky we have vaccines at all; it was never a sure thing.
Also, IIRC Sinovac’s Coronavirus vaccine is an “old style” inactivated virus vaccine, and the J&J one is an adenovirus vector vaccine. They are not as effective as the mRNA vaccines.
Those diseases could be (mostly) eradicated because they have incredibly effective vaccines - the CDC quotes 95% for smallpox, 97% for measles, 99-100% for polio. No currently known Covid vaccine is that effective and there's no obvious reason to expect future ones will be.
The difference isn't as minor as I think you're suggesting. Compared to 95% efficacy, 90% efficacy means twice as many vaccinated people get sick and 75% efficacy means five times as many get sick. I don't see how eradication programs would work with such a differential, and (relatedly) I don't know of any experts who think it's feasible to eradicate Covid with current technology.
> I don't see how eradication programs would work with such a differential
Its all about R0. If the efficacy (and compliance) is above the 1 / R0 rate, then eradication is possible.
As its "efficacy times compliance", the number we wish to maximize is the smaller number. Efficacy may have dropped to 60% (double shot vs Delta), but a 3rd booster brings the efficacy back up to 90%.
Compliance however, is stuck around 60% in the USA in general, and a large number of people are refusing to get the booster. As such, compliance is the number we need to work on right now.
--------
Going from 90% to 99% vaccine efficacy barely does anything, because our vaccine compliance numbers are so damn low.
> Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker viral variants is stronger viral variants killing their hosts in droves, thus preventing the stronger variants from passing on their genetics to new hosts.
That selection pressure doesn't exist, because people are not dropping like flies due to COVID. The virus is free to mutate into something stronger because there is little pressure to stop it.
Well, logically speaking, we never needed vaccines, since some percentage of the human race will survive COVID regardless. The question always was just whether you can improve your own odds of staying healthy. And so far that data seems to have been strongly in favor of vaccination of yourself and those around you, with further increased benefit demonstrated from opting for a booster shot. But still never being essential or necessary for survival.
You seem to be interpreting "essential" as "essential for continued human existence", which is a pretty low bar. "Essential for maintaining public health", or "essential for preventing excess deaths" would be better interpretations. While vaccines are not essential for continued human existence, they are essential for maintaining public health and preventing excess deaths.
I don't think that was the question? It was how to not overload hospitals and create a safer environment for those in the population most at risk. Thus healthy young adults getting vaccinated to reduce the rate of spread
There are two primary factors driving virus evolution - not killing the host and defeating the host's immune system. Killing the host, at least with humans, is an evolutionary dead end, since we go out of our way to quarantine the body and destroy or permanently confine it.
In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time.
There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At some point we should see an equilibrium reached with the coronaviruses, and the hope is that it'll be as mild as seasonal colds. Omicron could be a significant leap in that direction.
Covid related links have saturated any searches on viruses in general, and the doom&gloom "reporting"is at the top. There are a lot of papers and examples of what I'm talking about, though, it's just irritating to get at.
Gain of function research gives us rapid and repeatable demonstrations of vital evolution. Viruses that don't kill their hosts and develop more and better mechanisms of infection or evasion of immune system defenses outcompete other variants. There are a lot of examples in animal viruses, but Sars and hiv are examples of recent relevance.
To be clear, I'm not making the claim that this happens to all viruses - evolution doesn't work like that. A virus that leaves you mostly functional for a few months before it kills you is not at all an unlikely scenario. Viruses also exist concurrent with other variants, and they can mutate rapidly. There's no hard and fast rule, just influences and constraints that can manifest as trends.
In my opinion, the ideal outcome for sars-cov2 at this point is that a super mild variant evolves that will confer robust natural immunity while spreading fast enough to prevent the spread of other variants. It could become more deadly - I hope it won't, and what we know of virus evolutionary pressures in humans hints that we could get lucky.
SARS and HiV are certainly not examples where a human virus has evolved to become more contagious but less deadly. SARS was not contagious enough to escape our control efforts, and HiV is mitigated by our anti viral drugs.
Indeed it would be nice if a less severe strain out competed current COVID, but such a thing has never happened before (as far as we know) - and as you point out there is no selection pressure for mildness when death/disability occurs some weeks after the infection has been cleared.
There are multiple strains of hiv. One of the papers I linked to is a detailed study investigating a less lethal, more infectious strain. Sars-cov1 also evolved a few strains that were more infectious and less lethal. Both effects, by the way, are usually associated with separate individual mutations. It's rare that a single change in DNA results in both effects.
Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare.
If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
If the choice is between that and permanent "emergency powers" for all levels of government to continue to panic and scare monger and implement things like vaccine passports, required immunizations as a condition of employment, the destruction of SMB and the demonization and hostility towards anyone that doesn't trust The Science (while shutting all discussion down about The Science because the plebs aren't smart enough to understand The Science)
We've banned this account because (a) single purpose accounts aren't allowed here; (b) using HN primarily for ideological battle is not allowed here; (c) trollish usernames are not allowed here.
> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide.
No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all.
Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted)
Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence.
That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.
The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection. The story has always been that it reduces symptoms and hospitalization, so there are plenty of opportunities for the disease to get “tickets” in the evolution lottery. Between that, the animal reservoirs (COVID can spread to different species), and the millions of people in undeveloped countries who will never get a vax, COVID was guaranteed to mutate no matter what the public policy. Letting it rip is less a strategy and more an acknowledgement of reality.
The vaccine was initially sold as the tool to end the pandemic and get life
back to 'normal'. The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine
and keep profits from sinking.
They could have ended the wildtype pandemic. As soon as delta appeared it was impossible. They have 90% efficiency at best and you need 84% of all people protected to stop delta (1-1/R0 for R0=6). It's impossible to get such high vax rate.
It was kinda-possible to return to normality with delta though. The entire EU is above 70% of the total population, with some countries above 80%. And of the unvaccinated, most are children who are less susceptible in the first place.
But with Omicron, it's literally like we're back to March 2020. Norway (with 81% vaccination rate) went from normality to full lockdown in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's coming everywhere else during the next month or so.
If omicron causes lockdowns again than this will literally happen every winter. Vaccines were the end state. There is nothing left to do but accept the risks and move on with life.
People scared about hospital capacity should be asking strong questions to their politicians about why they squandered 2 years of peoples short life with zero new capacity.
The public shouldn’t shoulder the failures of politicians nor these “experts”.
They pretty much did end the Delta pandemic in the Bay Area. We had a minor spike up and then it subsided without any major restrictions or strain on the healthcare system. Vaccination rates are 95%+ where I am, so 0.95 * 0.9 = 0.855 and it was still over the herd immunity threshold.
> The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine and keep profits from sinking.
The narrative may have evolved but that was more due to the virus evolving rather than some conspiracy driven by Pfizer and Moderna to sell more shots. More people being vaccinated benefits everyone, not just the pharmaceutical companies, and saying otherwise is a bit paranoid.
This isn’t true, and the lack of testing during the phase 3 trials to see if there were non-symptomatic cases was a deliberate design choice to avoid answering that question.
I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.
I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?
EDIT:
To be clear I already had COVID and didn't have any serious symptoms so the argument about a hospital bed doesn't necessarily apply to me. Beyond that I actually got vaccinated, my question centers around the disparity of treatment we are giving individuals who are vaxxed and those who are not if both are capable of spreading. Further it brings in the question of vaccine mandates if they are much less effective then we were led to believe.
Well I got COVID before the vaccine came out and am not in a high risk group, so I'm not really that worried about me.
But you say it is being a decent human being, but I am confused if we both agree the vaccine doesn't reduce infectivity then why would me getting it change anything for anyone else, since we know it doesn't protect others?
It amazes me that there remains this misguided view that vaccination efficacy around protecting others is a binary mechanism. It's not. There is evidence of at least partial reduction in infection, not just outcome, by being vaccinated.
That's not including the nuanced aspect of it where being vaccinated reduces the severity and duration of symptomatic cases, which by nature reduces the likelihood simply based on time alone, of exposing others.
> It amazes me that there remains this misguided view that vaccination efficacy around protecting others is a binary mechanism. It's not. There is evidence of at least partial reduction in infection, not just outcome, by being vaccinated.
I do not understand if this argument is made in good faith or if it's covid deniers stirring shit up in the public debate or just rationalizing their fear of the syringe (yes, I know of 2 anti-vax who admitted it was their original reasons to refuse the vaccine).
I think with the majority of instances it's a matter of repeating what they've seen online somewhere, where it is nearly unilaterally presented in similar tone. Some cases are malicious intent I'm sure, but I wouldn't guess the most of them.
Seems some people have a genuine difference in the way they asses their risk.
Some people are scared that there have been 800k+ deaths in the U.S. Others say that's only 1 in 400, mostly old and with commodities, and not that big a deal.
The sophomoric response would be the trope that teenagers always think they are invincible and it won’t happen to me. I think some people never grow out of that phase.
There is also something called the normalcy bias which has an interplay with psychology and risk assessments.
Something like 1 in 400 can easily become 1 in 200. At what point does the majority notice and act appropriately?
Parent said he has natural immunity, can you cite any evidence that you can get covid twice? If not then people who can prove natural immunity don't need the vaccine and are just risking their health for nothing.
If you want sources I will find them, but there are studied and not simply anecdotal instances of multiple infections of covid, yes. The outcomes range somewhat across the board from subsequent risks of severe infection or death, in a way that resembles vaccination.
However, from said study : "First, reinfection was not confirmed through whole genome sequencing, which would be necessary to definitively prove that the reinfection was caused from a distinct virus relative to the first infection. Although in some cases the repeat positive test could be indicative of prolonged viral shedding or failure to clear the initial viral infection (9), given the time between initial and subsequent positive molecular tests among participants in this study, reinfection is the most likely explanation"
Do with this as you will, but it seems there's nothing concrete. "most likely explanation" isn't good enough to force people to get an emergency use, rushed vaccine.
It is you, sir, who is making extraordinary claims. The very reference you cite states that: "Reinfection with human coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has been documented."
A vaccine is likely to enhance your immunity and make you less likely to become ill and infect others. It's not guaranteed to do that, but that's different than not doing it at all.
If you're vaccinated and become infected, you will have less of a viral load, and thus will spread less viral particles to others. The duration of infection will also be much shorter, thus lessening the time you can spread the infection to others. The vaccine also prevents some, but not all, infections in the first place.
You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.
> I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?
Why are you (and others) thinking that since vaccines aren't 100% effective it doesn't help protecting other people ?
What kind of dissonance cognitive gets you there ?
Why are you blind to the fact that a vaccine that mostly works still help reducing infections and why do you equate that to "vaccines don't work to protect others (since some vaccinated people can still infect others) so I shouldn't get vaccinated" ?
How come you are working from a yes/no, full-or-nothing angle ?
A glass of water won't 100% quench your thirst when you haven't drunk in a long time so you won't take it ?
the vaccines may not have been advertised as that, since the evidence during development for that was marginal. but recent evidence suggests that it does prevent infection. unfortunately, less true with omicron.
> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.
A lot of people believed they were. I've spent some time arguing with people that the punishments for not taking the vaccine were too extreme, and that government-supported firing of people from their jobs was a bad idea.
It was extremely common for people to argue that the vaccine would cut down on transmission (which is basically saying infection) and end the pandemic. Without that pillar it gets quite hard to justify the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Australia. Not sure about the rest of the world but I assume there is a similar story.
this is why i was, and continue to be, against the various vaccine mandates. My employer said to me "upload your vax card or get an exemption else be fired". It was a bridge too far for me and I submitted for an exemption request on grounds of personal conscious. However, a couple weeks later we get another email that says if your exemption request is denied you are fired. I could have taken a moral stand but i have a wife + 2 kids and a MIL dependent on my income and I decided it wasn't worth it. I ended up canceling my request and uploading my vax card.
In the US the politicians know a law mandating the vaccine is a non-starter. So, instead, they encouraged and supported employers threatening their employees. I guess it's ironic that everyone is quitting everywhere anyway.
> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.
In the USA? Yes, they were. There was no mention of a future need for boosters. There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
Literally everything I read about vaccine efficacy said that the metrics they tracked were about reducing the incidence of symptoms and serious disease. They didn't even test people in the clinical trials for COVID unless they started showing symptoms.
Now, certainly, some media outlets may have been irresponsibly or ignorantly misinterpreting all this and pushing the narrative that it would make everyone immune. But that's not the CDC or WHO's fault.
> There was no mention of a future need for boosters.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Things change.
> There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
You must have been reading some really watered-down news, and not actually reading what public health officials were saying.
Who cares about the advertising? The data is in, and the vaccines do both - they decrease your chance to be infected and they make symptoms much more mild if you are infected. The combination of factors is why hospitalisation rates in highly vaccinated countries plummeted.
Or at least they did until omicron. Unfortunately 2 doses of the existing vaccines are pretty ineffective against omicron. 3 doses make the vaccines work better - but I’m honestly a little concerned.
That would make sense but been the originally strains did not overwhelm hospitals. New York has the highest and craziest number of cases and deaths at the beginning and didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds. Hospitals did not run out of beds and now the biggest problem is running out of staff, the same as every industry. At our local hospital all of the nurses quit for better, higher paying jobs. We’re running at less hospital labor than even pre pandemic, aren’t building new hospitals, and the highest peaks in cases and deaths were while the strictest lockdowns and mask mandates were already in place. There is complete fear overload and yet all attempts at preventing spread, even vaccines, have failed. They reduce symptoms but do not stop the spread. That’s how contagious this virus is, without any symptoms whatsoever people are spreading the virus, even with masks on, and limits on how close they can be to people. We now have vaccines, we have even pills that have been approved, we also know healthy lifestyle fights against it, yet we are still in a 2 year long “state of emergency.” Letting it rip through is not an option we can choose, it will happen regardless of what we do.
> But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
If the emergency and need was that bad they would have absolutely figured out simple logistics to get people on a ship. The fact is most people were told go home and wait it out and are still told that and that is the treatment most people receive. There is no point in continuing our state of emergency when our emergency services are not and never were at risk. Every single lockdown and mask measure put in place has had no significant impact on the spread of the virus. It is that contagious.
> New York has the highest and craziest number of cases and deaths at the beginning and didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds
The ships weren't for COVID patients, they were for non-COVID cases so that hospitals could focus on the overflow of COVID patients that they were better equipped to handle. Turns out that at the beginning of a global pandemic, not a lot people opted to go to the hospital even if they needed to because of fear of infection.
Natural immunity is the ONLY way back to a sane planet. It's time you take a step back, look at what happened for two years now, and realize we don't need this insanity anymore.
Given how quickly the virus can infect people and put them in the hospital if unchecked by masking/social distancing/etc. and vaccines, just letting everyone get infected would rapidly overwhelm our health care system and cause a lot of deaths that could have been prevented.
If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death toll would likely be much higher than what we'll probably end up with when all this is actually over, given our current path.
I'm not thrilled with how the past two years have gone, but it could have been much, much worse. It could also have been much better, if it weren't for people using the virus to score political points.
Even with a mix of vaccines and natural immunity, I don't think we can rely on natural immunity to solve this. That just doesn't pass the smell test.
The world “experts” clearly didn’t do anything at all these last two years if they are still freaking out about “healthcare collapse”.
There is zero excuse to push lockdowns, masks or any of that nonsense at this point to “protect healthcare”. Healthcare should have been “protected” by now if this is supposed to be a normal thing
there really can't be an "exponential" increase in the number of cases, whatever that means, given that there's a hard upper bound which is the number of hosts.
While technically correct, you and I both know what they meant by exponential. Sure, there's a limit, but if we're looking at function that is exponential until it reaches an inflection point where there's simply less hosts to infect than possible...
> Sure, there's a limit, but if we're looking at function that is exponential until it reaches an inflection point where there's simply less hosts to infect than possible...
What do you think I meant by this? Do you think I believe that the rate of infection will keep going up literally exponentially until it hits 7 billion then turn flat, or do you think that by my usage of 'inflection point' maybe I had more nuance than that?
In a math classroom, you are right. But when we're in a context of talking about the disease on an internet forum, you are being needlessly pedantic and extremely nitpick-y if you expect people to describe the ways infections grows as "similar to a sigmoid function" rathan than the well-understood and extremely common "exponential growth" term.
I don’t really care if you say sigmoid when you mean exponential, my point is that both of those are wrong. People shudder in fear of the phrase “exponential” but disease does not spread exponentially. It never does. That’s a laymen fairy tail and it does a great deal of harm in understanding the disease.
Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
>disease does not spread exponentially. It never does. That’s a laymen fairy tail and it does a great deal of harm in understanding the disease.
>Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
Well, in typical Dunning-Krüger fashion you're lecturing us laymen about the wrong use of "exponential", but it seems that you are the layman when it comes to epidemiology modelling.
Diseases of course spread in an initially exponential phase, not logarithmically as you boldly claim in another comment.
Not the original commenter and agree with your sentiment.
That said, from what we know about random graph models, once the transmission rate passes a certain threshold, the cumulative number of eventually infected individuals will NOT scale exponentially as the transmission rate increases.
You're speaking about initial growth rate though, not convergent size of the once-infected population, which is definitely exponential and relevant if you care about minimizing simultaneous hospitalizations.
A brief initial exponential phase that doesn’t explain the average state of the system is a poor mental model.
Epidemiologists do frequently use exponential growth in discussions of theoretical spreading, but they are not correct. It does not fucking matter. They’re just wrong. Is the long term spread of a disease exponential. No. We can say this with 100% confidence. Why? Because they do not increase exponentially over time. They QUICKLY hit ceilings and inflection points.
