However hospitals are reporting fewer numbers,shorter stays, etc, so the signs we do have are encouraging.
That leaves only 10-20% of the population at risk of severe covid if vaccination and previous infection mean milder illness potentially.
Add to this that SA with 25% vaccination is seeing less hospitalisations.
Omicron in most western countries doesn't have many people left to infect. Those that do will see milder illness.
I don't see how this will threaten healthcare systems any more.
And here we are with hospitals being overwhelmed in Germany and France, for example, despite high level of vaccination and a lot of people who already had the virus previously. In France we have more people going to the ICU per day than during the last peak, and at the current rate we'll reach, and probably pass, the previous two peaks soon
All it takes is a few thousands of 50+ years old unvaccinated people to use all the ICU beds. In France we have 2m+ people over 50 who didn't even get the first dose, 1% of these 2m people would be enough to use every single ICU beds in the country
Not necessarily, if the less infectious one was already infectious enough that nearly everyone was going to get it eventually.
Another factor to consider is that every one getting infected quickly, and partial herd immunity being established sooner, could expedite the repeal of COVID control measures, and the dissipitation of the climate of fear, which are both incurring significant health, quality of life, and economic costs.
The World Bank estimates that COVID and its associated policies has already pushed 97 million people into extreme poverty. UNICEF says "Schools still closed for nearly 77 million students 18 months into pandemic": https://www.unicef.org/lac/en/press-releases/schools-still-c...
In the US, fentanyl overdoses during the pandemic have surged to become the leading cause of death for the 18 - 45 demographic: https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/fentanyl-...
Scientists have long known that social isolation is deadly, and if there's one thing that COVID control policies increase, it's social isolation.
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[0]: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/about-1-in-5...
[1]: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/burnout-alcohol-ptsd-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/23/pandemic-hits-...
Keep in mind, this isn't just 20% fewer people to deal with COVID, it's 20% fewer people to deal with, well, everything, for years to come. I'm sure someone's done the calculations on what the consequences of a decimated healthcare system are, if you want to go look for them.
How much worse do you think everything you've listed would be if we had started with 20% fewer healthcare personnel? Well, guess what. That's how bad it will be from now on, because we couldn't all cooperate to take measures to ensure the healthcare system didn't get overwhelmed in the first place, and doesn't continue to get overwhelmed.
That's why I asked how you could arrive at the converse conclusion that lockdowns are net beneficial for mental health.
This is only true if it’s a novel virus
This. Just to emphasize the point: As long as the number of cases continues to rise, the situation will become more and more threatening, even if the falatity rate when infectied is low. It just takes longer. But it is harder to get it under control.
In other words: a low infection rate combined with a high fatality (per infection) rate would be better than a high infection rate combined with a low fatality (per infection) rate.
Take Ebola (a well known virus, with very high mortality). It's very hard for Ebola to spread. It tends to make people obviously sick, and also kills quick, both of which make it much much easier to control. I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time or energy avoiding Ebola.
Contrast to AIDS, which did not make people sick, and so was easier to catch from a seemingly healthy person. From an AIDS perspective weakening the immune system against other diseases was a flaw in the plan. Once it became rampant though there were (and are) behavioral changes to reduce the chance of infection. Those behaviors are now "normal" because, well, AIDS.
The "common cold" / flu etc are all covid, or covid-like viruses that constantly mutate and constantly do the rounds. We develop immunity over time and they mutate into milder (but more infectious) versions. We take steps to avoid these, but meh, if you get it you get it.
Some behaviors from this pandemic will remain (stop letting - or worse requiring - obviously sick people come to work for example) - others will fall away (I don't see the mask thing sticking around forever...) We'll probably work from home more than we did before, but that was already a trend, this has just accelerated it. Even when we get back to normal I don't think I'll be flying to a city for random meetings anymore.
There are no goals, paths or planning in evolution, evolution is the result of chance. Selection pressures are what keep the effects of genetic mutation in check. The selection pressure that might cause a virus to become weaker is the result of the virus literally dying in all of the corpses it creates, while weaker strains potentially live on in the hosts they didn't kill. People aren't dying in droves because of COVID, so that selection pressure doesn't exist, and the virus is free to mutate into more virulent forms.
Also, evolutionary timelines span many, many human lifetimes. In that time, a virus could very well become more fatal, wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on.
Thus natural selection optimises for forms that spread but don't kill.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...
DOI:10.1017/S0031182000055360
It may also find an unlucky local optimum where it shows no symptoms for a period while already being highly transmissible and then slowly kill or leave the survivors with permanent damage.
Mix AIDS with Omicron and you can stop bothering to save a pension.
