This is actually pretty bad, their mobile app wasn't updated to explain the situation and was showing 0 new cases for the timeframe. I personally know people who took that at face value.
No clear evidence yet when just looking at a small sample of UK data.
It's clear from SA that this wave is having lower mortality than previous waves (perhaps for a mixture of reasons).
There is also data that shows that Omicron spreads much slower in the lung than the previous variant, while spreading 70 times faster in bronchial tissue (which is why it is so transmissable) so there is a suspected vector for why it may be milder. (https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagate...)
No, it's not 'clear' at all. SA has 70-80% natural immunity, the UK does not. They have different healthcare facilities, rates of testing, data collection.
They seem pretty good. This summer was a bit of a mystery, but otherwise things have tracked pretty well.
<jk> Obviously you can't determine anything without taking into account the estimated/guessed factors (extent of people movement, other restrictions) included in the models versus what really happened (new restrictions, lower than expected movement). And why only select this subset of forecasts, given they are produced daily/weekly (depending on urgency)? There was an early prediction that Covid would only cause ~30,000 deaths in the UK, why wasn't that included?
Do you have a link to anything that isn't Fox-news level cherry-picking? The Spectator is notoriously not a reliable source.
Since there's currently a shortage of objective journalism, we're left with adversarial presentations. Above is one perspective. There must be other presentations or analysis from teams or organizations with varying incentives. Maybe even from the people creating the models? Hopefully someone can link them.
COVID is a community disease, when you get infected you spread it, and that 'spread' eventually gets to the elderly.
It's a second order concept but it's not hard to understand for anyone reading HN.
If you knock down the dominos, they will mostly all get knocked down and take everyone with them.
If you separate the dominos, they don't take everything down.
I'm not sure if lockdowns are the right measure, and public fatigue is a factor - but if they end up being a rational measure then that's what we need to do.
> There is no evidence Omicron is milder than Delta.
> Cited Study: The non peer-reviewed research was based on UK Health Security Agency and National Health Service data on people who tested positive for COVID-19 in a PCR test in England between November 29 and December 11
Well, of course there won't be evidence in that dataset! This was before even a single omicron death in the UK.
However there is evidence in other datasets - including what is happening on the ground in South Africa.
Potentially. COVID is a slow disease. First there have to be ~100 cases (so that there are expected hospitalisations), then it takes a week or so before the hospitalisations actually start. It matters who those cases are, if a bunch of kids get the virus then the stats will look mild.
It is too early to be confident about what is happening from the sidelines. The evidence is a bit murky and we might be about to see some horrible numbers in the aggregate numbers. Or we might not.
> South Africa delivered some positive news on the omicron coronavirus variant on Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions ... Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave ... Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.
Not quite every other virus. We eliminated a few handful of diseases.
(And of course, lots and lots of viruses were eliminated naturally. Just by natural selection and competition. There are even some hints that coronaviruses are replacing influenca.)
> This virus won't just go away in a few months, we'll have to live with it, just like Humans have done with every other virus since forever.
This statement mean different things to different people. Do we live with AIDS with or without condoms ? Do we live with Covid with or without masks and vaccines and other prophylactic measures ?
I am not making myself clear enough: some use the statement "we have to live with covid" to mean "let covid cull the weak and the old, people die all the time anyway, vaccines and masks are only needed for the weak and the old so we shouldn't make them mandatory" and others to mean "covid is here to stay so are vaccines, masking and ventilation, etc.".
> Have we ever imposed measures that limit the freedom of movement of the entire population, or subsects of it that have a higher infection rates per capita, such as drug users, prostitutes or homosexuals, as many countries have done?
That's not the point. The point is that AIDS has changed some things that we haven't come back to yet. One of the most prominent one is condom usage. This change doesn't need to be proved/sanctified by laws to happen and yet it exists (but I'll add that some people have been sentenced to years in prison for not revealing their HIV/AIDS status when having sex with their partner).
Masking does not prevent the spread of covid, for the result is not perfect. It does slow the spread, which is helpful to allow vaccine development, and reduce hospitals strain.
Current vaccines do not stop the spread of covid.
Thus, eventually, everyone will have had covid, and all its variants.
We're pretty much there, I'd think.