This is the problem. If you call a system exponential because it looks like that at the beginning, your estimates of the middle and end will be hugely off. Massively wrong.
It is obviously apparent looking at Covid that it does not spread exponentially. The impact of this understanding is enormous. In an exponential model, a virus that is twice as infectious could be expected to infect 4x as many people over the same period. If the model is logarithmic, twice as infectious will likely result in LESS THAN TWICE the number of people infected.
Scary predictions that a small increase in spreading will exponentially increase the number of infected people do not hold up against observed real world data. We should be cheering on a more spreadable but less deadly disease. Scale matters, of course, but we aren’t seeing anything like that.
If you want to come back to this in one year and check to see if omicron infected even twice the number of people that delta did over the same time period that’s a bet I’d surely take.
Look, no need to be pedantic about this : the only thing that counts here is whether it's still in the initial exponential phase by the time we hit maximum hospital capacity. It seems likely.
The problem is that (higher) exponential growth will cause many more hospitalizations to happen in a much shorter time interval. That can make the wave more deadly even if the virus is somewhat milder.
You're missing the point. If Delta kills, say, a million people, and Omicron only kills half a million people, but Omicron kills that halved amount in, say, 1/10th the time, Omicron is more likely to lead to overwhelmed hospitals.
> Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
No it’s not. Contagion spread is logarithmic, and has obvious upper bounds. E.g. about a third of the us has gotten Covid. 5x contagious does not give you 166% of the population infected. Nor does it give you 100%. Probably not even 90%. I would bet no more than 50% over the next year.
Half as deadly on the other hand is a big deal. It’s not just deaths, it’s also hospitalizations. If you imagine the bell curve of outcomes, the deaths are the small tail on the right and the hospitalizations are the fatter bit on the right. If you get to move everything to the left a bit, you remove the biggest chunk of the population from getting hospitalized in the first place.
Read your own damn paper. The exponential phase of a disease spread is at the very beginning when the total number of cases is small. The rate rapidly decays to a point of being mostly linear and continuing to drop off.
People think exponential is an accelerating rocket ship to 100% infected. It is not. It’s a decelerating trend likely to stall out well below 100%.
If the R factor increases from 1 to 2, over a LONG period, you would be wrong to expect exponentially more cases. You would probably see fewer than 2x the cases. You would see it expand much, much faster initially.
But both would see slow downs at similar inflection points.
The very first sentence of your own linked abstract:
> The INITIAL exponential growth rate of an epidemic is an important measure of the severeness of the epidemic, and is also closely related to the basic reproduction number. Estimating the growth rate from the epidemic curve can be a challenge, because of its DECAYS with time.
the long term model is not exponential. This really should be obvious, but you cannot create an accurate disease model that does not show the impact of population size. Pure exponential models are only relevant on a theoretical infinitely large population that is well and randomly mixed. When you establish that there’s only so many people, the growth rate has to decline, and not at 100% of the population. It stalls out well before that. Look into random graph models.
Given that the South African study discussed in this Washington Post article included 78k people, none of whom died if the above Reuters article is correct, doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
I know deaths lag cases. I mentioned just the cases in the south African study because those are the earliest cases we have. None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec.
This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases of Omicron from 15 November 2021 to 7 December 2021 (source: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room). At the time the Reuters article was published we were 6 days after even the most recently reported of those South African cases.
I wasn't trying to present the global denominator - that is far higher than 78,000 since it includes all countries, not just the 78k reported in the South African country.
Pretty much every estimate of exponential growth has turned out to be logarithmic. Which makes sense. That’s how % of new nodes reached in a random walk through a graph works.
And the next paragraph says "Britain gave no details on the death other than the person had been diagnosed in hospital."
However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.
If the person was hit by a bus or died from a cause other than Omicron then that would strengthen the point I was making in the post you replied to which was
>>doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
>Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear training running full steam.
Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis.
If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language.
The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.
The evidence of the past year or two suggests otherwise.
For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!"
There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!"
Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
Mine had. Not less than 24hours before the story emerged. Which result in 2 things: loss of trust in public authorities public faces ("omicron is a christmas gift !") and loss of trust in the scientific public faces ("omicron may be milder").
>For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
This hasn't been my experience, in fact the British government's SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) was advising the government to lean on the press in order to increase 'the perceived level of personal threat' early in the pandemic[1]. I really do think the use of behavioural psychology to encourage compliance with government policy is one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the pandemic that future historians will correctly give more importance to than we did at the time. In all honesty this isn't so much a criticism of how the British government acted during the pandemic but how it acts in general. This institutional bent towards the manipulative is partially what led us into the unmitigated disaster that is the War on Terror in my opinion, consent for which largely stemmed from a state of fear among the general public made worse by poor journalistic norms.
>Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
I've not seen a single bit of serious journalism along those lines, it's either been 'COVID is going to kill us all and it's the plaguebearing hordes of the unvaccinated who are to blame' or 'The government is turning totalitarian and it's the fault of out-of-touch bureaucrats that need to be removed' (the article I linked is very much a member of that species). I've come across very little in the way of sober analysis, almost every piece of journalism I've come across on the topic carries some kind of moral judgement against $group in it. The point I'm making is that moral judgement sells and feels good to dole out to people you don't like, but it also robs us of a little humanity every time we do it.
But at the time the risk was still small, because the virus was mostly not in the US yet. Article doesn't say the risk will remain small in the future, does it?
If they’re used correctly, P95 and P100 face masks can reduce the likelihood of being exposed to coronavirus by blocking contaminated air particles. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises against people in the US using face masks because most people who aren’t trained medical professionals may not know how to fit them properly, and the risk of exposure in the US is so low to begin with.
it’s worth always keeping in mind that the only dichotomy that matters in political economies is that between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else, not left-right, black-white, east-west, socialist-capitalist, or anything else. it’s been this way for all of human history past and will likely be so for the rest of it too. that’s a sober position to take, not a cynical one, as some might argue. the more dynamic our political and economic engines are, the better for the general welfare (obviously at the extreme this breaks down, but we’re not in danger of that extreme any time soon, if ever).
masks provide no added protection in most common situations where they’re used, but provide much political leverage, which is why they’re popular. same with (non-sterilizing) vaccine mandates and other arbitrary public restrictions. these are political wedges, not effective public health measures. if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status. we’d also be policing private behavior (family/social gatherings) much more invasively, rather than public behavior (grocery stores and restaurants).
"the only dichotomy that matters in political economies is that between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else"
I always think of this as putting on different pairs of glasses to see the world through different lenses. That is one lens. left-right is another lens.
There is no "the only lens that matters". There are many lenses which have different degrees of predictive power depending on what you are observing. You don't use a microscope to look at the stars.
left-right is the worst of political dichotomies. it provides no purpose other than to arbitrarily divide the world into good vs. bad from the perspective of the viewer. that’s meant to solely benefit politicians, not provide any clarity, because it collapses the acceptable political narratives down into a palatably small set from which the politician can form a base. in short, it’s pure bullshit.
I was with you for the first paragraph, but the second makes a number of concrete statements about the virus that are contrary to what I've heard elsewhere, so I'd second the ask for sources.
Your second paragraph assumes our governments have the means to do that. They don't. Which breaks the logic of your conclusion. And masks do add protection. Their political leverage is null. What is gained by authorities ? There's no advantages.
> if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status.
Ww are worried. Infection status is considered. Vaccination status is considered. You are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to minimize the covid problem.
You can fight reality with logic and interpretations and a different philosophical approach of the situation but facts don't care. Hospitals are regularly overwhelmed, people are dying when they shouldn't and the virus doesn't care about our psychotic or neurotic bouts. We know that if we do nothing it gets worse real fast.
Of course there's a political advantage. It's something that forces everybody to visibly declare an affiliation with a side at all times in public. That will always be used for political advantage.
What nonsense the only ones that have made masks political is the right-wingers of the world for whatever convoluted "freedom" reasons they have come up with.
I don't wear a mask because of my political beliefs. I wear a mask due to the abundance of evidence that it helps prevent transmission. If you assume my political affiliation from that not only would you be wrong but you know what they say about assuming.
> It's something that forces everybody to visibly declare an affiliation with a side at all times in public.
No. Forcing people to wear a police badge or a yellow star or a hijab or a a beard in some places would fit that outlook but the first reason to wear a mask is a medical/prophylactic one. The fact some people (right or left) decided to associate that with political beliefs is another matter that has nothing to do with the inherent advantages that wearing a mask provides in some occasions.
you are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to maximize the covid problem.
you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid. the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them. we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
> you are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to maximize the covid problem.
You are trying a weird (and childish may I add) apparent mirror strategy but subtly adding twist of your own making that weren't there to drive your point that Covid is not a problem:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Fixed:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged.
No need to get all conspiracy on that one.
> you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid.
They are overwhelmed and they shouldn't and they weren't 2 years ago. It'd be very weird that all around the world the hospital infrastructure just happened to show their limits at the same time and that it'd have nothing to do with the current pandemic but only with greed (I suppose you refer to the impoverishment of public hospitals). Occam's razor and all that.
Would you please wear a mask and get a vaccine or keep your distance a bit if you don't want/can't ? Thank you.
> the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them.
So what if they have a comorbidity ? It's still happening. There's a strong underlying current in anti-* that suggest to let people die and let selection plays its game. Are you advocating for that ?
Unfortunately for your weak ass arguments the virus does care about masking in the sense that it hinders its efforts to infect us. Vaccination is also shown to work.
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Ah yes, the media and the politics are manufacturing a crisis. Media do it to make money (or something) and politicians to their benefit (whatever that is).
You rather believe in a pharma-political conspiracy to manufacture a global pandemic than face the fact life is unfair and unpredictable ? You rather believe that behind the shadows there's someone that is pulling the strings over all this for their own political or financial gains because then it would make the world less scary, less unjust ? I am sorry, this is not how the world works. Things are fucked up and it's not fair and it's not (y)our fault but it is what it is.
This isn't some final strain so let's all hurry up and get it. The more people that get any variant increases the likelihood of new variants and we don't get to pick what they do. We need to stop thinking about this as a pandemic that will end and start thinking about it as an endemic disease that is never going away. Soon, you'll be getting your annual covid shot along with your flu shot. It is going to continue to kill immuno-compromised people for a very long time. Our lungs are definitely our weak spot (just look at the elderly mortality rates for pneumonia, 20-30%).
It is most likely pretty close to the final strain, viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections) and this one is pretty close to the global maximum.
people are easily influenced by others who they admire, even if they have no idea what they’re talking about. athletes, politicians, investors, artists, etc.
Evolution isn’t programmed, it’s a function of survival. If there’s a highly infectious virus with a huge lead time to develop deadly symptoms, that’s more than enough to spread “optimally”
> viral mutations are optimizing for high transmission and low severity (to not kill the host and maximize infections
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create.
People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.
I think the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains.
There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.
It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous.
If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest.
But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time.
The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.
> The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
Making COVID extinct is unfortunately not a reasonable scenario. There will be animal reservoirs, high vaccination rates are difficult to achieve for most countries, long-term lockdowns will be hard to enforce if you're not China.
There's no particular reason to believe this. It's just as likely as "space aliens did it" at this point, until there's more evidence in any given direction.
> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time.
Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
In decades maybe we get a mild covid.
> Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.
> No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity.
So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains.
Clearly not how it works and not what's happening.
We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading.
Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ?
> That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past.
We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly.
We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu.
> Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants.
It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu.
Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take.
Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking.
edit:
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains
Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers.
Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ?
We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines.
And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.
>> We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year.
Seriously? I thought flu vaccines were just a hipster thing: something you do to look cool, but they don't really matter much. In my country only 4% of people take them, and we don't have many flu-related deaths.
Diabetics and older people are strongly advised to take it. That surely helped cementing the "it's a flu" when most of the deaths are old people. Also, we don't have many flu-related deaths because it either turns into emphyzema or other pulmonary complications which are the cause of death. Or the vaccine did its job.
Waiting decades with government policies in place and altered behavior is not a realistic option. Most people would rather risk infection over the long term.
> Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
Too bad all those back-to-office-adamant employers completely ignore this. Like, OK, I get infected cause I had to commute to work and then you fire me/lay me off and I'm left holding the bag, financially and physically cause you really wanted to make your leasing payments "worth it".
Most likely, considering this is HN, s/he's moving bits around all day. Something that every day grocery store workers can't do remotely with the things they have to move around.
Which reminds me that in the first lockdown, in my country, grocery stores workers were considered "essential" and were allowed to go to their workplace and work there.
If I was in charge I’d classify tech workers as non essential and not let them work. Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
> If I was in charge I’d classify tech workers as non essential and not let them work. Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Tech workers were classified as non essentials. That's why we got the whole remote thing. Other professions also got labelled non-essential and governments asked employers to put remote/wfh in place as much as possible and at some time made it mandatory. Being classified as a non-essential never meant you were de facto out of a job or prevented from working (Western Europe here).
> Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Wait, what ? Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
I won't say everything I am thinking but wishing people to lose their job because you think they are privileged and they are scared of covid is pretty fucked up. I am making €1750 net a month, in IT, I have a master degree. I don't feel privileged.
> The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Then follow your heart and go work in the service industry in a supermarket.
> Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears. So yeah, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Very little tech work is “essential”. So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
It requires a lot of privilege to be scared of Covid.
> These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears.
Could you please provide some examples of how tech workers have been able to punish the rest of society ? As far as I can tell it's the public authorities who decide laws and public health policies. Tech workers can't even unionize and now they can lobby for WFH or lockdowns and are punishing the rest of society ?
> So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
I wrote it in my previous comment then deleted it but I'll finally put it here because fuck it: I did lose my job one month into the first lockdown because my n+2 non tech boss decided to use the federal budget allocated to my job to create a new job for her bestie. How am I privileged ? Why didn't being put on unemployment during lockdown erase my fear of covid ? While at the same time a family member of mine who is an artist lost her gigs but thanks to our welfare state she didn't lose an euro of income in the last two years and now she's setting up fires and stirring things up in antivax/mask riots in Brussels. Their world revolve around the virus, their only meaning in life is now to be against every health measures (and yes they are ordering covid online in the Netherlands rather than get a jab. Which FAANG employees is forcing her to do that, uh ?).
You may not like how the covid thing is handled but thinking it's tech worker's fault is wack and wanting to punish them for that is wackier. If anything, talk to your representative or your councilmen or something. They are the one in charge.
> Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
Not GP, but one reason is that they're advocating for restrictions that have severe detrimental effects (loss of employment) on others, but not on themselves.
I haven't seen much on HN about such restrictions so I suppose something in the mainstream media does point to that or I have a bias. Do you have some examples ?
Also, apparently, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated is already a giant no-no for some here so I'd like to know what restrictions are being advocated by who ? Surely it's not a `they` as in everyone though, right ?
That's incredibly quick in evolutionary terms. If COVID becomes milder, it may take many human lifetimes for that to occur. In the mean time, it can mutate into something stronger.
Agreed. I still have to come to terms to that myself so I use `decades` not to scare people too much but... also my understanding of the situation and evolution is not solid enough to get into an argument about decades vs lifetime so I stick to decades because it can also mean centuries :/.
If a past infection with Delta doesn't protect against Omicron should we expect an infection by Omicron to protect against Delta or any future strains evolved from it?
Yes, the best case scenario might be an extremely mild disease that gives everyone natural immunity to more virulent strains. But half as deadly with twice transmission rate is kind of a wash, in the short term right?
But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window.
I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.
Did anyone notice the comparison of vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity in the findings within the source PR [0]? With a little work, you can compare them.
If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection.
Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization.
From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated
From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron
Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics?
Given the high percentage of the population in SA who has already had an infection, there's probably a significant chunk of people in finding 1 who also already had natural immunity. That's probably going to make it difficult to use these results to compare vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity, right?
If you die with Omicron, you are very old and dying above the average life expectancy, or already sick with chronic preventable illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices. We should be banning McDonalds advertising, not deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police.
If you are not very old or already sick and get omicron, whether you have antibodies or not, you’re going to experience mild symptoms, if anything at all, and achieve broader and more durable immunity than you would get from vaccine alone.
If we're looking at the US, "already sick with chronic preventable illnesses causes by poor lifestyle choices" is >50% of our population, so I would say a majority of people care (here). Our society and businesses have done a pretty good job making sure most people don't have the time available to make the right choices.
This comment adds nothing to the discussion and of course ignores important factors like:
* people with cancer or autoimmune diseases
* concerning early signals like drastically increased hospitalizations in the under-2 population
* unchecked spread allowing further mutations that could be worse
Good point. Let's fire half of all the black people again like we did 2020. You're so empathetic and really looking out for the little people out there.
This is pretty good news imo. A mild version of Covid is in a way like a vaccine. Maybe this is how COVID fizzles out.
* all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
Almost no vaccines prevent infection (e.g., rotavirus vaccine). But most reduce/prevent symptoms. In fact, it's still not proven that existing COVID vaccines 'prevent infection'--that is, provide sterilizing immunity.
Unless I'm missing something, this 'study' seems to do little more than support that understanding.
Please don't take HN threads straight into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You can make your substantive points without that, so please do so.
The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it.
So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.
Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.
I wonder if there is comparative research on the mutations of SarsCov2 compared to other betacoronaviruses. Is it mutating similarly, or do the vaccines /self-isolation and distancing cause a different mutation pattern
Prediction - nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. I am seeing it in my company already - in the today's tech virtual townhall "omicron is going to hit hard, so why go back to the office in Jan" was the most upvoted comment in the stream.
> nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office.
And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be screaming to get rid of them. Instead the force all the (mostly vaccinated) "servant class" that brings them deliveries, makes their food, and checks out their groceries to wear some nasty mask all day and when these tech workers are called back into the office "but still wear masks" they all scream about it and continue to work from home. ... because wearing a mask for an entire workday absolutely sucks.
Our response to this virus requires a hell of a lot of privilege when you really start thinking hard about it. Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class and transfered massive amounts of wealth in to the pockets of some of the richest people in the world. But hey! We are saving grandma!
> Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class
Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves.
You know what actually decimates the working class? Catching COVID. Taking unpaid time from work, because they fall sick. Crippling medical bills, from trips to the doctor, or heaven forbid, the hospital. Lingering damage from long COVID. Strangely enough, the 'reopen everything' political movement also tends to oppose things like worker protections, mandated sick days, affordable healthcare, taxes on the rich...
'You know what actually decimates the working class?'
Is that theory or do you work a blue collar job?
I was in a work truck as 'critical infrastructure' and lived it. The company owners got richer AT HOME while we kept working. And then some layoffs after the pandemic forgivable loan calendar window expired.
I caught the 'rona earlier this year. I have a Dr. letter saying so. Now white collar woke-from-home wants me to keep them 'safe' by wearing a cloth mask and getting jabbed.
No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines.
> No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines
Many of my blue collar friends feel the same way.
Getting bossed around by chicken shit triple vaccinated white collar workers too afraid to go into the office. They expect all expendable service class workers to do their bidding while they all “take this serious” huddled up in their fancy homes.
Well I'd probably be in the work from home group and I don't want any bidding, I just want people to stop spreading so much virus around.
And if we are talking about what I want, I want "expendable service class workers" to be paid twice as much anyway. If that's not enough to make up for a mask requirement, then I'm sure there's some alternative we can figure out.
Tell you what, why don’t we require tech workers to wear a mask all day while they work at home? Better, cut off all these tech workers paychecks until some public health “expert” decrees it to be okay again. Then, force them back on unemployment at some random interval a few months later because “it isn’t safe anymore”. Don’t forget to stall their unemployment checks too… then yank their chain more with vaccine mandates and ceaseless masks.
I sincerely doubt most white collar workers are “essential” so they should never have been allowed to work during the pandemic, even if they could do so from home. It wasn’t right to let non essential people work no matter where they worked, period. Everybody non essential should have been on the government dole.
If the privileged white collar work-from-home crowd got the same complete shaft the common working class folks did, none of our response to Covid would have happened. Because out here in the real world there are a hell of a lot more problems than exactly one damn respiratory virus.
So the first part is you being upset at things I definitely don't endorse but have nothing to do with masks.
The part about forcing non essential people to be paid to not work is confusing and I don't think I understand your point but sure I'd take that deal??
My friends work blue collar jobs. One loves the mask mandates.
Do you know why?
Because people he meets can no longer see what happens to your teeth when you can't afford a dentist. [1] [2]
Another took full advantage of stimulus and unemployment payments, because with her comorbidities, and lack of health insurance, she didn't want to get seriously sick, or die at her shitty McDonalds job.
The person you're spiting the most by not getting vaccinated is yourself, followed closely by your relatives and coworkers, followed by the rest of your community.
Most of my extended family caught the 'rona' last year, and had beautiful doctor's notes attesting to this fact. Those notes did not stop all of them from catch it again this year. My grandfather (who missed out on getting sick the first time around) nearly died from it, and my grandmother was not in a good way. So much for acquired immunity. If they weren't all vaccinated, it's likely I wouldn't have a grandfather today.
[1] I believe that the technical term for this is 'meth-mouth', but you don't actually have to take any meth, cocaine, or heroin for your teeth to end up looking like that.
[2] And also the obvious reason that he doesn't want sick people to breathe on him.
> Why would I want a delivery person to wear a mask all day?
If you support these mask mandates you support fully vaccinated employees wearing masks 8 hours a day 40 hours a week. All nothing more than security theater to make the most fearful feel “safe” and provide an easy way for lazy government to look like they are “taking this serious”
Maybe people are just scared? There’s no ulterior motives needed about working in the office here. Omicron is scary. Also with something this spectacularly infectious it pays at the community level to work from home and slow the spread. Maybe consider the vulnerable in your community before you force your entire company to catch covid and then infect their grandparents.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] thread[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/africa/south-africa...
Quote:
“National data show an exponential increase in both new infections and test positivity rates during the first three weeks of this wave, indicating a highly transmissible variant with rapid community spread of infection.”
https://jim.bmj.com/content/69/6/1253
It's a small sample, but it was done on data available in 2020, which was before vaccines were available.
Small sample size, but even similar result is somewhat surprising -- I would've thought the 2nd infection would be weaker.
It's not that much larger -- I guess reinfections are hard to find -- but surprisingly this found that ICU admission was higher for reinfections.
And as for knowledge, step into a hospital, and you'll see plenty of medications being used to treat actual cases of COVID. Doctors don't just put an oxygen mask on your face, and wait for you to die. You'll find a bit more knowledge there than you will in a deraged InfoWars rant, or a Joe Rogan podcast.
Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn't have 190 million monthly listeners. [1]
[1] If the most popular podcast[2] in America is your definition of 'eradicating' discussion, it's certainly an odd one.
[2] Or, if you're looking for variety in your media, you could always tune in to AM radio. Or the biggest television news syndicate in the world.
Everyone knows Paxlovid is safe and effective too, but you aren't allowed to take it yet.
"Do the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants Fluoxetine and Fluvoxamine Reduce Mortality Among Patients With COVID-19?" – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"Mortality Risk Among Patients With COVID-19 Prescribed Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants" – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"Mortality risk is confirmed to be significantly decreased among patients with #COVID-19 prescribed SSRI antidepressants, and particularly #fluoxetine, and fluoxetine or #fluvoxamine, in a large (n>80,000) US observational study." – https://twitter.com/HoertelN/status/1460309793558646785?s=20
Dr. Farid Jalali's track record on accuracy of statements on the pathophysiology is excellent. Here's a thread that outlines how and why SSRIs work to reduce illness in COVID: https://twitter.com/farid__jalali/status/1440876997182300169
Platelets and serotonin are involved in the disease. Serotonin tends to cause inflammation, clotting, and vasoconstriction. A significant feature of COVID-19 is elevated plasma serotonin. (Here's an almost random source for this: https://twitter.com/ivanajpavlovic/status/146071264917663334... ... another: https://twitter.com/__ice9/status/1345194722055385091 ... these are tweets, yes, but they link to papers.) Platelets have serotonin transporters and serotonin receptors. SARS-CoV-2 does a lot of things; One of the things it does is that it kills platelets by inducing necroptosis (source: https://twitter.com/DrKoupenova/status/1418558896390688776?s... ). This releases the serotonin inside them, causing other platelets to clot. SSRIs block platelets from picking up serotonin produced and secreted by enterochromaffin cells in the digestive tract; This is the source of the platelets' serotonin payload (more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterochromaffin_cell ). If an SSRI is taken early, platelets will have reduced serotonin payloads, which limits the serotonin-induced damage to the lung.
I had no idea about any of this until recently.
Another thing I had no idea about: Serotonin is metabolised by the lungs. https://twitter.com/ablative_sasha/status/144016208428566528... — and COVID-19 damages the lungs. It's a bad feedback loop involving way too much free serotonin.
There are other things at play but this is one of them. SSRIs work for a lot of patients, have a significant and c...
[0]https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/monoclonal-antibody-therapy...
First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020."
and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”"
Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
I’m going to wait for severity data from where I live, because that’s what matters.
I'm still waiting on proper large scale studies as well, though. It'll probably be at least a week or two until we get that
not trying to contradict here I think it will be less each year.
maybe governments will even start telling people their dirt and exercise choices are exacerbating this disease!
The number added each season is not necessarily the same number as the ones removed in the previous year - see the prevalence of really bad flu seasons for instance, which occur every 2-3 years or so.
Don't worry, Joe Rogan is on the case!
No it's not, the study specifically mentions "the relative reduction of risk conferred by prior proven COVID-19 infection"
https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room
> “Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.”
There are these estimates that ~80% of SA had Covid.
If so - previous variants were 1/4th as severe - since 3/4ths of the cases went undetected... Right?
Why "BUT"? Shouldn't the second part be, uh, a good thing?
In this very specific demographic. Other countries will have different outcomes, as seen with the current state of the pandemic (looking at Europe, for example).
The worm hypothesis is practically a curiosity to solve later.
Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off.
Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting?
edit from the summary :-/ :
Vaccine effectiveness:
Now the next question is what is the percentage reduction in deaths for Omicron vs prior variants. It seems like more than the 29 percent reduction in hospitalisation given the first death from Omicron was reported in Britain last week right?
Omicron cases are 'suspected' via a partial match in a PCR test (widely done), but this isn't definitive.
End result: There are very few confirmed deaths.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.18.21266496v... [2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...
Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.
If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.
Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.
So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.
With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.
Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/masonbissada/2021/12/03/scienti...
When the pandemic first started, people were flabberghasted about how FAST! the numbers were going up. Faster and faster, new records broken every day! Meanwhile, on a logarithmic plot, it was a dead straight line. It wasn't changing, not really.
People don't "get" this. Even now, two years in, people are clinging to constant factors.
I've had similar conversations with people who just don't understand Moore's law, Nielsen's Law, etc...
I had to use pictures to explain to IT network professionals that upgrading a 15-year-old 2 Mbps site office link to 4 Mbps is hilariously under-specced when the mobile phone in my pocket can exceed 1 Gbps while I'm sitting at the bus stop. They just hadn't "grokked" that their mental models are off by orders of magnitude. They're used to x*2 instead of x*10^2.
4 megabits! That would be considered fast 25 years ago.
The difference will be in timing; the people will have been infected more quickly, with the (severe) problems that entails.
> South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.
It could still be that among people infected with Omicron, there is a larger proportion of vaccinated people, due to vaccines being less efficient, but that's still a better yardstick.
Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this point, so by all means try to replace it with something weaker!
EDIT: Also, on a side note, the actual doctor who found Omicron said it was less dangerous. She even described it as "extremely mild." https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgddw4/omicron-variant-inter... Needless to say, politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it.
No. This is a perfectly good crisis and to do so would be to let it go to waste.
One could hypothesize that those who derive greater self-esteem or self-worth from social dynamics would engage in behaviors where the long-run probability of increasing self-esteem is higher. In other words, the most adaptive posts on both sides of a social media debate would be those which: A) maximally increase self-esteem via ingroup loyalty, and B) cause the debate to be prolonged or not resolved, thereby increasing the duration of A. The "we can't be sure" defense in response to optimism is B.
Probably naive to think we could totally eradicate it within a couple of years, particularly as far as vaccine fearmongering is concerned. Would be nice to see it join Smallpox and Polio though.
That said, we've accepted an annual winter uptick in flu infections and we just tell people most vulnerable to get their yearly flu jab; less vulnerable folks can stay at home for a bit and manage the symptoms. If that's what we have to do for covid every winter then so be it.
I would still call that a victory overall.
You're picking an outlier as proof that its not seasonal. Others may say it's the exception that proves the rule.
I just did. There are no discernable spikes coinciding with cold weather for India, Brazil, the UK or Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_season#Timing -> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/165/12/1434/125289
> In the Fourier analysis, the seasonality of influenza in Brazil was characterized by a semiannual pattern, peaking in the winter month of June (amplitude = 27 percent), with a second, smaller peak during the summer (January; amplitude = 13 percent; figure 2).
Accepted? I would call that normalizing as well. According to an estimate, about 290,000 to 650,000 globally died of the flu each year.[1]
Normalization means it's a problem out of mind out of sight. We stop demanding these problems to be solved.
1. https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-up-to-650-000-peopl...
Since we have 100% death ratio, show us your health history along with your verifiable ID. We are the ministry of Truth and Safety.
In all seriousness: We need to push back on robbing of civil liberties. No one cared to check for flu vaccine. It should be the same for COVID now that it’s getting weaker and it won’t end forever.
At some point, drastic measures start being worse than the disease. It doesn't mean we should ignore the few hundred thousand death.
Humanity declared victory over every single pathogen to date (eradicated, contained or seasonal) because we are still here and thriving. We should go on with our lives.
Here's LA County using overflow tents in 2018 because the flu season was particularly bad: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-flu-demand-2018...
So it's not like this is some new threat. "2 weeks to flatten the curve" came along with some understanding that hospitals would increase their resources. Instead, in many states, they've spent more time working out which unvaccinated staff to fire and how than they have increasing staffing levels.
[US Closing Hospitals At Record Pace During Pandemic - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz46ZQSRdRE)
So these politicians should treat this like an emergency and drive dumptrucks of money up to healthcare staff not working and get them back. Get nursing students. Do whatever it takes. Think outside of the box. This is supposed to be an emergency, is it not?
I mean, if it was an emergency and healthcare was truly an issue, why aren't those hospital tents and hospital ships docked in the harbor of every major city? "Lack of staff" is just an excuse in an emergency. You work around it. Make it happen. It's an emergency, right?
And if it isn't an emergency, why are we mandating anything at all? Shouldn't we all be going about our lives like we did prior to march 2020? If it isn't an emergency why are governments still using emergency powers to push mandates onto citizens instead of actually dealing with hospital shortages?
None of this makes any sense at all when you really start thinking about it. Absolutely none of it... Never did, never will...
We would have to completely redesign our current method of vaccination, then. We do not have a sterilizing vaccine for COVID (like we did for smallpox and polio). The current vaccines all use spike proteins to prepare a body's antibodies against the main infection tool of the COVID virus. This method indirectly prevents the virus from efficiently infecting cells in vaccinated hosts, but it does not and cannot eradicate the virus.
However, more than a year later, I think now we should not only catalogue the arising variants, but we should also make a serious attempt to move away from spike-protein based vaccines in favor of traditional, weakened virus vaccines.
We don't actually have sterilizing vaccines for smallpox or polio either.
>The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells never get involved, a bit like an intruder smacking up against an electric fence around a building, leaving the security guards inside none the wiser.
and
>This is a very neat story. And it is “almost impossible to prove,” Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Oregon Health & Science University, told me. To show sterilizing immunity, researchers have to demonstrate that an infection never occurred—a big ask, considering that microbiologists can’t even agree on what an infection actually is.
If that is the definition used, yes, you are right. It is also basically useless as a term, as it is 'almost impossible to prove.' If you wish to use another term, we can do that. Instead of sterilizing, I could simply say 'highly effective.' Suffice to say, the mechanisms used by the COVID vaccine and the polio vaccine are very different. At most, the polio vaccine only included 3 strains (or variants)- the Salk vaccine, the first, only targeted type 1, but two more were added later over the course of years.
All of this is to say- the highly effective polio vaccine works because there are very few polio variants and people are immunized against them directly.
The COVID vaccine does not make one immune to the virus, or immune to the spike protein. The presence of the spike protein in the vaccine provokes an autoimmune response in the form of antibodies that will target that spike protein. This is somewhat effective, and a clever 'hack' that allows us a measure of protection. However, different spike proteins can be used by different variant viruses.
I am not antivaccine, and while autoimmune systems can be fairly complex, it is certainly worth discussing. Frankly I find the obfuscation and sloppy, ideological reporting to be frustrating. On all sides I see a lack of rigor and emotional attempts at control.
Would someone who is flagging this comment please, instead, respond to it? If it is so trivially dismissed, please show the rest of us.
In any case, the term 'sterilizing' may not be one hundred percent biologically accurate any more, but denying that there are no sterilizing vaccines isn't really addressing the issue. So there are no 'sterilizing vaccines.' I think we can all agree that we want a COVID vaccine that is as effective as the polio or smallpox vaccine, a vaccine capable of eradication. Currently, that may not be an option due to how the disease mutates, but we should still talk about it, and discuss why we are not at least attempting to come up with a vaccine that is the flu vaccine (which may include 50 weakened or dead variants). Acting like the current vaccine options operate mechanistically like the old, very effective vaccines is misleading, and I think part of what is driving a lot of the consternation.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind...
But that hope should not be treated as a fact like the headline does.
Another hope could be that omicron is actually not as virulent as delta, but only spreads so fast in South Africa, because people can get reinfected.
It's seeing a pretty explosive growth rate in Denmark.
https://sum.dk/ministeren/sociale-medier-arkiv/2021/december...
https://www.ssi.dk/-/media/cdn/files/covid19/omikron/statusr...
Even if it turns up to actually be true, the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true.
The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “it’s too soon to be sure”, then pay attention.
It’s too soon to be sure.
Although it's too early to be sure, it would explain both an increased transmissibility and a milder variant.
Also, it is similar enough to what i heard before from a conference about covid previous year.
It's actually a worldwide and European meeting ( so 2 times/ week for me actually) and it's a pretty good alternative for keeping company culture and bringing it somewhat online.
Yes, it's not required if you don't want to attend :)
Thanks!
Research from just today confirmed that it's more in the nose and less in the lung. Which is exactly what i mentioned.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-15/omicron-i...
...
So a more lethal virus during a pandemic must also be more transmissible, as it's actively competing for the same susceptible hosts with other circulating strains. If another strain gets there first, chances are it's going to prime that host's immune system sufficiently to prevent reinfection.
Which means it needs not just more lethal mutations, but also more transmissible ones. The probability of all of those coinciding seems low, as the former are more likely to arise in immunocompromised hosts, and the latter in circulation among dense populations, no?
