Further, we couldn’t contain delta. If Omicron is 10x more virulent (as claimed), then we have no hope. Masks didn’t help, Lockdowns didn’t help.
Luckily, these illnesses are treatable with the plethora of therapeutics that were discovered. Plus, the strains have become less lethal over time.
It is fear mongering on the part of media (to make money) and governments (to seize power).
I think you mean “10x more infectious” as virulence is how serious/deadly/damaging the infection is. Omicron is no more virulent and maybe considerably less virulent than previous strains.
Is the key difference that in an infectious disease expert context, virulent means severe and infectious means contagious?
I always thought virulent was ability to spread because that’s what viruses do, but that was way before the pandemic.
Some said that vaccination proved a 70% protection to infect someone. Makes sense since the time someone can infect others is shortened because of the quicker immune response. I still believe this to be a noble lie however, since we should have seen an effect, but the curves rose just as quickly in vaccinated/unvaccinated countries and as fast as in the first wave.
Our bureaucracy and inability to improvise in times of need will kill us all.
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0...
In the last week daily cases have increased 50%. If this remains with the 1 in 40 case:hospitalisation ratio, then between Christmas and New Year we'll be looking at 2,000 new hospitalisations a day.
This time last year the ratio was 1 in 13 case->hospitalisations, so clearly things are far better.
However if cases are doubling every 4-5 days - with cases 4 days ago being abeing about 100k/day, in a few days time this will be 250k/day, and by christmas 700k a day. Before New Year it will naturally plataeu at 1.5m a day (because that's 1 in 6 of the population getting it in a week, and there just aren't enough uninfected people for it to go around.)
That seems to be the strategy the country is going for.
It's too late to stop it reaching 160k/day, which would be 4k hospitalisations a day - the peak of last year - based on October's admittance rates, and there's very little sign of attempts stop it going further, meaning we could be looking at 8k attempted hospitalisations come new year.
The main hope is that Omicron, combined with boosters (which already have a >80% uptake in over 60s) will reduce that 1:40 ratio
Further, have you seen the latest theory about the mechanism of Omicron? It grows faster in your bronchus/windpipe[0], and slower in your alveoli, so while the cytokine storm (immune response) side of the disease is still concerning, the risk of pneumonia is greatly reduced. I will not comment on cytokine storm vs pneumonia frequency in terms of long COVID or case severity as I am ignorant in this regard, but I can imagine people need the breathers less if they aren't dying of pneumonia, and I somewhat understood this to be a major issue for ICU capacity. This also explains the increased infectiousness to me, as your bronchus would emit comparatively larger viral loads with each breath than the alveoli if we still believe the droplet and not airborne theory.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/15/omicron-found-...
80%+ of new cases were in fully vaccinated back in August.
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/antibody-dependent-enhance...
Hospitalization matters for short-term policy, but long-term damage could end up affecting long-term healthcare policy even more in the coming decades
So, the trouble with that is that hospitalisation is a lagging indicator. By the time hospitalisation starts rising rapidly, you could lock everyone in their houses and it would still rise rapidly for another week or so. Which will probably overwhelm your hospitals.
Even in places with 95% vaccination, case counts are still _generally_ a reasonable indicator of where hospitalisation is headed; some fraction of those cases will convert to hospitalisations due to that vulnerable 5%, and due to people for whom the vaccination doesn't work very well (immunocompromised and extremely ill people, generally).
Exactly what should be done. Instead of reporting new cases most prominently, there should be reports on how cities like SF, with 80%+ vaccination rates, have 0, or single digit death averages over the last week. For massive population centers!
And laws, which take time, for good reason, to propose, debate and pass.
We can't run a country with by changing direction every time case numbers of one particular virus go up or down
What I now believe is missing, and would like to see, is the number of ICU COVID patients who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, as well as an age group breakdown. This is the type of data required to make informed decisions. If I had a teenage child, I’d be wanting to understand the true likelihood of them contracting COVID and ending up in an ICU bed, in order to make a decision about vaccinating them against it.
I’ll give you the technicality that you said “state” but still, we’re doing pretty good here in the territory!
I had my booster yesterday morning. I’m 45.
[0]: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021...
It is the control group of the natural circumstance.
It seems like a pretty big gamble to not be cautious. Masking, vaccines, and avoiding indoor crowds in poorly ventilated spaces seems to be helpful. Probably best to at a minimum continue to do that until we have more concrete evidence.
Every new infection results in rolling the evolutionary dice a few hundred billion times, and is how we get diseases that evade our defenses, and new diseases in general.
Also, being hospitalized isn't the only bad thing about COVID.
That frames it as if that was a new and scary thing and not something that has been going on for millions of years.
The hospitalisations measurement, is I think sensible. I still think underlying case rate means something.
> I find that very scary, close to a "giving up" mentality.
Everyone can have a vaccine, there are multiple highly effective therapies and even the risk of death without intervention to the majority of people (under 55) is already astronomically low.
To put it in perspective, if you’re under 30 with asthma, your risk of death from the original covid variant (not the less lethal variants) is the same as being struck by lightening.
We haven’t given up, we’ve successfully mitigated fatalities until we have effective treatments and a vaccine. Now it’s time to move on.
This this month I did catch covid. I'm not even sure I'd class it as a bad cold, it was far less debilitating than the bug I had in November - although seems to be lasting longer (4 days of coughing so far). My last vaccine was in July (went positive literally the morning by booster was due).
I suspect most people have either had covid or know someone close who has, and see that the main problem is the effects of restrictions -- not going to work while waiting for results (leading to public transport cancellations for example), kids being kept off even though they feel fine. (One symptom of covid is a headache, but that's because I've been trapped in a house with 2 very energetic very excited children for the last 10 days)
Throw in the constant disregard for the rules that the government has shown, and I can't see the acceptance of restrictions surviving in the UK past January.
The brexity type people I'm 'freinds' with on facebook began covid all in favour of restrictions and vaccines. They are fortunatly still in favour of vaccines, but are increasingly shifting to being anti restrictions. Further restrictions will push them more into the Piers Corbyn echosphere, and that's a bad thing.
My brexity friends started covid feb 2020 - "There have been no white people die of Covid, white genetics are superior to chinese genetics and immune to covid - this is an EU conspiracy to punish the UK for brexit" - since then a few died of covid, most lost parent / aunt / uncle / family member.
Its still 100% an EU plot to destroy brexit.
So I think preventing all that loss of quality of life is also worthwhile.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Whether that is a net benefit over the economic consequences of lockdowns and secondary effects of that I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know how to begin answering that question.
I’m just trying to say that there are other effects than death which seem more likely and impactful for longer for youthful people as they are more likely to get one of the other effects than they are likely to die from COVID.
In this case my eye care provider has seen more cases where patients lost eye sight after covid. Typically this amount of loss of eyesight is not observed over a single period of three weeks.
Mitigated, how exactly?
Well sorry to say that with Omicron that all bets are off. Two out of 3 mAbs don't work and the third isn't so great. And the covid pills are still a long ways off.
Then break that down to "in hospital and vaccinated with X or having had a previous infection and recovered or unvaccinated and having had no previous infection."
We're not seeing that here in Australia... its all just about the number of new infections. plus a bit of info about Delta/Omicron. it feels like fear mongering not information clarity.