So that said, eventually masks and social distancing will lose relevance, as case numbers will drop, and the real goal of masks and social distancing, reducing hospital overloads, will go away.
> So that said, eventually masks and social distancing will lose relevance, as case numbers will drop, and the real goal of masks and social distancing, reducing hospital overloads, will go away.
I think it'd be interesting to wait and see if keeping those measures in place , even if covid threats magically disappeared overnight, would reduce other infections (common cold, flu, etc.).
> I think it'd be interesting to wait and see if keeping those measures in place , even if covid threats magically disappeared overnight, would reduce other infections (common cold, flu, etc.).
That’s a hard no from me, we can’t keep moving the goalposts for giving things like mask mandates and social distancing the boot. Three million plastic masks get thrown away every minute, each of which takes centuries to degrade and potentially introduces micro-plastic pollution into the food chain. I’m not going to contribute to this environmental catastrophe a second more than the law requires me to.
Keep masks and distancing on a personal basis for those who want them, but the mandates must end the instant it’s possible for them to. COVID culture does enormous collateral damage to the environment and to many industries, we can’t keep it enforced by law on the basis of ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, or ‘the common cold’.
Live exactly as we lived before March 2019, with the small exceptions of using mask in gatherings or closed spaces, voluntary vaccination, specially to people with comorbidities.
Other than that, just not being bombarded with covid stats every single minute would be a huge improvement for the mental well-being of the population.
> Live exactly as we lived before March 2019, with the small exceptions of using mask in gatherings or closed spaces, voluntary vaccination, specially to people with comorbidities.
For what it's worth and to let my opinion be clear: I don't think that's yet possible :/.
> Other than that, just not being bombarded with covid stats every single minute would be a huge improvement for the mental well-being of the population.
I do agree the media and the politics relying on the media "to inform the people" are fucking things up in a way I couldn't believe they could. There's almost 0 actionable or relevant information in what they broadcast 24/7.
are you suggesting we keep wearing masks in public forever? Surely someone takes this stance but it sounds ludicrous to me. (Although I wouldn't mind normalizing it for people who are feeling under the weather but still must travel, say.)
Maybe there should be mandatory when numbers are too high or maybe we should try to educate people to wear a mask when sick. Like it seems they do it in Asia.
Wow, definitely, the caseload matters a lot. 'Flatten the curve' has always been a very real policy, if you watch the reports from State/Provincial agencies you can very clearly seem them watch the number of available beds, and particularly how much COVID caseload affects other hospital operations i.e. delayed surgeries etc.. This definitely informs policy.
It also helps motivate people to get vaccinated, with a 3rd shoot booster seemingly providing decent protection against Omicron, it's something we probably want to get people to.
Humans survive for millennia because we react rationality to situations, not because we just lay down and die.
>and particularly how much COVID caseload affects other hospital operations i.e. delayed surgeries etc..
And what is more important, the people with deadlier diseases who didn't get surgeries or treatments that were postponed, the screanings that weren't done that could allow an early treatment of someone who is sick too, to prevent other persons that could potentially become sick?
>Humans survive for millennia because we react rationality to situations, not because we just lay down and die.
> And what is more important, the people with deadlier diseases who didn't get surgeries or treatments that were postponed, the screanings that weren't done that could allow an early treatment of someone who is sick too, to prevent other persons that could potentially become sick?
> Read again, you totally missed my point.
I read this comment a few times, but the sentence structure made it difficult to understand what you're trying to say. I'm entirely unsure which of the aforementioned situations you think is more desirable. If you're trying to make a point, instead of asking people to read again, you may want to consider rewriting your points to be more clear.
humans are definitely not rational. Our reaction has been driven by fear and anxiety out of all proportion to the actual threat here. Obesity is still a bigger killer than covid but we have not spent the same resources tackling it.
covid isn't going to reach some new all time high infection rate because one monitoring system in one state was down for a few weeks (if that's the sentiment here. article doesn't load)
In the last 100 days, the MD Department of Information Technology (DoIT) has submitted $3,000,000 of ____emergency____ procurement requests for network monitoring, intrusion detection, and firewall assistance.
So...what do you think is going on at Maryland's Department of IT?