No, it doesn't.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
> The claim makes a broad generalization about pathogens that’s not supported by science. It has been well-documented that pathogens can evolve to be more virulent. And many viruses, including HIV and Ebola, have in fact become more lethal over time.
As you note, smallpox disproves the idea that viruses automatically become mild. It had thousands of years to do so and carried a 30% mortality rate still.
If everything survives, the resulting community can live with each other and that requires a sufficiently mild virus. However that doesn't help predict the future, because you can't enforce the precondition of everyone surviving.
Indeed. And wanting something to be false does not make it false. People on both sides of this debate are far too eager to run with their preferred opinion and accuse anyone who disagrees of "misinformation".
"I don't like this paper, and I see arguments against it, therefore it is dangerous and wrong."
It's petty behavior.
Sure, for this immediate wave [more transmissible less virulent] is better than [more transmissible more virulent].
But that's awfully myopic. What happens after that?
Since mutation rate is a function of the number of viral particles, and more transmission means many more hosts incubating many more particles, we should expect to see more new variants, faster.
So the probability just went up that we'll get a new wave of a new variant that's [more transmissible more virulent] and will kill 10x more people than alpha through omicron will.
That's a probability and not a certainty, but life is probabilistic and our risk level just went up a lot.
It's not a miracle or anything close to that level of implied bafflement (devoid of being able to explain it rationally). We're excellent survivors overall, and a lot more than that. We're very skilled at resource utilization, we're relatively talented at conceptual thinking, we're competent tool builders on a planet ripe for it, we possess the ability to plan far ahead and understand consequences numerous steps out, we have memory capabilities that are quite effective across most of our lifetimes, most of our species is not particularly violent and is generally good natured & friendly (only a very small fraction of the population will ever commit serious acts of violence), we function quite well together in groups/tribes/cities/nations (compounded, shared outcomes), and so on. It's not particularly complicated, despite the doomsayers that will never stop existing amongst us (their mentality says more about them than it does the human race).
We should have prioritized health and Vitamin D in April 2020. At that time it was clear it was mainly affecting overweight people. Of course even almost 2 years later people still don't think that as a whole. They say comorbidities. Just say it like it is... it's mostly fat people. The news and society won't say that.
Also by some definitions America is “mostly fat people” so your point is not that meaningful to begin with.
The human mind can create symptoms very easily, especially if every day you get bombarded by social media and news about Covid.
> Also by some definitions America is “mostly fat people” so your point is not that meaningful to begin with
True, but I'm just saying this wouldn't have been an issue 30 - 50 years ago.
Globally that is one thing, but if that data point is in the US, then the baseline population is something like 60-70% overweight/obese to begin with. In which case, that elevation from baseline isn’t as significant as implied.
Citation for this? I've never heard this at all.
But still useful data. Thanks.
There's just no nuance in any conversation related to Covid.
Let me ask you a question. If weight had absolutely no impact on Covid then what expected percentage of Covid hospitalizations would be with overweight people?
Apparently though people's risk perceptions about COVID are wildly off base, by orders of magnitude.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
40% of US Democrats think COVID hospitalization risk if you're unvaccinated is 50%! Fifty percent! The real answer is less than 1%. Other polls have shown similar things for fatality rates, like estimated 16% IFR on average in France. It really makes me realize why people act in such extreme ways, if that's what they think.
COVID is to a large extent a total failure of our societies ability to disseminate accurate information. Unfortunately this misinformation catastrophe is largely the work of the very same people who are constantly complaining about misinformation.
For a disease to make us go extinct it would have to be highly transmissible and have a fatality rate of close to 100%. Anything less than that, and evolution will produce a generation of humans that are resistant to (or otherwise able to protect themselves from) the disease, and from there the population will replenish itself. The great plague had a fatality rate of 30% and it didn't even come close to threatening our existence as a specie. (In fact, the resulting redistribution of wealth arguably contributed to the advent of the renaissance.)
While there can be recombinations of some similar viruses, that's not the common way that viruses propagate, and it's not mating. Point mutations are much more common. And if they do recombine there's no reason to (automatically) expect that the results will be the worst characteristics of both.
The probability of a more transmissible, more virulent strain just went down, not up. It certainly isn't zero, but "more transmissible less virulent" is exactly how viruses tend to evolve. Mutations are a dice roll and it there's no way to be sure of anything, but being a little optimistic is completely appropriate.
How does selection pressure work when the disease is spread by people with no symptoms?
You are forgetting about the most vulnerable group of all: immunosuppressed people.
They cannot mount a sufficient immune response, in severe immunosuppression like after a transplant event months or years after. In some cases the covid mortality for these people can approach 40% for young adults.
We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such. Or "whoever's not vaccinated dies of their own fault". Not 100% true.
We as a society must protect those most vulnerable.
Plus many of these people arguing to keep them around forever forget that actual living humans work at these businesses. It takes a lot of privilege to suggest employees should continue wearing masks forever to make a small set of extremely fearful customers feel "safe". I bet 99% of the "pro mask" people on are not in a place requiring them to wear a mask 40 hours a week.
"We have to be mindful of people like this when thinking about dropping mask mandates and such."
Not arguing with you, just genuinely interested on how long you would advocate for mask mandates? Would you be willing to accept mask mandates in perpetuity?
This is still so hilarious to me. It's pretty obvious that some masks work, that is, n95 or whatever actual respirator masks. It's pretty obvious that other masks don't work at all, that is, 99.99% of masks worn by the public at large.
So a N95 mask works and covering your mouth with a bandana has no effect at all? Not even 10%?
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
This is the problem, isn't it? For how long will these mandates be in place for? Right now, it's clear that they won't end until populations start revolting.
That's not at all clear. My very cautious Northern California county dropped the mask mandates when cases started dropping this summer and only re-implimented them when cases and hospitalizations started to rise again.
I don't see any reason for them not to drop the mandates again when infection/hospitalization rates drop down to acceptable levels.
Define acceptable levels? And does this suggest we continue masking every winter when "cases surge"? There will always be a variant of covid. Always. It's never going away. Basing mask mandates of any metric, be it cases, hospitalizations or deaths means every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask.
We've been in this pandemic now for close to 2 years. At every single point, government rules and guidance have lagged recommendations from the experts. I'm confident that there is exactly 0 chance that any governmental body in the US is going to continue to mandate masking after it's no longer necessary.
At this point, in the states that have mandates? I'm honestly not sure. There sure seems to be no rush to remove them despite having low "cases" and hospitalizations not being an issue. And given none of these states have given a single hint as to when they will go away... who knows?
States that continue this are absolutely normalizing mandated masks. Vaccines were sold as the end of masks (and they morally should have been regardless of what politicians say). Vaccines are the best we can do. Mandated masks in a post-vaccine world makes absolutely no sense at all. What other target could a government reasonably set after a vaccine? "Cases"? "Hospitalizations"? Well... those will always be there. So do we just keep doing this forever?
And if you say "hospital capacity" shouldn't these governments have fixed that already? We gave them two years and it was an emergency so where is the hospital capacity we put our lives on hold for? I mean, its still an emergency right? Shouldn't people be super pissed that government hasn't dealt with the actual problem they keep saying we have?
Both of these may be widely available in the US quite soon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/14/does-pfizer...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/ 'Ivermectin is an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
We know that steroids work because they were studied, they definitely work, they're cheap and now they're the standard of care. Why didn't the anti-ivermectin conspiracy come for dexamethasone? It's left unexplained...
I think it depends on location. In key environments like public transport and supermarkets and other spaces that everyone needs to be able to access it seems reasonable to me that we might keep them for at least a 5-10 year horizon if that proves necessary. It just doesn't seem like a big deal to wear a mask, and it would cut down on the need for more restrictive measures like lockdowns.
My wife has a medical exemption from wearing a mask. She cannot live a normal life when the standard response to her being out in public is disgust, constant questioning, or outright rejecting her due to "in-store policies."
My father has been wearing a mask, but constantly deals with hyperventilation issues. He's working with his family doctor to determine next steps.
Some things are a big deal for some people. I support anyone wearing a mask if they so choose. I oppose mask mandates as a one-size fits all solution.
I expect my wife would have to strap her card over her mouth to satisfy the social pressure to conform. It's not in most people's imaginations that anyone else could suffer from something that doesn't bother them.
What about the fully vaccinated, boostered employees who work at these places? Should they also continue wearing masks despite being at virtually zero risk of major covid issues?
But yeah, no thanks. We didn't do masks in 2019 and we sure as heck shouldn't keep doing them going forward. Masks were a hack to get us to vaccines. They aren't something we should be keeping around anymore.
From start to end of October, cases per 100k, 7 day average
Glasgow -- 300->220
Edinburgh -- 210->250
Manchester -- 290->220
Birmingham -- 250->280
4 similar cities, two with mask mandates, two without.
And smaller ones
Aberdeen -- 267->330
Southampton -- 300->410
Perth -- 320->260
Hereford -- 290->580
So there may be something there, would need more data to really see, but it certainly isn't a glowing mandate for masks
Yeah... I'm sure all these studies done post-2019 are totally legit though.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
"At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were divided into a group wearing medical/surgical masks and a control group found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review found nine trials (of which eight were cluster-randomized controlled trials in which clusters of people, versus individuals, were randomized) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness. Two trials were with healthcare workers and seven in the community. The review concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI) (RR 0.99, 95%CI 0.82 to 1.18) or laboratory confirmed illness (LCI) (RR 0.91, 95%CI 0.66-1.26) (44); the certainty of the evidence was low for ILI, moderate for LCI."
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/337199/WHO-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546829/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
Interestingly the DOI does not show up
https://dx.doi.org/
Here's some further criticisms:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1073440/latest.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01296
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/ja...
They saw a significant reduction in covid presence in communities with more masking -- even though total masking was still only 40% in those communities -- which is very much in line with all the other literature.
I literally can't believe people still pretend like masks (especially surgical/KN95s) don't protect people when it's completely self-evident since we've used them forever to protect people in medical settings.
They don't work, at all, across decades of research and dozens of studies. They're not going to magically start working for COVID when they haven't worked for the flu or any other respiratory virus in the past.
>forever to protect people in medical settings.
Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
Unfortunately, Tyler Cowen's blog has worse Covid commentary than even HN does, which is pretty impressive given the amount of HCQ/Ivermectin/bioweapon conspiracy theorizing here.
> Surgical masks in medical settings are designed to protect from bacterial infections, not viral ones.
This is patently untrue.. you're not one of those "virus particles can fit through masks" people are you? As just one example of how obvious it is that masks protect against viruses in HCW from the last SARS outbreak;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112437/
> Although more research on universal masking in heath settings is needed, it is the expert opinion of the majority (79%) of WHO COVID-19 IPC GDG members that universal masking is advisable in geographic settings where there is known or suspected community or cluster transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
> 1. In areas of known or suspected community or cluster SARS-CoV-2 transmission, universal masking should be advised in all health facilities (see Table 1).
> All health workers, including community health workers and caregivers, should wear a medical mask at all times, for any activity (care of COVID-19 or nonCOVID-19 patients) and in any common area (e.g., cafeteria, staff rooms).
> Other staff, visitors, outpatients and service providers should also wear a mask (medical or non-medical) at all times
"Experts" supported eugenics, antibacterial soap, breakfast cereal, the food pyramid, lobotomies, and all kinds of other things on the basis of popular "consensus"
The people making those recommendations are experts in the field and have all read the relevant research. Weighting the good studies vs. the bad ones, measuring evidence, etc. They literally exist to give guidance on world health matters based on the spectrum of results from all these different researchers.
And here you are, telling me that in your opinion, we should ignore their assessment and only trust these few specific papers that you choose to emphasize. (At least you've stopped advocating for ivermectin now?)
A bit of a paradox to get people to rely on your opinion when you've previously said we shouldn't rely on opinions isn't it? Or is it just that you don't like the WHO's opinion on World Health issues because they might be in the pocket of "big surgical mask".
I'm not telling you anything in my opinion. I'm telling you what the empirical evidence says or doesn't say.
I have not stopped advocating Ivermectin. The empirical evidence shows that it is still an extremely cheap, safe, and correlated treatment demonstrated across populations of billions through a mechanism of action that has been well established.
There's literally no reason not to try it, and there's a reason it's part of treatment regimens across several countries. Its use doesn't involve eroding the liberty of the populace or solidifying absolute power of state. It has virtually zero side effects medically or socioculturally, unlike things like masks or vaccines that have zero long term data
Even if I disagree with TC on something, I still think he's pretty much intellectually honest, i.e., is not beholden to one political agenda or another simply because it matches his world view or completely unaware of competing data. And he often does a good job in striking a balance on ideology & practicality (State Capacity Libertarianism comes to mind)
However the comments section on MR are often a hot mess of cherry picking or misinformation parroted back by people trying emulate TC's style without anything approaching his intellectual rigor.
1) Were people in Scotland (with higher masking) being less cautious in other areas (washing hands, staying further away, etc)
2) Was the weather worse in Scotland, leading to more closed windows
3) Are people in Scotland more likely to be tested and thus more cases caught
The problem I have is that
The Scientific method comes out with great studies (wearing masks, all things being equal, reduces transmission)
That leads to a prediction (enforcing masks reduces cases figures)
That prediction doesn't hold out (Scottish cases figures)
So we need to revisit the prediction,
1) Does a mask mandate increase mask usage (anecdotally it appears so, but I only went to Glasgow and Manchester in October)
2) Does increased mask usage lead to other behaviours which would increase risk
3) Does increased mask usage lead to more awareness in testing
4) Do anti mask people go round licking door handles to try to spread covid to prove their points
These are perfectly valid questions, yet you can't ask them, because half the responses will be some idiotic cultish anti-mask covid denier, and the others will be some cultish mask worshiper
I'm fully vaccinated, so why should I? And when will the pandemic "be over"? Covid is here forever and ever. As long as we keep testing at the level we do, we will always find new variants and always see "spikes" of cases every single winter.
When, specifically, do the states with mask mandates remove them? Why not today? What makes a month better? Or a year? Or never?
Pushing for masks at this stage is arguing we wear masks forever. That isn't a world I care to live in.
There shortages of hospital beds across many states [0] If you want a full perspective on things, look further than your own state.
Unless you live in Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska, North Dakota, or Montana then everything is not going very well. Most people don't live in these states, and many of the states with loose mask mandates are not in that short list. A small are just about holding their ground, but about 40 states have seen a >= 15% increase in infections just in the last two weeks, and one of the least restrictive states for mask mandates (Texas) has increased by 80%. [1]
[0] https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
I also don't understand your assessment that we are reaching (or can reach) herd immunity: We're not there on the common cold or influenza, and it seems COVID mutates at rates that will keep it around as well. Early evidence on Omicron indicates that it in particular is better at reinfection than other strains, so I hope the data in the next few weeks confirms its milder nature, but reinfection provides even more opportunity for variants to emerge.
We're much better off than we were a year ago: The holiday spike is (so far) not as bad, deaths are lower than last year at this time, and vaccines are widely available. But we're not back to normal yet (probably never will be) and I don't think we're doing as well right now as we could be, and I think we can make a lot more progress before we declare this thing over and adjust to a new status-quo.
As for your experience, it is not predictive or representative given the ~800,000 US deaths. Especially because you live in an admittedly very cautious area.
Give me "unnecessarily wear a mask while walking the dog" and no deaths every day if my other option is "never wear a mask anywhere" and be surrounded by death.
The death distributions are very clear.
If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.
Long COVID is a big deal, and it apparently affects half of those who get COVID [1]. Furthermore, even double-vaxxed, while protected against hospitalization or death, are still at risk (reduced about 50%) for long COVID [2].
Until/unless Omicron has been proven to have less severe long covid symptoms, yeah I'm treating it with the same caution that I'd do with Delta.
[1] https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/how-many-people-get-... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
Long Covid is not a defined term. It comprises everything from "post-hospitalization syndrome" -- which is something that has existed since long before Covid -- to "slight cough for a few weeks". If you're young (under 65) and otherwise healthy, you are highly unlikely to have anything more than a minor illness. Particularly after vaccination.
Here's a paper that might interest you:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
> In this cross-sectional analysis of 26,823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with [loss of smell].
In other words, in a large study out of France, the only "long covid symptom" actually correlated with SARS-CoV2 infection was loss of smell. All of the other various symptoms were associated with self-reported illness, but not confirmed illness.
This is a fairly strong argument that "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic. We'd probably see this more clearly if the various "long covid" studies didn't rely exclusively on self-reporting of symptoms, and mix together all levels of illness.
To combat this, perhaps we could swap the masks out with gags. /s
I'll happily give those odds a miss.
Without knowing your specific background, your numbers are probably much less.
E.g. ages 0-17, there's been 644 deaths. Across a cohort with ~75,000,000 people.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Getting infected with COVID does not.
Same thing with driving; we have a variety of safety precautions - quite a few of them mandatory - involved that help tilt the cost/benefit balance in our favor.
So they will buy carbon indulgences for your corporate trip to Bora Bora but not regular travelers?
You would need to compare the benefits of driving to the benefits of living a normal life, and compare that to the risks of dying from each.
Why would getting infected with COVID have benefits? What are you trying to say?
Why do you think you get a choice? Without extreme measures of staying locked up, most everyone will encounter the virus. Why not help your body deal with it by going for a walk today to get some exercise? Life is to live, not eat ourselves to overweight deaths.
So many benefits.
Going to a live game has benefits. Do those not matter?
