But if Omicron happens to be benign enough, it almost acts as a natural vaccine. This would be a very positive development for covid, not negative.

For some reason the focus still seems to be largely on case counts instead of actual outcomes.

Economic impact of lockdowns was mitigated somewhat by mass money printing and fiscal spending. If we lockdown again, will be disastrous for global economy as most monetary and fiscal firepower has been exhausted. Very troubling to see nations moving towards this again

For vaccines, the focus still seems to be largely the percentage of effectiveness, as if that effectiveness will be a reliable constant for each combination of particular vaccine, particular variant, and particular undesired outcome (case, symptomatic case, hospitalized case, oxygenized case, ventilated case, long covid, death, whatever). However, that effectiveness will almost certainly vary both with the attributes of the person (e.g. age, sex and `comorbidities`) exposed to the variant and with the environment, particularly the number of times the typical vaccinated person is exposed to the variant and how heavily exposed. For example, if we now observe, when omicron is starting to spread, that a vaccine shows 50% reduction in cases or hospitalizations or deaths, what will be the observed reduction when omicron is more prevalent, when it may be common for typical persons to be exposed multiple times per day for a few weeks? Could the 50% reduction still occur? Could the vaccine give a percentage of people super-immunity and the other people none at all? Otherwise, will the increased presence of omicron in the environment overwhelm the effects of the vaccine and drive that observed reduction from vaccination (or boosterization, or whatever) down significantly? What do the experts know from experience about this?

I wish Mr Biden nothing but success in his efforts to get us all doing the right thing, and I hope that his emphasis on vaccination now brings good results.

The reason seems obvious - it’s been only 25 days since the discovery of the first case. There haven’t been many outcomes yet to focus on - as far as I remember, the average time between symptom onset and hospitalisation is something like 10 days, depending on the age group.

Here's my speculation on the reason that the virus is seeming benignish so far... omicron requires fewer ACE2 receptors to bind to in order for it to infect a host(because of the incredible reproduction rate over delta once it takes hold). The younger are generally not taking as many precautions as the elderly did(elderly have more ACE2 receptors but have mostly been vaccinated or died already). so as the pool of eligible candidates for infection trend younger (fewer ACE2 required moves the bar of easy infection down younger) you have younger people generally having a better time with the infection because their immune system is slightly more robust. and that tracks with younger people (generally) during the delta wave and original variant; younger people tended to have fewer really bad outcomes.

You need a fully formed view to come to a conclusion based on details and those most qualified to do so are the least willing to do so.

Be reasonable.

Bad news is reported more, if bad things happen, you need to act fast so it's good to pay close attention to bad news, that's what news organizations want you to think.

And then you commented that as an educated scientist, you also think we should pay close attention to bad news. At least that's how I took it.

When I wrote my comment, my intended meaning was more specific to the current situation: I really wish people would be more united in taking action in the face of an infectious disease, the transmission of which is entirely preventable in the aggregate.

These are all things that we have to act on, as individuals. They are all bad news.

Then you have the rest of the 99.999% that you don't need to know, but you do need to know the very few stories. And for that you have to go through all the other ones.

That is actually a terrible heuristic. The need to “do something fast” leads to tremendous amounts of wasted time and resources and often a codified public policy that is unproductive or counterproductive.

The bias to action over inaction exists, among other reasons, because it plays out conceit that we control our own fate.

There's plenty you need to stop doing.

So far, the data are scarce and incomplete

The rest of the article consists of anecdotes that could point in either direction. If you want good news, check out the piece from WaPo from a few days ago [0]

Just keep in mind the scarce and incomplete factor. Give it another 2-3 weeks and we'll know more. Meanwhile it's probably not a good time to stop whatever precautions you have already been taking.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/south-africa...

Extrapolating from hospitalization rates and limited sample sizes is mostly just guesswork. It’s probably not much worse, but beyond that is up in the air.

1) the “precautionary principle”

2) the consequence asymmetry: if we’re vigilant at a time when we could relax, the consequence is small, but if we relax when we should increase vigilance, the consequence is larger.

and here's the plot for London https://twitter.com/theosanderson/status/1471907339397738502

It seems safer to believe bad news, and remain wary, than to believe good news and drop your guard.

Unvaccinated who haven’t had the virus should be very worried due to the transmission. For people with some immunity, the jury is out but personally I am not looking forward to probable mild Covid, until recently I thought I had a good chance of simply not catching it due to being vaccinated. that seems to be no longer the case.