____TRULY SHAMEFUL INCIDENT COMMUNICATIONS____
Bad things happen in IT departments every day. Some can be anticipated, some even possibly prevented - but there will always exist the risk of data breach/attack.
“Public officials have no higher responsibility than keeping the American people safe, and there is no greater threat to their safety than the cyber vulnerabilities of the systems that support our daily lives,” said Governor Hogan in November 2021.
Secretary Leahy's commitment to the Governor and the people of Maryland is to lead the state's IT resources in taking all reasonable measures to protect against such risks.
I do not yet know if this situation could have been reasonably prevented or if it is due to MD DoIT negligence/oversight. The flurry of emergency procurement requests suggests awareness and good intentions. And yet - here we are...
What is clear to me, however, is that Secretary Leahy and his directs have ___failed to effectively manage communications___ throughout the response and remediation effort.
Most damning, in my opinion, is the use of the incident report as a venue for high-fiving and taking victory laps:
> Because of the state’s aggressive cybersecurity strategy, and the use of MD THINK and other cloud-based services, many of the department’s core functions were not affected.
Are you serious? It's been over two weeks. And it's clear from your report that you're nowhere close to understanding what happened, let alone fixing it.
____FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF INCIDENT IMPACT____
Whoever approved this for publication is oblivious to the downstream, rippling effects this incident continues to have:
- At the time of writing, MD's local public health departments have been ___fighting a war blindfolded___ for 16 days.
- The impact has rippled ___beyond MD's state borders___, impacting CDC data feeds as well. Hospitalizations (which are reported by each hospital network directly to the CDC) are trending upward while new cases (reported by each state's IIS to the CDC) have flatlined: https://imgur.com/gallery/k2gG5GS.
____AND WHAT THE HECK IS MD THINK?____
MD Think is Maryland's cloud application platform. The state, along with Deloitte and an army of subcontractors, has been working on migrating legacy applications to this new infrastructure since 2017.
The report points to the success of MD THINK in isolating the impact away from core MD Health Department services.
Is MD Think really a success? Is this a case of what happens when legacy applications are left outside to rot in the sun?
No.
It turns out that MD Think has been a nightmare since it's inception. A series of program failures that jeopardized open enrollment for medicaid recipients ...
Thank you for posting this. As a Maryland resident I found this really enlightening. I wasn't aware of this and I'm pretty curious now what's going on. It makes me wonder how or if I can help, as an ordinary citizen.
I read through those procurement requests. The reasons they cite in the remarks are interesting.
Sept 2021, Splunk:
> The staff providing the Splunk support services resigned as of March 31, 2021, and the contractor has been unable to replace them. The Department requested these support services through another contract vehicle, but that contractor was unable to source qualified and competent candidates in the appropriate labor categories and with the rates provided in the contract.
Dec 2021, Palo Alto Firewalls:
> Although the Department has two contract vehicles available to staff this need, neither contractor has been successful in staffing the role. One contractor who once provided the services lost three of their four resources in the past 12 months. The other contractor has been unable to source a candidate with the requisite skills and experience in the appropriate labor categories and rates provided in the contract.
So people are quitting, and they can't find replacements. Wow, that makes me think we're seeing effects from the "Great Resignation". I wonder what the "rates provided in the contract" are.
62 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadhttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/18/no-evidence-omicro...
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...
There is no clear evidence as of yet to suggest hospitalization or mortality rates of Omicron among our kind of population.
We'll have a better idea in a few weeks.
It's clear from SA that this wave is having lower mortality than previous waves (perhaps for a mixture of reasons).
There is also data that shows that Omicron spreads much slower in the lung than the previous variant, while spreading 70 times faster in bronchial tissue (which is why it is so transmissable) so there is a suspected vector for why it may be milder. (https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagate...)
Nothing we've seen yet is definitive.
<jk> Obviously you can't determine anything without taking into account the estimated/guessed factors (extent of people movement, other restrictions) included in the models versus what really happened (new restrictions, lower than expected movement). And why only select this subset of forecasts, given they are produced daily/weekly (depending on urgency)? There was an early prediction that Covid would only cause ~30,000 deaths in the UK, why wasn't that included?
Do you have a link to anything that isn't Fox-news level cherry-picking? The Spectator is notoriously not a reliable source.