The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.
This is a ludicrous abuse of statistics. 11 fatalities per 100k people is 11 fatalities per 100k people's worth of trips. That is a few orders of magnitude less than executing 11 people out of every 100k who show up to a stadium.
> Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?
Covid-19 deaths are not randomly distributed. We've known this for nearly two years now.
Given the option, I'm not taking that bet. I wouldn't play Russian roulette even with a 2000-bullet revolver. Especially when there are pretty simple steps I can take to further minimize the risk.
(It would be nice to have more-- and updated-- data than this. If anyone is aware of a source, I'd love to know about it)
That's also discounting other (and possibly not yet known) complications from getting COVID. There might not be much of any, but we it will be some time before we know that so I wouldn't discount that factor in my risk analysis.
Serious measure to mitigate transmission rates still seems like a very reasonable practice, even for healthy people.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7327471/
Thank-you for acknowledging the subjectivity of Risk Tolerance.
But keeping the panic dialed up to 11 for two years is very healthy.
Signed, someone who probably now has a cardiac neurosis.
As for the doctor that discovered it: Here experience with infected individuals is anecdotal data. She has not, to my knowledge, been involved in systematic studies. She is a general practitioner so here experience with this has been on the ground, primarily with the patients she has seen. Certainly this is useful but it is not a replacement for well-formed studies. Medical research and epidemiology are distinctly different activities from medical practice, even if many people involved in both have a medical degree.
"Most Omicron cases in US have been mild but most were vaccinated" from CDC reported on by CNN and MSNBC
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/health/omicron-cases-us-cdc/i...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-report-omicro...
There may be more but that was a quick Google search. You said "politicians and news hosts decided to completely ignore her description about it." but that's incorrect
That being said there are a lot of people hand wringing about “we don’t know yet, we don’t know yet” in this very thread. Three weeks into it, and the evidence is almost overwhelming: it is not likely to be nearly as bad.
I followed the original covid news in early January and I fought against the narrative that it was “just the flu”. We would know by now if the news was bad.
That being said, folks should continue to remain vigilant in those areas where spread is prevalent.
I'm optimistic.
A version of Covid that is much more contagious, but less likely to be severe is a great way to get the immune system of the vaccine avoidant trained on how to recognize and fight Covid.
For those who have already been vaccinated, a mild breakthrough infection would serve the same function as a booster shot.
Except booster shots don’t infect other people.
And her experience is entirely consistent with Omicron appearing less virulent because it's infecting the previously infected and vaccinated who already have some degree of immunity.
The doctor isn't a psychic but how do _you_ know this
1. We know that break through infections are less serious than infections to the unvaccinated and uninfected. 2. We determine virulence by # of hospitalizations (or other serious outcome) / # of infections 3. If we add more infections that don't have serious outcomes (because they are break through cases) that greatly increases the denominator without affecting the numerator. 4. This is how you could have Omicron be just as virulent as the original but look less virulent to a doctor. (Because of the break through cases)
Does that make sense?
Unfortunately, in Bulgaria you see that the size of the deaths wave still follows the size of the infection wave.
The “no vulnerable people to die are left” hypothesis doesn’t hold. Those who survived survived because they were lucky, careful or vaccinated. It’s not true that the virus burned through the population and the remaining are the immune or resilient survivors.
If they lock down again, they'll lock down every single winter from here on out. Lockdowns in a post-vaccine world are complete madness.
A few months back I was in Bulgaria, where the majority of the population is antivaxx virus deniers mask sceptics. It’s true that mask free virus free worry free life is much better, it was liberating to be in Bulgaria. However, at the same time everyone knew someone who died from covid. Much more than Turkey, where I have been since the start of the pandemic.
The situation we are in is not a choice. The virus is real, the damage is real and we can’t simply refuse to play. We can but a lot of people will die and I’m not convinced that this is the way to go.
I bet, when the things start getting real with other issues like the global warming, the inconveniences will create similar reactions. I appreciate the drive, the desire for freedom and convince but these things happen to people all the time when they fail to address the slow moving issues beforehand.
Everything we’ve done in the last two years is not caused by the virus but our reaction to the virus.
PS: eventually even the most hardcore fearful will have no choice but to move on. Omicron is not the last variant and Covid will be with us forever. Expecting every member of society to treat Covid as if it is the only problem from here on out is not going to happen.
Get your vaccines. Stop being scared and move on. It’s quite literally as simple as that.
We will eventually move on, the idea is to do it with least damage possible. People moved on from the plague, the black death ve will move on. It’s just doesn’t need to lose so many people in the name of conspiracy theories and inconvenience.
The handling of the situation is different everywhere. It’s a management issue, not really a virus issue.
The way you talk scares me more than the virus. It is so authoritarian and creepy. So many of my tech worker colleagues talk the same way. It’s abuse. People that talk your way are the kinds of people that commit grave atrocities in the name of some cause you are 100% bought into. You do not have the moral high ground you think you do. Stop now before you let very evil people use you to commit very bad things to your fellow humans.
You’ve already allowed your government to destroy our kids, caused old folks to die alone in care homes, gutted the working class, transferred enormous amounts of wealth to the richest in society, and divided the population in a way never seen before. You are committing great evil and you foolishly believe you are doing it for a proper cause. You aren’t.
Covid ends when you personally decide it does. Covid has no feelings. It’s a virus. It does virus stuff. It’s a part of nature just like earthquakes or tornadoes. We have very little control over it. Accept that and move on.
End your fear and Covid is no longer a problem. It is literally as easy as that. Nobody has to “accept” the virus requires them to sacrifice their very short amount of time on this earth unless they allow it to. And anybody who tells them otherwise is not to be trusted at all, for they have nobodies interest in mind.
You know what’s part of the nature? lions, crocodiles and sharks and yet I’m not going to let them eat me. Earthquakes are natural too and you build accordingly, actually the evil governments even implemented building codes for it. 20 years ago I survived an earthquake that wiped out the neighbourhood because the previous governments couldn't bother to be evil and authoritarian over building standards.
What's up with this obsession with naturalism and personification of events?
We don't need any further mitigation strategies. Vaccines were the only real mitigation strategy we ever had.
Sometimes I feel this is what people want when they say we should be listening to "medical and scientific" people. They want us to build society around the advice of exactly one profession to the exclusion of everything else.
It takes way more than just a very narrow expert to run a society. For two years we've handed the keys over to exactly one form of expert and completely ignored every other form of expertise.
These "medical and scientific" folks you talk of can yell "not enough" until they run out of air but that doesn't mean we should listen to them. Of course they are gonna say "it isn't enough"! That is their job! That doesn't mean we should to listen to their advice.
It may come as a surprise to some people but at some point you have to move on from covid no matter what these "experts" say. There are vastly more problems with the world than one specific form of illness.
This blind adherence to a small set of "medical experts" is completely myopic and is resulting in a cure that is much worse than covid ever was. We've had a vaccine for a year. You can mix & match boosters at this point. Party is over. Covid is here to stay. Move on, people.
>“Epidemiological tracking shows a steep trajectory of new infections, indicating Omicron’s rapid spread, but so far with a flatter trajectory of hospital admissions, possibly indicating lower severity,” explains Dr Noach. “This lesser severity could, however, be confounded by the high seroprevalence levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies in the general South African population, especially following an extensive Delta wave of infections.” [1].
So, to actually make the comparison we'd need to compare new Delta infections with new Omicron infections time-matched, comparing people who were seronegative to start with. This would be really hard to do in South Africa since there is a high proportion of seropositive people.
[1] https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room
All viruses are severe if you have no immune protection from them. A small number of people die from the cold every year. The only thing that matters is how severe the infection is given the immunity you have.
Comparing the severity of the viral strains on some objective scale, if that’s even possible, is at best an academic curiosity. Severity comparisons only really matter in giving us an accurate idea of how likely severe illness and death will be so that individuals, families, and public health officials can make any changes necessary.
https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room
These numbers show (as one would expect) that prior infection makes you less likely to get Omicron, and that prior infection with more recent strains does so more effectively. (Which might be because they're more Omicron-like, or because the infection was more recent. I'm guessing more the latter.)
Google doesn't run its data centers at 5% capacity for the same reasons ICUs don't.
For a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison they should be comparing omicron hospitalization & fatality rates to those of non-omicron variants over the same period of time. It doesn't look like they've done that, and I'm not aware of a study that has systematically done this (yet).
It would certainly be a holiday-season gift if we shifted to a more virulent but less serious variant, but I'll hold out for a bit more information before I completely buy into that narrative. That can be difficult: people want to believe some good news here. Heck, my initial gut reaction was to push back against your objections but my career has trained me to resist that sort of thing. It won't be good for the erosion of trust in the media if they've jumped the gun on this and Omicron doesn't turn out the way we hope it will.
https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room
> For individuals who have had COVID-19 previously, the risk of reinfection with Omicron is significantly higher, relative to prior variants.
Just because you disagree with something does not make it "misleading". The question of prior immunity is not unknown, is an obvious question, and in fact is mentioned in the article and discussed in the study.
The title accurately reflects the contents of the study. I have many issues with Washington Post's coverage of Covid, but this is actually fair.
No research paper stands alone, and we never have all context on a given question. You disagree with the conclusion for reasons -- that's fine. Make your arguments, and see if you can convince people. That's how science works.
Few headlines work without context so what we want is for them to choose the most obvious, pertinent context. I think we all care a lot more about what Omicron means to us now, not what it would have meant if it were the main variant at the start of the pandemic.
And, of course, anyone who cares about the topic should read past the headline.
Plus, this combination could be a lot WORSE for the hospital capacity situation.
Even if the virulence/severity is only a fraction, the severe consequences will still grow exponentially, just further to the right on the curve.
Meanwhile, the curve will grow a lot faster to the top of the graph because the greater exponential growth among both the unvaxed and the vaccinated.
So, higher percentage of severe cases and lower transmisability would be less bad — fewer sever cases and much greater trensmissability is almost the worst case.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/covid-vaccinat...
For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to normal behavior after vaccination, and (iii) the vaccines inhibit the other variants much more than Omnicron. So Omicron gets more opportunities to infect and spread. Of course, all this is just conjecture and could be true or false.
What matters from a practical point of view is that, Omnicron is less severe in the general population today(for various reasons), as compared to the original strain back in 2020.
I think it is misleading. AIDS is much more survivable in "the current situation" because of various drug advances we made in the past few decades. Does that mean 2021 AIDS is "less severe" than 90s AIDS? I guess you could claim it's technically less severe, but the wording definitely suggests it's something about the virus, rather than the environment.
* variant "D" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive
* variant "O" that kills 1% of the 20% of the population that isn't seropositive and 0.2% of the 80% of the population that is seropositive
The takeaway is "good news everyone, variant O is less severe!"
I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
Edit: The result of this, if you look at previous diseases that have plagued humanity (see Black Death), is a high initial death count when the virus breaks out, but the death rate declines as the milder variants spread and people survive them, building immunity to stronger versions, until eventually the virus mostly disappears.
Naively, you’d think selection pressure would decrease severity, because severity is not how viruses spread. However, if (some of) the same mechanisms that ar causing the virus to spread better are also responsible for (some of) its severity, then things may not really get better over time —unless our immune systems themselves adapt, but that generally requires a first infection…
But about the breeding ground, not really: If one day some super deadly variant evolves, it's not popping up in all of the infected hosts at the same time. It'd still need to infect everyone from scratch, and since we all have our guard up right now, it'd definitely have an incredibly hard time doing so.
I've definitely seen outlets postulating that the endgame for COVID-19 would be it doing exactly this— becoming way more contagious but way less severe, basically a just a kind of cold. These "final" variants would quickly spread everywhere, choking off the supply of new hosts for the more deadly variants, effectively achieving herd immunity.
Not necessarily[1]:
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270
Viruses evolve according to evolutionary pressures. I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests - perhaps it's too soon, or even, who knows, maybe they are there and we don't know?
The common trope is that if the virus is too deadly, then it doesn't have a chance to find new hosts. This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pass it on.
Unfortunately, this is only a weak effect in Covid. Most of the spread happens well before people are very ill; in terminal stages of severe Covid, many people in fact would test negative for virus presence. So there is little evolutionary pressure on the virus to be less deadly - by the time it kills people, we are spent vessels from its point of view.
I suppose a mutation that makes it completely benign would be beneficial, as current rules on self-isolation curb the spread of strains causing symptomatic disease.
There are pressures that make it more deadly: a mutation leading to higher viral load is both more deadly and more transmissible. So unless the transmissibility increases too much (and virus is way too deadly), we might even expect the virus to become more deadly. This hasn't happened yet, thankfully.
An example I used elsewhere was the introduction of Myxomatosis in Australia, to control the invasive rabbit population. Over time, the local strain evolved to be more deadly, but with a longer incubation periods. This way, bunnies had more time to pass the virus around, then once that job was done, the virus was happy to kill them off.
On the flipside (and very long timescales), since some people appear to be genetically more resistant to the virus, you can expect natural selection to do its job. But since overall death rate from Covid is low-ish (no more than 1%, you'd say, and skewed towards older, non-reproducing individuals) this would take a long time.
Another hope is that, if the disease is less serious in children, perhaps immunity it built up during the usual period of childhood infections. There is another coronavirus, which causes a mild cold in children, but can be very serious in adults (apologies, I can't remember what it's called). Thankfully, a single infection gives more-or-less complete lifetime protection - so most people have it as children and never worry about it again.
In either of these cases, we're talking about generational timescales.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/07/scientists-fin...
PCR tests for RNA or DNA, that's not something a mutation can change. I don't know for Covid, but usually a PCR test targets something fundamental & stable. That might need to be updated with new variants.
The people who design the tests know which parts of the sequence are more likely to mutate, so they pick the more conserved parts. Also, most PCR tests check for 3 different parts of the sequence. Which is why Omicron can still be detected even if there is a mutation in one part checked by the test, since the other 2 parts still match (the so called S-gene-dropout).
I'm not a virologist by any stretch of imagination. Mutations seem to come in bundles; I'm just surprised that, given typical PCR tests only test for three RNA fragments, that we don't see mutations that evade it.
The main evolutionary pressure on Covid in developed countries is Public Health clamping down on it like a ton of bricks. A variant that quietly evades PCR tests, self-isolation etc. is set up for life.
A variant that infects more people from a single host (assuming everything else held constant) is a positive selective pressure. So increasing the contagious period is beneficial. But the length of the contagious period is inversely related to the timing and strength of the immune response. So we should expect the virus to become less deadly over time, assuming there's a hard limit to its ability to evade a typical immune system.
Do you have other examples besides Myxomatosis?
Quick nit: while this is true, SARS-1 was also not particularly transmissible before symptoms appeared, in contrast to Covid, which made control much easier (in addition to the much higher fatality rate causing everyone to take it much more seriously).
The adaptations that affect severity and those that affect transmissibility generally seem to be different. These are two axes on which a new variant can very in either way. The most successful new variants will tend to be highly transmissible (for obvious reasons) but also tend to be lower severity for the reasons gjsman gave in a sibling comment.
That's only a tendency though, evolution will throw up variants on all sorts of different points on the transmissibility and severity scales and may the most successful virus win. Yes high severity variants will tend to kill off their victims sooner, but if also highly infectious that might overcome that effect. In any case killing off victims still leaves a trail of devastation. It can take a while for all of this to play out.
If severity means the host dies quickly rather than slowly, there's obviously selection pressure and that mutation will die off relatively quickly vs the rest, since it won't have as many chances to spread as the less severe strain. E.g. SARS/MERS.
If severity means the host dies more often, but it still takes a long time to die, the selection pressure is much lower, and it will roughly spread the same as the less severe strain, all other things being the same. E.g. Spanish Flu.
That doesn't make sense. We have seen regular waves of flu, some being more pathogenic than others. There has not been a "direction" of flu strains becoming milder. So-called Spanish flu came after weaker strains.
> All modern seasonal flu variants are descended from it.
I don't think this makes sense either. The more serious strains of flu we've had in recent decades have for example included contributions from bird and pig viruses.
Viruses can pick up genes from lateral gene transfer. Basically in the process of copying their own genetic material while replicating, they might inadvertently copy some extra genetic material that was just lying around in the host cell, and it gets incorporated into their genetic code, producing recombinant strains. Further, just as animal strains can jump into humans, human strains can jump into animals. So for example in 1968 the H3N2 flu lineage started in birds, jumped to humans where it recombined with 1918's H1N1 making human H3N2, and then jumped into pigs to make Porcine H3N2. Indeed there's evidence that H1N1 started out as an avian strain that jumped to humans and swine around the same time, but this is still an open academic debate.
It might still trend towards that over time, but it will probably be slower at it than other viruses, and thus the 'it gets milder over time' aphorism about viruses doesn't apply as strongly to Covid-19.
Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely.
This may (may!) be what we’re observing with Omicron. In any case, we’ll know much more in a few weeks.
Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up.
With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.)
From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.
How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?
When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out. As it dies out, and people go outside, variants that are milder will thrive because people won't lockdown as easily. This can repeat forever until eventually the virus is completely benign. Of course it's all based on randomness so it's not exactly predictable what will happen.
When everybody goes inside, all the variants stop spreading. The pressure is the same on every variants, so there's no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.
Any variant that is able to co-exist with (rather than kill) its host during a full lockdown has a significant advantage. We co-exist with several coronaviruses already.
But it is — this will not be the response to a variant that doesn’t cause an increase in hospitalizations or deaths.