If the model promises hell, the country goes into full lockdown and at the end we only see a mild hell-ish, was the model wrong?
Full lockdown is just a major inconvince.
Restrictions focused at me, a healthy vaccinated under-30 yo male aren’t helping anyone.
It's a second order concept but it's not hard to understand for anyone reading HN.
If you knock down the dominos, they will mostly all get knocked down and take everyone with them.
If you separate the dominos, they don't take everything down.
I'm not sure if lockdowns are the right measure, and public fatigue is a factor - but if they end up being a rational measure then that's what we need to do.
> Cited Study: The non peer-reviewed research was based on UK Health Security Agency and National Health Service data on people who tested positive for COVID-19 in a PCR test in England between November 29 and December 11
Well, of course there won't be evidence in that dataset! This was before even a single omicron death in the UK.
However there is evidence in other datasets - including what is happening on the ground in South Africa.
It is too early to be confident about what is happening from the sidelines. The evidence is a bit murky and we might be about to see some horrible numbers in the aggregate numbers. Or we might not.
> South Africa delivered some positive news on the omicron coronavirus variant on Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions ... Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave ... Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.
This virus won't just go away in a few months, we'll have to live with it, just like Humans have done with every other virus since forever.
(And of course, lots and lots of viruses were eliminated naturally. Just by natural selection and competition. There are even some hints that coronaviruses are replacing influenca.)
This statement mean different things to different people. Do we live with AIDS with or without condoms ? Do we live with Covid with or without masks and vaccines and other prophylactic measures ?
> Have we ever imposed measures that limit the freedom of movement of the entire population, or subsects of it that have a higher infection rates per capita, such as drug users, prostitutes or homosexuals, as many countries have done?
That's not the point. The point is that AIDS has changed some things that we haven't come back to yet. One of the most prominent one is condom usage. This change doesn't need to be proved/sanctified by laws to happen and yet it exists (but I'll add that some people have been sentenced to years in prison for not revealing their HIV/AIDS status when having sex with their partner).
So: what does it mean to "live with covid" ?
Current vaccines do not stop the spread of covid.
Thus, eventually, everyone will have had covid, and all its variants.
We're pretty much there, I'd think.
So that said, eventually masks and social distancing will lose relevance, as case numbers will drop, and the real goal of masks and social distancing, reducing hospital overloads, will go away.
No, not to the extent we first hoped.
But it does help you survive covid, which was our goal all along.
I think it'd be interesting to wait and see if keeping those measures in place , even if covid threats magically disappeared overnight, would reduce other infections (common cold, flu, etc.).
That’s a hard no from me, we can’t keep moving the goalposts for giving things like mask mandates and social distancing the boot. Three million plastic masks get thrown away every minute, each of which takes centuries to degrade and potentially introduces micro-plastic pollution into the food chain. I’m not going to contribute to this environmental catastrophe a second more than the law requires me to.
Keep masks and distancing on a personal basis for those who want them, but the mandates must end the instant it’s possible for them to. COVID culture does enormous collateral damage to the environment and to many industries, we can’t keep it enforced by law on the basis of ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, or ‘the common cold’.
Live exactly as we lived before March 2019, with the small exceptions of using mask in gatherings or closed spaces, voluntary vaccination, specially to people with comorbidities.
Other than that, just not being bombarded with covid stats every single minute would be a huge improvement for the mental well-being of the population.
> Live exactly as we lived before March 2019, with the small exceptions of using mask in gatherings or closed spaces, voluntary vaccination, specially to people with comorbidities.
For what it's worth and to let my opinion be clear: I don't think that's yet possible :/.
> Other than that, just not being bombarded with covid stats every single minute would be a huge improvement for the mental well-being of the population.
I do agree the media and the politics relying on the media "to inform the people" are fucking things up in a way I couldn't believe they could. There's almost 0 actionable or relevant information in what they broadcast 24/7.
I am glad we have FFP2/n95 options.
It also helps motivate people to get vaccinated, with a 3rd shoot booster seemingly providing decent protection against Omicron, it's something we probably want to get people to.
Humans survive for millennia because we react rationality to situations, not because we just lay down and die.