A given response exerts pressure on all variants, of course. But a milder variant may be able to spread widely before a more lethal one shows up and ratchets up lockdowns.
Except this doesn't happen, otherwise COVID would have already stopped spreading. Our social response to COVID isn't adequate enough to stop its spread. We can't get people to actually lock down or stop transmission.
And then it goes on because measures are reduced, and zero-covid never was a goal... would even go so far that some few countries pretty successfully did zero-covid strategies and stopped their virus, though sure, that is a pretty futile thing if the world is not "globally" doing this and you are likely not isolating forever/completely - so we just start to live with it.
Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.
There's going to be a negative correlation between severity and something like "velocity" of infected persons.
If a virus that would make make you very sick is contracted by someone who's vaccinated - They will now be in the 2nd category you describe ~'Sick, but not sick enough to stop them going out' -- They're now giving mobility to that virus that it would have otherwise not had (If they weren't vaccinated and were feeling too sick to go out and about)
So by usage of vaccines that only prevent severe symptoms, we pervert that normal negative feedback loop of virus spread and instead set the parameters to be more likely to propagate severe virus' that would usually keep you sick at home.
No, not _all_ transmission. Neither _all_ symptoms.
But prolonging the inevitable is still useful, in that it slows down the number of hospitalizations on your march towards the inevitable.
Most hospital systems in the USA are stressed to severe levels. We had a nursing shortage before COVID19 even began, and the increased workload from COVID19 is clearly causing problems.
------
Slowing things down gives more time for the old patients to leave the hospital, meaning doctors/nurses won't have to work as hard.
Very much so, and my post was carefully worded to refer to evolutionary selection pressure, and not any kind of agency on behalf of a virus.
I assumed the audience here would get it.
As an aside, there are much kinder ways to voice this kind of concern that don’t drip with contempt; consider taking a less accusatory tone in the future? That might trigger fewer downvotes the next time the reading comprehension module needs coffee.
First, evolutionary pressure will select for a lower dormancy period, i.e. a lower time to contagion. This is because a variant with a shorter dormancy will spread faster than one with a longer dormancy period if both are present in the same population. This is also exactly what happened with the Delta variant, which is asymptomatic generally for a shorter period[1] than the original variant, because it replicates faster.
Second, the usual process occurs for the usual reasons. This may be happening with Omicron.
[1]: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
A new variant need only replicate slightly faster to dominate (eventually).
There was a passage that suggested that virus evolutions happens all the time which sometimes gives us a super severe strain. But usually these super sever strains don't evolve into even more severe strains - generally they evolve back towards the "baseline" severity and the severe strain burns itself out.
From that, I had hope that the Delta variant of COVID was one of these outlier super severe strains and that all subsequent evolutions would fall back but it's not looking like that is the case when omicron was found.
I have been basing a lot of my virus information from Tomas Pueyo. Here is my source:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-omicron-qu...
In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a week before the person shows severe illness
It takes far less than death to reduce spread. People who feel sick stay home from work (not guaranteed, but with enough frequency that it matters), don't go out to eat, don't wander around and go to parties, and so on. Any time they're sitting home, they've hurt the chances that their variant is the winning-est variant.
Again with the caveat about dormancy periods for Covid.
Also, those who do not get symptoms (that is, most who catch covid) do not spread the virus in general, which is why it's now called "presymptomatic" spread.
Didn't we learn anything from Plague Inc?
Every single press title the last two years can be related somehow to a single Game. New variants, new mutations, spreading faster vs killing more people, ... All these tradeoffs are quite well modeled.
Building a resistance to vaccines ("the cure") is also one areas where your virus can evolve, and -to be honnest- I prefer it to fight vaccines than to develop a "total organ failure" mutation.
As viruses evolve they generally have 2 paths of evolution – they either become more deadly, or more contagious.
The ones that become more deadly will kill the host quicker, and so won't have enough time to spread to others.
The ones that become more contagious are by definition weaker, they will spread to more people, but the effects will be milder.
There are some theories to suggest that pandemics (like the Spanish flu) ended because the virus eventually mutated to a milder, more contagious form.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-viruses-ev...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30734920/ (really good one)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7255208/
In short, we don't know and won't know until this is all "over" a few years in the future, at least.
no, that's cringeworthy fearmongering. the virus is fragile and falls apart relatively quickly outside the body. the main risk behavior is having long conversations in close quarters where you're constantly exposed to a warm airstream of live virus.
make no mistake, if covid menacingly floating in the air to catch you unaware were actually a meaningful method of spread, we’d have evidence all over the place being reported feverishly by those very same biased reporting sources.
on this end, I do not want covid at all, straight up. I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.
I'm still wearing my KN95 to busy indoor places in part because it's been nice not getting colds/flus for the last two years, too.
I really hope that mentality never comes back.
to be clear, one component of minor vs. major covid is how large of a viral load someone is initially exposed towards. I'm fairly certain if I take a deep breath near an infected person, the N95 should reduce the load I'm exposed towards, hopefully significantly.
The question isn't intended to be rude, or suggesting your motives are tarnished. Just a query into the extent online projection (and presumptions about it) affect our choices. Note also that I am distinguishing between your stated choices and the choices themselves.
Maybe on Facebook where people often use their real name I could see that as a possible motive but here?
Why is it so hard to think that people who disagree with you about masks are wearing them because they want to be safe? I wonder if the divide and anger is because each side believes the other is taking action to make a point and nothing else.
The masks have never been about protecting yourself but have at it. I don't care what you do just stop forcing your attitude on everyone else. At this point you're just trying to make a statement, not protect anyone.
The biggest issue is that the minority of people like you are dictating how everyone else has to lead their lives. Dirty looks aren't "intolerance". Now, if they were telling you that you could not wear a mask that might be intolerant (see how that's similar to telling people they have to wear masks).
Nonetheless, in your example it did. At extreme cost, though that was already understood when you said Spanish Flu.
Per this site's guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
"Sadly at least one patient has now been confirmed to have died with Omicron," Johnson told reporters [2]
This sounds batshit crazy, because it is, but in the UK, if you die from something unrelated while infected with SARS-COV-2, it's counted as a COVID death. [3] The key word in Boris' announcement is "with".
1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-york-becomes-fo...
2: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread...
3: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-co...
This wasn't a press release fyi.
The end result is discussion that advance little in the Shannon information sense, but maximally clarify every individuals social net.
Initially reported Omicron cases in the US predate knowledge of Omicron, confirmed cases are from November, and today's story of 13% of samples in Washington state likely being Omicron is based on test data from a week ago.
0 or 1 deaths being reported so far as caused by Omicron is still consistent with "Omicron is roughly as bad as previous strains, and will result in a lot of excess deaths."
I think Boris' statement is accurate, but you're right; our reaction to it needs to be taken in context. The media and government will talk non-stop about vaccination and treatments, which are incredibly important due to the reality of the pandemic, today. But, mentioning weight, eating healthier, exercising, critically analyzing your own risk factors (with the help of a doctor), etc; out of the question.
I wish I could scream at our leftist leadership right now: Managing fear is wildly important. Every spectrum has extremes. On the extreme right we have vaccine denialists; that's unhealthy. But on the extreme left, we have the opposite [1]; people who are so afraid of this thing they can barely live their daily lives, people who isolate, become depressed, and even kids who are so impacted by at-home learning and impaired social lives they commit suicide. That's blood; the rightwing media and government leaders spill the blood of people who won't get vaccinated, and the leftwing media and government spills the blood of people so caught up in the fear of this thing they neglect their own mental and socioeconomic health.
A (leftist) friend just told me three days ago: "Every other human is a threat."
At this point, we need to heal. Vaccinations, treatments; absolutely. But far more importantly, we gotta put COVID behind us, even if its still here. That responsibility falls on the media and government leaders. Early in the pandemic, we (probably) overplayed the severity of the disease to convince people to isolate; we didn't know how bad it would be, so it was the safer, correct route. Today, I think we need to underplay it. Don't lie; don't obscure. But the fearmongering will destroy our society far faster than COVID does.
[1] https://twitter.com/drewtoothpaste/status/147012370236491367...
Suicide rates may rise in future, but all the available data says that they have not gone up yet. This is using real time monitoring data.
> Don't lie;
Quite.
That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
We already know one such thing - bird flu (H5N1 - 50% mortality). Luckily it doesn't pass from one human to another. But scientists already built a version that presumably can (gain-of-function):
> (2019) Controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans will soon resume after being on hold for more than 4 years. ScienceInsider has learned that last year, a U.S. government review panel quietly approved experiments proposed by two labs that were previously considered so dangerous that federal officials had imposed an unusual top-down moratorium on such research.
https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-controvers...
Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.
We seem to have gotten lucky that omicron is even more contagious but less severe; fingers crossed that bolsters worldwide immunity.
No, evolution doesn't work that way.
The design space for diseases are large, and there is no guarantee what happens next. Maybe the next variant is even less lethal, but leaves 90% of people with long term damage. Maybe the next variant is far more lethal, but has a much longer prodromal period with allows it to infect far more people. Maybe we get a variant which is a little less lethal, but persists on fomites for far longer, so it becomes harder to avoid.
The general idea that diseases become less virulent over time is a misinterpretation. Diseases populations and hosts populations co-evolve. Over time, those who are more likely to die from the disease fail to reproduce. Only the most resistant offspring are left in the population.
The rabbit disease myxomatosis killed 90% of rabbits when it was introduced to Australia. Today it kills less than 10% of rabbits. However, myxomatosis is not less virulent.
Lab rabbits have been isolated from natural selection pressure for a very long time. When exposed to today's "mild" myxomatosis the disease still wipes out 90% of them.
The long-term trajectory of our species's co-evolution with covid-19 probably results in fewer of our offspring dying from covid-19 in a hundred years, but that means squat to those of us alive today.
A random mutation that causes the virus to be more mild would cause people to rationally take fewer precautions against it. Then it gets to spread more, which is evolutionarily advantageous to the virus, but it doesn't kill as many people, which is advantageous to humans.
Note that there are a ton of viruses people get infected by on a regular basis that don't even have symptoms. Those viruses "spread like the plague" but because they're not the plague, nobody cares.
this occurs when a host is coinfected with two or more viral strands of differing origin. most often virus of close familial lineage do this, but that isnt exclusive.
the mechanism is molecular promiscuity during replication, there is a jump from one strand to another in proximity, thus recombining.
cocirculation is required for this to occur, high frequency of co infection is required for recombinant mutants to occur with predictive certainty.
like the gatekeeper and the keymaster, we should avoid allowing delta, and omicron to contact each other, and surveil the sequences closely.
Tell the Black Plague its strategy of killing 30% of is suboptimal. Or to the species driven to extinction by a disease. “Inanimate object, that was suboptimal to your existence!”
We should be pressuring our governments to make paxlovid legal and to encourage work on Omicron boosters, rather than pretending this is good news.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
I think eventually that winter will come, but the process will be gradual and vaccines/antiviral treatments will only be able to accomplish so much in terms of mitigation.
In any case I'm no longer thinking this has a clear end date, just a gradual fade into memory, the exact length of time it takes undefined/unclear.
Only in places that continue to consider covid the only problem society should focus on. It might be hard for some to imagine but we cannot continue to put the world on hold for exactly one specific form of illness.
For one thing, we've created a pandemic of untreated mental illness. All these people I see walking their dogs at night on a rainy day alone on the street wearing a mask with foggy glasses are gonna have a hard time getting over this... All the people who haven't left their house in two years are gonna need some help. People have lost their minds and it is gonna take a while to heal.
But rather that the current vaccines aren’t effect for because omicron is substantially different from the original covid strain used to develop those vaccines.
The same thing happens every year with the flu.
The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild.
From today:
> lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and accounts for most of the infections over the past three weeks, is the most glaring difference.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-south-afr...
> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.
It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.
The UK provides some estimates of seroprevalence in blood donors (thus a skewed sample): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-... (Figure 3). These estimates aren't quite what you are looking for, but one test is sensitive to previous infection and estimates 20% previously infected, whereas another test is sensitive to (infection OR vaccine) and estimates ~100%. Basically, in that population, pretty much everybody has some kind of antibodies.
To answer your question, I would say that SA doesn't look particularly unique.
If you don't correct for it, it's easy to see "10x as many cases but few deaths" just because cases went up so quickly that deaths didn't start yet. Of course, this can be corrected for, and I'd expect a good study to do so - but I would NOT trust a typical news article to make the distinction, nor would I trust it to skip the temptation to misinterpret the study for a more interesting headline.
“South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection,” she said. “We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.”
>By May 2021, the combined infection- and vaccination-induced seroprevalence estimate increased to 83.3% (95% CI, 82.9%-83.7%)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013
The delta variant surge didn't hit the States until after this study concluded, so one would expect the numbers to be quite a bit higher today.
There are not a lot of people out there still who are not partially immune at this point, due to vaccine, recovery or both. It varies by region of course, but it's certainly true in most parts of the US.
There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections.
The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fantasy.
- Pathogenicity: Virtually no hospitalizations or deaths. There's only one reported death so far "with" Omicron, about which there are absolutely no details released whatsoever and which was rather suspiciously announced by the UK PM just before a vote.
- Pathogenicity: all reports from SA say the symptoms are not only extremely mild, but don't actually match COVID symptoms at all. The first person to get it thought they'd simply been in the sun too long. Muscle aches, a slight headache, etc. Basically common cold symptoms.
- Irrelevance of vaccines: in Denmark the percentage of Omicron cases that are vaccinated is the same as the overall vaccination rate, i.e. there's ~no impact of vaccines.
There's really two ways to look at this. One is that the vaccine programme has now completely failed, but it doesn't matter because new COVID is mild.
The other is that really, Omicron isn't a COVID-causing virus at all, and that this marks the end of COVID. Because:
1. The symptoms are different. Different symptoms = different disease.
2. The severity is different. Both are mild but Omicron appears to be super mild. What it creates can barely be classed as a "disease" at all.
3. The virus is different. Much more heavily mutated than any other variant so far, in fact, so much so that some of the DRASTIC people are starting to suspect it may be another lab leak. Unfortunately, there have been scientists doing GoF research on SARS-CoV-2, their papers are public to view.
I think in a properly functioning and rational health system, it would be very hard to describe this new variant as COVID. Based on the evidence and reports so far it would be more rational to describe it as a common cold virus, of the type that occur every year.
You mean succeeded? As in, prevented many people from dying, and forced the virus to mutate into Omicron, which is far less dangerous.
As for the vaccines forcing mutation, SA is only 25% vaccinated so that doesn't work.
Have the vaccines succeeded in preventing many people from dying? That is something for history to judge. There just isn't good enough data on vaccine deaths to judge that at the moment. The problem for COVID vaccines is that whilst they may some people from dying of COVID, not many life years are saved because almost all the COVID deaths are concentrated in the very elderly. Meanwhile vaccine injuries are a looming iceberg because they aren't being properly tracked or recorded. The number of random cardiac failures in athletes is well up this year and eventually people will stop being in denial about the reasons. The long term damage from this programme can be judged in five or ten years.
However, if Omicron does display Delta as it appears to be doing very rapidly, we can say that at most the vaccines were useful for maybe 6-8 months. Bearing in mind you aren't "vaccinated" until your second dose and there's a gap.
Please don't post this nonsense on HN. There's ample evidence for vaccines saving the lives of millions.
I would love to go through and debunk them all, but I don't have the time or the crayons, nor would I think it would be effective in changing your beliefs. You're too far gone.
Thank you in advance.
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
It's disappointing to see complete lies like this on HN. Vaccines have been, and remain, incredibly effective in preventing hospitalization/death, even without a booster (although everyone should also get their booster).
It's not because the trials proved it - they didn't. At only ~64,000 participants the e.g. Pfizer trial was not powered to show any difference to deaths and didn't use hospitalizations as a goal metric either, only infections.
And so we're forced to rely on the testimony of the same people in charge of the program, where their data is often missing or deceptive in some way. For example Germany has been claiming nearly all cases occur in the unvaccinated. It turned out this wasn't true. Rather, they don't have data at all on the status of most cases, and then reallocate all the "unknown" column to "unvaccinated" because ... well, why not? No matter what they do, plenty of people will still take their word for everything. This was revealed by Die Welt and the response was nothing. They still do it, as far as I know.
The UK data is usually considered to be the best, as in, the most detailed. And there, when the data on deaths is studied carefully it turns out to be riddled with anomalies and problems that cast doubt on whether vaccines did in fact reduce mortality (the numbers are low enough that statistical artifacts can actually matter). For example, in the UK data vaccination reduces non-COVID deaths in unvaccinated people. Don't take my word for it, ask a professor of risk management:
http://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/12/possible-syste...
"Our research team have now analysed the ONS England November mortality data. We conclude that, despite seeming evidence to support vaccine effectiveness, this conclusion is doubtful because of a range of serious inconsistencies and anomalies", "The ONS data provide no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality."
https://garycornell.com/2021/07/28/the-base-rate-fallacy-x-o...
EDIT:
In the case of my numbers, I'm based in the US. I wish we had a high enough vaccination rate to worry about the base rate fallacy. I'm surrounded by rural areas who unfortunately don't believe in vaccines until they show up in the ER. We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end.
"We have an enormous surgical backlog due to antivaxxers having filled up the hospitals for months on end."
You have a surgical backlog because your hospitals have been firing staff. Former "heros" who, quite sensibly, observed that as they'd already had COVID they didn't need a vaccine for it, and who were immediately demonized and excluded despite the hospitals supposedly being overwhelmed. You might want to meditate on that and consider whether that's the expected course of action during a crisis or not.
Where I live, there is no vaccine mandate for hospital staff due to staffing concerns. Talking with actual local physicians, nurses and doctors are quitting in droves after seeing a huge amount of preventable death in the past few months, by patients who deny the reality of the disease they have, and whos families harass hospital staff about treatments that don't work (hcq/ivermectin/whatever the latest magic pill is now).
I actually am against vaccine mandates and don't think anyone who doesn't want the vaccine should be forced to take it. That said, if you don't take it, I don't want you in the hospital if you end up getting covid. Take hcq/ivermectin/whatever joe rogan is saying now rather than occupy a hospital bed, don't clog up the hospital due to your mistake.
This is not correct. We've seen quite a few hospitalisations. See the dramatic uptick in South African hospital numbers.
Deaths have generally occurred about 4 weeks after infection. Omicron was only reported to the WHO about 3 weeks ago.
The rest of your post is of a similar level of confusion.
I suspect that if this omicron had emerged in 2018 at least with the symptoms and lack of severe disease that we have seen so far…it would likely have been described as a virulent common cold and may have gotten an occasional news mention, but zero public and government panic.
I think the phrase “Look for the devil and you will find him” is going to describe virology and government approach to virology for probably the next decade. This is a shame, because it seems to create and feed tyrants at almost every level of government.
I see currently reported numbers of 75% and 81% for those rates respectively, which means unvaccinated people are over-represented by about 30% relative their percentage of the population. Now these numbers are still very new, and unreliable, have no confidence interval, and only for infection, not hospitalization. But I don’t think that difference would be irrelevant, unless it ceases to hold up after data is collected over the next few weeks.
Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.
What selection pressure exists to make it less-deadly? It takes weeks for the virus to kill people and they are most infectious early on.
This is why island populations all get sick when a ship comes in.
But to the other commenter's point, if omicron DID get a more deadly variant that kills you after you've already infected other people due to presymptomatic spread, then why would that variant be likely to die out? It's already reproduced before killing the host
A disease that spreads before it's symptomatic may not face negative selection pressure for some individuals, but on the aggregate people wear masks, avoid contact, even entered lockdowns, are more likely to obtain vaccination, and so on.
There's a stronger behavioral response to a more deadly covid than there is to one that is entirely harmless. It's not just death that reduces rates of transmission, and it's not just sick or symptomatic people who avoid contact.
You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right? We still wiped it out.
Smallpox, Measles, Polio. We've wiped out diseases before, and we can do it again if we so try. I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases and are so pessimistic about this subject...
It seems unlikely that many cows caught smallpox, given the prevalence of cowpox. Cowpox is a different disease, and was the first vaccine, after which the very concept of "vaccination" is named. Milkmaids had long been known for their immunity to smallpox. If smallpox had been in cows, milkmaids would have been known for universal smallpox exposure instead.
> I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases
Not a good look.
That conferred immunity to smallpox. Which makes it about as "different" as Omicron is to Delta or COVID19.
In any case, Cowpox is case-positive proof of animal reservoirs of smallpox.
Sure, that's fair.
> In any case, Cowpox is case-positive proof of animal reservoirs of smallpox.
Huh? No, it isn't.
UK eradicated Rabies. I'm pretty sure we all agree Rabies has substantial animal reservoirs, right?
So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines.
The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going to end this way.
There's a lot of diseases we've eradicated. Surely something will come along that you don't have an excuse for.
Leprosy is bacterial and treated with antibiotics. Same with bubonic plague, if that was next on your list.
I believe COVID19 continues because we have a ~60% vaccination rate in the USA, which is far below the needed vaccination rate to slow down the spread of the disease.
A lot of these other diseases brought up have substantial 95%+ vaccination rates, or treatments that can hamper the spread.
No disease is equivalent to another. Smallpox and Measles had much higher spread R0 / replication rates. Others are bacterial. Cholera is water-borne and solved with other methodologies.
Efficacy dropped to 60% vs Delta, and drops again to 30% vs Omicron. Boosters seem to rise back up to 90% vs Delta and 75% vs Omicron.
That's why so many people are talking about boosters: it has a measurable impact on transmission for Omicron (and Delta).
Also, IIRC Sinovac’s Coronavirus vaccine is an “old style” inactivated virus vaccine, and the J&J one is an adenovirus vector vaccine. They are not as effective as the mRNA vaccines.
Measles is 3x more infectious than even Delta.
Current vaccines are 95% effective against the original strain, 60% vs Delta, unknown vs Omicron.
You boost the vaccine however, and you're back to 90% efficacy vs Delta, and like 75% vs Omicron.
Its all about R0. If the efficacy (and compliance) is above the 1 / R0 rate, then eradication is possible.
As its "efficacy times compliance", the number we wish to maximize is the smaller number. Efficacy may have dropped to 60% (double shot vs Delta), but a 3rd booster brings the efficacy back up to 90%.
Compliance however, is stuck around 60% in the USA in general, and a large number of people are refusing to get the booster. As such, compliance is the number we need to work on right now.
--------
Going from 90% to 99% vaccine efficacy barely does anything, because our vaccine compliance numbers are so damn low.
It's not a problem in any area with high vaccine compliance.
If left alone, yes. We are not leaving it alone.
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker viral variants is stronger viral variants killing their hosts in droves, thus preventing the stronger variants from passing on their genetics to new hosts.
That selection pressure doesn't exist, because people are not dropping like flies due to COVID. The virus is free to mutate into something stronger because there is little pressure to stop it.
In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time.
There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At some point we should see an equilibrium reached with the coronaviruses, and the hope is that it'll be as mild as seasonal colds. Omicron could be a significant leap in that direction.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-hea...
There isn't consensus in the scientific community about that.
Counterexamples: polio, rabies, avian flu in human hosts, Black Death.
It isn't clear what category COVID19 will end up in.
Feel free to provide an example virus if you think I'm wrong!
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/26/1413339111?wit...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-why-some-deadly-...
https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.00694-10
Covid related links have saturated any searches on viruses in general, and the doom&gloom "reporting"is at the top. There are a lot of papers and examples of what I'm talking about, though, it's just irritating to get at.
Gain of function research gives us rapid and repeatable demonstrations of vital evolution. Viruses that don't kill their hosts and develop more and better mechanisms of infection or evasion of immune system defenses outcompete other variants. There are a lot of examples in animal viruses, but Sars and hiv are examples of recent relevance.
To be clear, I'm not making the claim that this happens to all viruses - evolution doesn't work like that. A virus that leaves you mostly functional for a few months before it kills you is not at all an unlikely scenario. Viruses also exist concurrent with other variants, and they can mutate rapidly. There's no hard and fast rule, just influences and constraints that can manifest as trends.
In my opinion, the ideal outcome for sars-cov2 at this point is that a super mild variant evolves that will confer robust natural immunity while spreading fast enough to prevent the spread of other variants. It could become more deadly - I hope it won't, and what we know of virus evolutionary pressures in humans hints that we could get lucky.
Indeed it would be nice if a less severe strain out competed current COVID, but such a thing has never happened before (as far as we know) - and as you point out there is no selection pressure for mildness when death/disability occurs some weeks after the infection has been cleared.
If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying every year. In the U.S., is an extra 100,000 dead a year something we should be OK with?
Then yes yes I will take that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all.
Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.
In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted)
Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence.
That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.
One doesn't exclude the other. People don't see an end with natural evolution, so the vaccine was/is the main focus for a long time.
I was initially assuming you were excluding kids or other people ineligible to get vaccinated.
But with Omicron, it's literally like we're back to March 2020. Norway (with 81% vaccination rate) went from normality to full lockdown in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's coming everywhere else during the next month or so.
We need to treat Corona the same way we treat the flu and we should start now.
As an example the current number of hospitalizations here in Denmark is about 50% of the worst period for the 2017/18 flu.
The thing is that various governments have neglected hospitals and health care, that is the real problem that must be dealt with.
People scared about hospital capacity should be asking strong questions to their politicians about why they squandered 2 years of peoples short life with zero new capacity.
The public shouldn’t shoulder the failures of politicians nor these “experts”.
The narrative may have evolved but that was more due to the virus evolving rather than some conspiracy driven by Pfizer and Moderna to sell more shots. More people being vaccinated benefits everyone, not just the pharmaceutical companies, and saying otherwise is a bit paranoid.
I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.
EDIT:
To be clear I already had COVID and didn't have any serious symptoms so the argument about a hospital bed doesn't necessarily apply to me. Beyond that I actually got vaccinated, my question centers around the disparity of treatment we are giving individuals who are vaxxed and those who are not if both are capable of spreading. Further it brings in the question of vaccine mandates if they are much less effective then we were led to believe.
But you say it is being a decent human being, but I am confused if we both agree the vaccine doesn't reduce infectivity then why would me getting it change anything for anyone else, since we know it doesn't protect others?
That's not including the nuanced aspect of it where being vaccinated reduces the severity and duration of symptomatic cases, which by nature reduces the likelihood simply based on time alone, of exposing others.
I do not understand if this argument is made in good faith or if it's covid deniers stirring shit up in the public debate or just rationalizing their fear of the syringe (yes, I know of 2 anti-vax who admitted it was their original reasons to refuse the vaccine).
Some people are scared that there have been 800k+ deaths in the U.S. Others say that's only 1 in 400, mostly old and with commodities, and not that big a deal.
There is also something called the normalcy bias which has an interplay with psychology and risk assessments.
Something like 1 in 400 can easily become 1 in 200. At what point does the majority notice and act appropriately?
Also found a recent CDC study on this : https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm... .
However, from said study : "First, reinfection was not confirmed through whole genome sequencing, which would be necessary to definitively prove that the reinfection was caused from a distinct virus relative to the first infection. Although in some cases the repeat positive test could be indicative of prolonged viral shedding or failure to clear the initial viral infection (9), given the time between initial and subsequent positive molecular tests among participants in this study, reinfection is the most likely explanation"
Do with this as you will, but it seems there's nothing concrete. "most likely explanation" isn't good enough to force people to get an emergency use, rushed vaccine.
If you are going to just state your opinions as fact without actually providing evidence for extraordinary claims then this conversation is pointless.
I don't agree with that, and I don't believe the currently available data does, either.
You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.
Why are you (and others) thinking that since vaccines aren't 100% effective it doesn't help protecting other people ?
What kind of dissonance cognitive gets you there ?
Why are you blind to the fact that a vaccine that mostly works still help reducing infections and why do you equate that to "vaccines don't work to protect others (since some vaccinated people can still infect others) so I shouldn't get vaccinated" ?
How come you are working from a yes/no, full-or-nothing angle ?
A glass of water won't 100% quench your thirst when you haven't drunk in a long time so you won't take it ?
A lot of people believed they were. I've spent some time arguing with people that the punishments for not taking the vaccine were too extreme, and that government-supported firing of people from their jobs was a bad idea.
It was extremely common for people to argue that the vaccine would cut down on transmission (which is basically saying infection) and end the pandemic. Without that pillar it gets quite hard to justify the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Australia. Not sure about the rest of the world but I assume there is a similar story.
In the US the politicians know a law mandating the vaccine is a non-starter. So, instead, they encouraged and supported employers threatening their employees. I guess it's ironic that everyone is quitting everywhere anyway.
In the USA? Yes, they were. There was no mention of a future need for boosters. There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
Now, certainly, some media outlets may have been irresponsibly or ignorantly misinterpreting all this and pushing the narrative that it would make everyone immune. But that's not the CDC or WHO's fault.
> There was no mention of a future need for boosters.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Things change.
> There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.
You must have been reading some really watered-down news, and not actually reading what public health officials were saying.
Or at least they did until omicron. Unfortunately 2 doses of the existing vaccines are pretty ineffective against omicron. 3 doses make the vaccines work better - but I’m honestly a little concerned.
It wasn't for lack of need.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...
> But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
The ships weren't for COVID patients, they were for non-COVID cases so that hospitals could focus on the overflow of COVID patients that they were better equipped to handle. Turns out that at the beginning of a global pandemic, not a lot people opted to go to the hospital even if they needed to because of fear of infection.
That is absolutely not what the OP said, fwiw
If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death toll would likely be much higher than what we'll probably end up with when all this is actually over, given our current path.
I'm not thrilled with how the past two years have gone, but it could have been much, much worse. It could also have been much better, if it weren't for people using the virus to score political points.
Even with a mix of vaccines and natural immunity, I don't think we can rely on natural immunity to solve this. That just doesn't pass the smell test.
There is zero excuse to push lockdowns, masks or any of that nonsense at this point to “protect healthcare”. Healthcare should have been “protected” by now if this is supposed to be a normal thing
Gaining herd natural immunity implies a lot more death. Also natural immunity wanes after a while, and variants can work around it.
So no, it's not the only way, nor is it even a certain way at all.
The rapid slowdown of infections is FAR below 100% of people.
What do you think I meant by this? Do you think I believe that the rate of infection will keep going up literally exponentially until it hits 7 billion then turn flat, or do you think that by my usage of 'inflection point' maybe I had more nuance than that?
But that’s wrong. Growth stalls out much much earlier. It’s just not right to call disease spread exponential.
Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
>Exponential is not well understood. People don’t know what it means, as evidenced by the fact that they consistently use it incorrectly.
Well, in typical Dunning-Krüger fashion you're lecturing us laymen about the wrong use of "exponential", but it seems that you are the layman when it comes to epidemiology modelling.
Diseases of course spread in an initially exponential phase, not logarithmically as you boldly claim in another comment.
Epidemiologists talk about exponential disease growth all the time, here's one example : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6962332/
That said, from what we know about random graph models, once the transmission rate passes a certain threshold, the cumulative number of eventually infected individuals will NOT scale exponentially as the transmission rate increases.
You're speaking about initial growth rate though, not convergent size of the once-infected population, which is definitely exponential and relevant if you care about minimizing simultaneous hospitalizations.
Epidemiologists do frequently use exponential growth in discussions of theoretical spreading, but they are not correct. It does not fucking matter. They’re just wrong. Is the long term spread of a disease exponential. No. We can say this with 100% confidence. Why? Because they do not increase exponentially over time. They QUICKLY hit ceilings and inflection points.
This is the problem. If you call a system exponential because it looks like that at the beginning, your estimates of the middle and end will be hugely off. Massively wrong.
It is obviously apparent looking at Covid that it does not spread exponentially. The impact of this understanding is enormous. In an exponential model, a virus that is twice as infectious could be expected to infect 4x as many people over the same period. If the model is logarithmic, twice as infectious will likely result in LESS THAN TWICE the number of people infected.
Scary predictions that a small increase in spreading will exponentially increase the number of infected people do not hold up against observed real world data. We should be cheering on a more spreadable but less deadly disease. Scale matters, of course, but we aren’t seeing anything like that.
If you want to come back to this in one year and check to see if omicron infected even twice the number of people that delta did over the same time period that’s a bet I’d surely take.
No it's not, if delta infected say 1b humans and omicron infects 4b humans deaths can easily be offset by a lower fatality rate
With the current data available from SA, EU, and UK, the CFR has not been shown to be marginally lower, but dramatically lower. Things could change, of course, but right now the first part of your statement is really the case (as observed).
Half as deadly on the other hand is a big deal. It’s not just deaths, it’s also hospitalizations. If you imagine the bell curve of outcomes, the deaths are the small tail on the right and the hospitalizations are the fatter bit on the right. If you get to move everything to the left a bit, you remove the biggest chunk of the population from getting hospitalized in the first place.
People think exponential is an accelerating rocket ship to 100% infected. It is not. It’s a decelerating trend likely to stall out well below 100%.
If the R factor increases from 1 to 2, over a LONG period, you would be wrong to expect exponentially more cases. You would probably see fewer than 2x the cases. You would see it expand much, much faster initially.
But both would see slow downs at similar inflection points.
The very first sentence of your own linked abstract:
> The INITIAL exponential growth rate of an epidemic is an important measure of the severeness of the epidemic, and is also closely related to the basic reproduction number. Estimating the growth rate from the epidemic curve can be a challenge, because of its DECAYS with time.
the long term model is not exponential. This really should be obvious, but you cannot create an accurate disease model that does not show the impact of population size. Pure exponential models are only relevant on a theoretical infinitely large population that is well and randomly mixed. When you establish that there’s only so many people, the growth rate has to decline, and not at 100% of the population. It stalls out well before that. Look into random graph models.
The op didn't state marginally could you please share where you are getting this from?
The first publicly confirmed death globally from Omicron was reported just yesterday (source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-omicron-spread...
Given that the South African study discussed in this Washington Post article included 78k people, none of whom died if the above Reuters article is correct, doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases of Omicron from 15 November 2021 to 7 December 2021 (source: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room). At the time the Reuters article was published we were 6 days after even the most recently reported of those South African cases.
I wasn't trying to present the global denominator - that is far higher than 78,000 since it includes all countries, not just the 78k reported in the South African country.
Covid takes about 3 weeks to kill. The Omicron epicenter in SA has a much younger demographic than in western countries.
With Omicron, not from Omicron. It's an important distinction.
"the first publicly confirmed death globally from the swiftly spreading strain"
However I wasn't referring to the news article but actual statements from UK government ministers and health officials' failure to be specific when questioned. For all we know the person was hit by a bus.
>>doesn't this suggest that the case fatality rate is a lot lower (not marginally lower)?
Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to major media outlets have every incentive towards alarmism and sensationalism and no incentive at all for moderation and sober analysis.