And what is more important, the people with deadlier diseases who didn't get surgeries or treatments that were postponed, the screanings that weren't done that could allow an early treatment of someone who is sick too, to prevent other persons that could potentially become sick?
>Humans survive for millennia because we react rationality to situations, not because we just lay down and die.
Read again, you totally missed my point.
> Read again, you totally missed my point.
I read this comment a few times, but the sentence structure made it difficult to understand what you're trying to say. I'm entirely unsure which of the aforementioned situations you think is more desirable. If you're trying to make a point, instead of asking people to read again, you may want to consider rewriting your points to be more clear.
All have been approved and funded.
Sept 2021:
- Splunk Emergency Professional Services - $800k
- src: https://bpw.maryland.gov/MeetingDocs/2021-Sept-1-Agenda.pdf
Dec 2021:
- Splunk Emergency Professional Services - $1.6m
- Palo Alto Emergency Professional Services - $360k
- Ciena Emergency Professional Services - $240k
- src: https://bpw.maryland.gov/MeetingDocs/2021-Dec-1-Agenda.pdf
So...what do you think is going on at Maryland's Department of IT?
____TRULY SHAMEFUL INCIDENT COMMUNICATIONS____
Bad things happen in IT departments every day. Some can be anticipated, some even possibly prevented - but there will always exist the risk of data breach/attack.
“Public officials have no higher responsibility than keeping the American people safe, and there is no greater threat to their safety than the cyber vulnerabilities of the systems that support our daily lives,” said Governor Hogan in November 2021.
Secretary Leahy's commitment to the Governor and the people of Maryland is to lead the state's IT resources in taking all reasonable measures to protect against such risks.
I do not yet know if this situation could have been reasonably prevented or if it is due to MD DoIT negligence/oversight. The flurry of emergency procurement requests suggests awareness and good intentions. And yet - here we are...
What is clear to me, however, is that Secretary Leahy and his directs have ___failed to effectively manage communications___ throughout the response and remediation effort.
Most damning, in my opinion, is the use of the incident report as a venue for high-fiving and taking victory laps:
> Because of the state’s aggressive cybersecurity strategy, and the use of MD THINK and other cloud-based services, many of the department’s core functions were not affected.
> src: https://health.maryland.gov/incidentupdate/Pages/default.asp...
Are you serious? It's been over two weeks. And it's clear from your report that you're nowhere close to understanding what happened, let alone fixing it.
____FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF INCIDENT IMPACT____
Whoever approved this for publication is oblivious to the downstream, rippling effects this incident continues to have:
- At the time of writing, MD's local public health departments have been ___fighting a war blindfolded___ for 16 days.
- The impact has rippled ___beyond MD's state borders___, impacting CDC data feeds as well. Hospitalizations (which are reported by each hospital network directly to the CDC) are trending upward while new cases (reported by each state's IIS to the CDC) have flatlined: https://imgur.com/gallery/k2gG5GS.
____AND WHAT THE HECK IS MD THINK?____
MD Think is Maryland's cloud application platform. The state, along with Deloitte and an army of subcontractors, has been working on migrating legacy applications to this new infrastructure since 2017.
The report points to the success of MD THINK in isolating the impact away from core MD Health Department services.
Is MD Think really a success? Is this a case of what happens when legacy applications are left outside to rot in the sun?
No.
It turns out that MD Think has been a nightmare since it's inception. A series of program failures that jeopardized open enrollment for medicaid recipients ...
I read through those procurement requests. The reasons they cite in the remarks are interesting.
Sept 2021, Splunk:
> The staff providing the Splunk support services resigned as of March 31, 2021, and the contractor has been unable to replace them. The Department requested these support services through another contract vehicle, but that contractor was unable to source qualified and competent candidates in the appropriate labor categories and with the rates provided in the contract.
Dec 2021, Palo Alto Firewalls:
> Although the Department has two contract vehicles available to staff this need, neither contractor has been successful in staffing the role. One contractor who once provided the services lost three of their four resources in the past 12 months. The other contractor has been unable to source a candidate with the requisite skills and experience in the appropriate labor categories and rates provided in the contract.
So people are quitting, and they can't find replacements. Wow, that makes me think we're seeing effects from the "Great Resignation". I wonder what the "rates provided in the contract" are.