If you're a media outlet of any description and you write articles / film videos using hard-hitting emotional language to make people as terrified as possible, they'll be doomscrolling through your content all day and seeing lots of ads in the process. Even if it turns out your content was complete bollocks, you still got the engagement and ad revenue and by the time you post a correction (if you even bother) the news cycle has moved on to the next Horrible Truth you Must Read All About Right Now Or Else Bad Things will Happen to You. If you instead write a calm, measured article that right off the bat admits the caveats with any scary claims then nobody will read it and your potential readers/cash cows will be off on your competitor's sites that are using sensationalist and alarmist language.
The depressing thing is that even the average 'masks and distancing every winter forever' people and average 'restrictions are just a cover for politicians to consolidate their authoritarian power' people have far more in common with each-other than they do with say, Rupert Murdoch. So much completely artificial hatred has been generated and it has driven completely needless shards of anger and resentment between colleagues, between friends, and between families.
For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"
What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!"
There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!"
Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
This hasn't been my experience, in fact the British government's SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) was advising the government to lean on the press in order to increase 'the perceived level of personal threat' early in the pandemic[1]. I really do think the use of behavioural psychology to encourage compliance with government policy is one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the pandemic that future historians will correctly give more importance to than we did at the time. In all honesty this isn't so much a criticism of how the British government acted during the pandemic but how it acts in general. This institutional bent towards the manipulative is partially what led us into the unmitigated disaster that is the War on Terror in my opinion, consent for which largely stemmed from a state of fear among the general public made worse by poor journalistic norms.
>Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"
I've not seen a single bit of serious journalism along those lines, it's either been 'COVID is going to kill us all and it's the plaguebearing hordes of the unvaccinated who are to blame' or 'The government is turning totalitarian and it's the fault of out-of-touch bureaucrats that need to be removed' (the article I linked is very much a member of that species). I've come across very little in the way of sober analysis, almost every piece of journalism I've come across on the topic carries some kind of moral judgement against $group in it. The point I'm making is that moral judgement sells and feels good to dole out to people you don't like, but it also robs us of a little humanity every time we do it.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit...
If they’re used correctly, P95 and P100 face masks can reduce the likelihood of being exposed to coronavirus by blocking contaminated air particles. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises against people in the US using face masks because most people who aren’t trained medical professionals may not know how to fit them properly, and the risk of exposure in the US is so low to begin with.
masks provide no added protection in most common situations where they’re used, but provide much political leverage, which is why they’re popular. same with (non-sterilizing) vaccine mandates and other arbitrary public restrictions. these are political wedges, not effective public health measures. if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status. we’d also be policing private behavior (family/social gatherings) much more invasively, rather than public behavior (grocery stores and restaurants).
I always think of this as putting on different pairs of glasses to see the world through different lenses. That is one lens. left-right is another lens.
There is no "the only lens that matters". There are many lenses which have different degrees of predictive power depending on what you are observing. You don't use a microscope to look at the stars.
To start with one, https://twitter.com/maxplanckpress/status/146668793563865497...
> if we were worried about public health, vaccination status wouldn’t be considered at all, only infection status.
Ww are worried. Infection status is considered. Vaccination status is considered. You are building a counter stance to drive a point that aims to minimize the covid problem.
You can fight reality with logic and interpretations and a different philosophical approach of the situation but facts don't care. Hospitals are regularly overwhelmed, people are dying when they shouldn't and the virus doesn't care about our psychotic or neurotic bouts. We know that if we do nothing it gets worse real fast.
I don't wear a mask because of my political beliefs. I wear a mask due to the abundance of evidence that it helps prevent transmission. If you assume my political affiliation from that not only would you be wrong but you know what they say about assuming.
No. Forcing people to wear a police badge or a yellow star or a hijab or a a beard in some places would fit that outlook but the first reason to wear a mask is a medical/prophylactic one. The fact some people (right or left) decided to associate that with political beliefs is another matter that has nothing to do with the inherent advantages that wearing a mask provides in some occasions.
you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid. the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them. we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
You are trying a weird (and childish may I add) apparent mirror strategy but subtly adding twist of your own making that weren't there to drive your point that Covid is not a problem:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Fixed:
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged.
No need to get all conspiracy on that one.
> you can fight reality with fearmongering and projection, but facts don’t care. hospitals are only irregularly overwhelmed because of greed, not covid.
They are overwhelmed and they shouldn't and they weren't 2 years ago. It'd be very weird that all around the world the hospital infrastructure just happened to show their limits at the same time and that it'd have nothing to do with the current pandemic but only with greed (I suppose you refer to the impoverishment of public hospitals). Occam's razor and all that.
Would you please wear a mask and get a vaccine or keep your distance a bit if you don't want/can't ? Thank you.
> the people dying are overwhelmingly likely to have a comorbidity, and the virus doesn’t care about our hysteria over masks and political misguidance when it kills them.
So what if they have a comorbidity ? It's still happening. There's a strong underlying current in anti-* that suggest to let people die and let selection plays its game. Are you advocating for that ?
Unfortunately for your weak ass arguments the virus does care about masking in the sense that it hinders its efforts to infect us. Vaccination is also shown to work.
> we know that if we do exactly the wrong things, the pandemic and the panic is prolonged for maximal mediopolitical benefit.
Ah yes, the media and the politics are manufacturing a crisis. Media do it to make money (or something) and politicians to their benefit (whatever that is).
You rather believe in a pharma-political conspiracy to manufacture a global pandemic than face the fact life is unfair and unpredictable ? You rather believe that behind the shadows there's someone that is pulling the strings over all this for their own political or financial gains because then it would make the world less scary, less unjust ? I am sorry, this is not how the world works. Things are fucked up and it's not fair and it's not (y)our fault but it is what it is.
The selection pressure that sometimes selects for weaker strains is large amounts of viral hosts dying, causing the stronger strains to literally die out in the corpses they create.
People aren't dying in droves because of COVID. There is little evolutionary pressure to select for weaker variants of the virus.
There are many possible paths moving forward and from what I understand, if Omicron continues to mutate, it can take different, possibly more lethal strains.
There's a human tendency to wrap events into a neat story, with a beginning, middle, and end. But viruses are apathetic and ahistoric. They don't care for narrative.
It could be excellent news. It sounds more virulent than delta, so should displace it given enough time, and much less dangerous.
If this holds up, countries are doing the exact wrong thing by banning travel from South Africa. The thing to do would be to open travel with no restrictions and maybe even subsidize the airfares. The sooner you replace delta with omicron in a country, should this continue to hold up, the better.
I bet not a single country does the logical thing. It's politically infeasible, because it's counterintuitive and the population wouldn't understand or support it. Plus the politicians themselves aren't exactly the sharpest.
But it doesn't matter. Delta swept the world in under six months. Omicron may well do the same if what we're seeing so far about the R value holds up. At this rate it may well just be a matter of time.
The "end" of the pandemic, at least in ways that matter may well be on the horizon.
You think you want that, but this also increases the chances of Omicron evolving into something worse, like picking up genetic fragments from a haemorrhagic virus, or being able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The 2nd wave of the Spanish flu was deadlier than the first: being infected by an earlier variant doesn't automatically make one immune from subsequent variants, especially when given maximum genetic resources and time to work with by letting it run rampant. The ideal scenario would be making COVID extinct ASAP.
Evidence so far suggests Omicron has high rates of reinfection.
No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time.
Long term damage is not getting enough attention.
In decades maybe we get a mild covid.
> Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam.
And they should. 2 years in and in a month we are back to 2020 measures and public health policies have barely improved.
So let's Omicron, or any other mild variant spread, we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains. That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past. Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Clearly not how it works and not what's happening.
We are not developing resistance to more malignant strains so far despite the virus and its variants spreading.
Plus, mild symptoms when contagious are not indicators for long term covid damages on organs. Want to take the risk ?
> That's how we beat flu, which, believe or not, was deadly in the past.
We didn't beat flu. We still need vaccines every year. Believe it or not, it's still deadly.
We have vaccines for Covid and it's still not enough to live like Covid is another flu.
> Now we get millions of flu infections each year, but no one cares, because they are mild.
Millions of covid infections. It's still not mild and way too soon to know if omicron is milder short term and milder long term. You are talking a distant hypothetical future. People were already saying that in january 2020. Didn't pan out. What's different now ? We got worse variants.
It's time public voices stop comparing covid to flu. Covid is way more contagious than the flu.
Flu patients in ICU don't need 7 or 8 nurses. It's a different beast and it hasn't yet taken every evolutionary paths it can take.
Letting it rip through the population hoping it magically build a resistance ? Eugenics and wishful thinking.
edit:
> we'll get reinfected regularly, thus developing resistance to more malignant strains
Omicron is telling us it doesn't care much about our previous wuhan/alpha/delta infections when we look at current numbers.
Reinfections can send you to the ICU and then you toss a coin if you make it for one more year. How many times do you want to take that risk ? Once a year ? Are you in your thirties ? Then when your are ~45 and the risk of getting in the ICU gets higher than now, will you still take the risk to get Covid this year thinking you are building a resistance ?
We don't build resistance to next year's flu when we age. If/Since covid will be seasonal/periodical and evolve it's likely we will regularly need boosters/new vaccines.
And considering its high transmission capabilities we will still need masks and other preventive measures.
Seriously? I thought flu vaccines were just a hipster thing: something you do to look cool, but they don't really matter much. In my country only 4% of people take them, and we don't have many flu-related deaths.
Too bad all those back-to-office-adamant employers completely ignore this. Like, OK, I get infected cause I had to commute to work and then you fire me/lay me off and I'm left holding the bag, financially and physically cause you really wanted to make your leasing payments "worth it".
Which reminds me that in the first lockdown, in my country, grocery stores workers were considered "essential" and were allowed to go to their workplace and work there.
The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Tech workers were classified as non essentials. That's why we got the whole remote thing. Other professions also got labelled non-essential and governments asked employers to put remote/wfh in place as much as possible and at some time made it mandatory. Being classified as a non-essential never meant you were de facto out of a job or prevented from working (Western Europe here).
> Make them go through unemployment for a while. I bet a whole lot of these privileged people would suddenly become a lot less “scared” of Covid…
Wait, what ? Why do you want to punish people who managed to keep their job because you don't like the fact they are scared of covid ?
I won't say everything I am thinking but wishing people to lose their job because you think they are privileged and they are scared of covid is pretty fucked up. I am making €1750 net a month, in IT, I have a master degree. I don't feel privileged.
> The amount of privilege that reeks from the tech sector is astronomical. I’ve never been more embarrassed working in t is industry than these days.
Then follow your heart and go work in the service industry in a supermarket.
These very same tech workers have zero problems punishing the rest of society and selfishly forcing them to cower to their fears. So yeah, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Very little tech work is “essential”. So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
It requires a lot of privilege to be scared of Covid.
Could you please provide some examples of how tech workers have been able to punish the rest of society ? As far as I can tell it's the public authorities who decide laws and public health policies. Tech workers can't even unionize and now they can lobby for WFH or lockdowns and are punishing the rest of society ?
> So they should be on unemployment… let them wake up and realize the world doesn’t revolve around a fucking respiratory virus.
I wrote it in my previous comment then deleted it but I'll finally put it here because fuck it: I did lose my job one month into the first lockdown because my n+2 non tech boss decided to use the federal budget allocated to my job to create a new job for her bestie. How am I privileged ? Why didn't being put on unemployment during lockdown erase my fear of covid ? While at the same time a family member of mine who is an artist lost her gigs but thanks to our welfare state she didn't lose an euro of income in the last two years and now she's setting up fires and stirring things up in antivax/mask riots in Brussels. Their world revolve around the virus, their only meaning in life is now to be against every health measures (and yes they are ordering covid online in the Netherlands rather than get a jab. Which FAANG employees is forcing her to do that, uh ?).
You may not like how the covid thing is handled but thinking it's tech worker's fault is wack and wanting to punish them for that is wackier. If anything, talk to your representative or your councilmen or something. They are the one in charge.
Not GP, but one reason is that they're advocating for restrictions that have severe detrimental effects (loss of employment) on others, but not on themselves.
Also, apparently, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated is already a giant no-no for some here so I'd like to know what restrictions are being advocated by who ? Surely it's not a `they` as in everyone though, right ?
That's incredibly quick in evolutionary terms. If COVID becomes milder, it may take many human lifetimes for that to occur. In the mean time, it can mutate into something stronger.
But if R > 1, eventually everyone gets it and has their lottery ticket drawn, so increased transmissibility just speeds that process up (unflattens the curve). With the vaccines, R was < 1, so it would have petered out. That scenario looks out the window.
I think its a little early to be making confident predictions. Lots of potential confounds, e.g. while hospitalization rates have been lower in South Africa, I believe that the demographics have skewed younger than in previous waves too.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...
Just as an example, if a new virus is only 1/2 as deadly but 3x as infectious the mortality rate would climb by 50%.
If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection.
Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization.
From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated
From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron
Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics?
0: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas...
If you die with Omicron, you are very old and dying above the average life expectancy, or already sick with chronic preventable illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices. We should be banning McDonalds advertising, not deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police.
If you are not very old or already sick and get omicron, whether you have antibodies or not, you’re going to experience mild symptoms, if anything at all, and achieve broader and more durable immunity than you would get from vaccine alone.
If we're looking at the US, "already sick with chronic preventable illnesses causes by poor lifestyle choices" is >50% of our population, so I would say a majority of people care (here). Our society and businesses have done a pretty good job making sure most people don't have the time available to make the right choices.
* people with cancer or autoimmune diseases * concerning early signals like drastically increased hospitalizations in the under-2 population * unchecked spread allowing further mutations that could be worse
It also lacks human decency.
Oh god, I fled post-the_donald reddit to avoid trite drivel like this. Please don't.
That's partly why I support laws that keep service workers safe, instead of regurgitating clichés like "vaccination police."
* all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
Unless I'm missing something, this 'study' seems to do little more than support that understanding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That’s why the mRNA vaccines aren’t super effective for it.
So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.
Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.
FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1]
[1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article
Everyone I know in tech that was in SF has moved out of SF.
And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be screaming to get rid of them. Instead the force all the (mostly vaccinated) "servant class" that brings them deliveries, makes their food, and checks out their groceries to wear some nasty mask all day and when these tech workers are called back into the office "but still wear masks" they all scream about it and continue to work from home. ... because wearing a mask for an entire workday absolutely sucks.
Our response to this virus requires a hell of a lot of privilege when you really start thinking hard about it. Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class and transfered massive amounts of wealth in to the pockets of some of the richest people in the world. But hey! We are saving grandma!
Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves.
You know what actually decimates the working class? Catching COVID. Taking unpaid time from work, because they fall sick. Crippling medical bills, from trips to the doctor, or heaven forbid, the hospital. Lingering damage from long COVID. Strangely enough, the 'reopen everything' political movement also tends to oppose things like worker protections, mandated sick days, affordable healthcare, taxes on the rich...
Is that theory or do you work a blue collar job?
I was in a work truck as 'critical infrastructure' and lived it. The company owners got richer AT HOME while we kept working. And then some layoffs after the pandemic forgivable loan calendar window expired.
I caught the 'rona earlier this year. I have a Dr. letter saying so. Now white collar woke-from-home wants me to keep them 'safe' by wearing a cloth mask and getting jabbed.
No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines.
Many of my blue collar friends feel the same way.
Getting bossed around by chicken shit triple vaccinated white collar workers too afraid to go into the office. They expect all expendable service class workers to do their bidding while they all “take this serious” huddled up in their fancy homes.
And if we are talking about what I want, I want "expendable service class workers" to be paid twice as much anyway. If that's not enough to make up for a mask requirement, then I'm sure there's some alternative we can figure out.
I sincerely doubt most white collar workers are “essential” so they should never have been allowed to work during the pandemic, even if they could do so from home. It wasn’t right to let non essential people work no matter where they worked, period. Everybody non essential should have been on the government dole.
If the privileged white collar work-from-home crowd got the same complete shaft the common working class folks did, none of our response to Covid would have happened. Because out here in the real world there are a hell of a lot more problems than exactly one damn respiratory virus.
The part about forcing non essential people to be paid to not work is confusing and I don't think I understand your point but sure I'd take that deal??
Do you know why?
Because people he meets can no longer see what happens to your teeth when you can't afford a dentist. [1] [2]
Another took full advantage of stimulus and unemployment payments, because with her comorbidities, and lack of health insurance, she didn't want to get seriously sick, or die at her shitty McDonalds job.
The person you're spiting the most by not getting vaccinated is yourself, followed closely by your relatives and coworkers, followed by the rest of your community.
Most of my extended family caught the 'rona' last year, and had beautiful doctor's notes attesting to this fact. Those notes did not stop all of them from catch it again this year. My grandfather (who missed out on getting sick the first time around) nearly died from it, and my grandmother was not in a good way. So much for acquired immunity. If they weren't all vaccinated, it's likely I wouldn't have a grandfather today.
[1] I believe that the technical term for this is 'meth-mouth', but you don't actually have to take any meth, cocaine, or heroin for your teeth to end up looking like that.
[2] And also the obvious reason that he doesn't want sick people to breathe on him.
A mask for cooking is probably a good idea in general.
If you support these mask mandates you support fully vaccinated employees wearing masks 8 hours a day 40 hours a week. All nothing more than security theater to make the most fearful feel “safe” and provide an easy way for lazy government to look like they are “taking this serious”
I support ones that make a meaningful impact on spread though.
And where I live there haven't been any mandates for vaccinated people anyway.
That's the problem, not everyone can be vaccinated.