The Black Death (1) and the Spanish Flu would like to have a word. Humans eventually evolved sufficient immunity to defend against the pathogen, but significant proportions of the population died before that happened.
(1) not a virus, IIRC, but the same evolutionary pressures should apply
And hoping not to start a thread on antibiotics and superbugs, but bacteria do naturally select as well.
The Spanish Flu followed a similar path to Covid, it started deadly but then naturally selected to become less deadly. Its also somewhat unusual because of the numbers of displaced persons at the time returning home, the lack of basic medical knowledge etc.
But here's my point. The Spanish flu has mutated now to be basically Flu. It's not "deadly" anymore (for some definition of deadly). Non deadly mutations naturally select over deadly mutations.
Respiratory viruses that only or mainly have human hosts need ambulatory vectors.
But that's semantics. The point is that Aids has a long time between infection and death, thus encouraging spread.
Ebola for example gets you sick, and you die quickly. This results in it not spreading well.
AIDS kills you very slowly (over multiple years) so it has lots of time to spread (fortunately for us it's hard to catch).
So the perfect virus would have the transmisabilty of Omicron, but with no symptoms for years - then by the time the first person dies we all have it already.
Fortunately we haven't seen that one yet (in my lifetime anyway) and to some extent worrying about it is fruitless because there will be pretty much nothing we can do about it.
You may as well be worried about every other ELE - asteroids, alien invasions etc.
From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:
> Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken.
> 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 to spread as efficiently as possible, what happens to the host after they have spread is from a viral evolution point of view utterly irrelevant. So they can and do evolve to be more lethal. Maybe it takes a bit longer before you die but that's perfectly fine.
How is the norm for viruses to continue to become more lethal? That does not align with anything I've ever heard. That link doesn't even claim that, and that's a baseless "fact check" done by a mathematician acting as a false authority.
The norm is for viruses to end up somewhere in the middle, but chances are that the lethality is still very high. The whole idea that viruses evolve to be less lethal simply isn't true and very much outdated.
> That does not align with anything I've ever heard.
That is possible, it is a pretty persistent thing but it has been dealt with decisively since the 80's:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224043344_Coevoluti...
In a nutshell: it is likely that viruses (and other parasites) change once they have made their jump to a new species. This change is mostly random, selection pressure will lead to maximizing for R0, which may or may not lead to a lower level of lethality but this is by no means guaranteed. Some outliers may evolve to become more lethal, some other outliers may evolve to be (much) less lethal, but for the bulk an intermediary level of lethality (which can still be very high) is the normal outcome.
This is experimentally confirmed over and over again over the timescales that we have been doing these.
The shortest way in which you can condense all this is: "to a virus it is replication that matters, not what happens to the host after it has replicated". Of course viruses don't have any conscious plan but the evolutionary mechanism selects for (more) successful reproduction so it will seem like that from the outside.
[1] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/NICD-COVID...
[2] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
If you look at the bars for 2021.46 - 2021.49, there's a clear exponential trend with a doubling time of about a week, going from 715 to 1446 to 3994 to 7558.
[1] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Datcov19_N...
[2] https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Datcov19_N...
Is there a precedent for "us" doing this? Surely some pandemics have "super-nova'ed" themselves, but having "us" encourage faster and wider spread as policy seems risky and unusual.
I appreciate the need for govts to be seen to do something "new variant? quick, lock the borders..", but as data emerges that this is "the one to get" there's no need to inhibit the economy in the name of public health, when that inhibition leads to a worse, not better outcome.
Our best case scenario right now is that a) the virus spreads really fast, and b) it's not lethal (or at least no more lethal than anything else in life.)
Ultimately we all need to build up immunity from this thing - whether that's via vaccines or contractions everyone is free to take their pick. but 5 years from now we'll all have anti-bodies for it one way or the other...
Do you know any other diseases where there's virtually no risk to young children but very high risk to the elderly?
https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...
If you call him irresponsible, at least back it up with numbers why. He's got a similar estimate of what i think is happening.
We're all grown-ups here, there's no harm in interpreting the current situation. Anyone can come by and refute his assumption to improve discussion.
As an example:
@bruce511: To me, the core question is how much the cases in south Africa can be compared to other countries, because of high infection rate during previous waves.
There's still a reasonable risk if previous infection with delta protects better than vaccines.
And for that, we will have to wait :(
I'm hopeful though.
I’m hoping for the best, too, but let’s not continue the tradition we’ve had during the pandemic of saying “you’re worrying too much” and being wrong.
Today’s Science on this: https://www.science.org/content/article/early-lab-studies-hi...
The article you referenced, referenced a research with a added comment where they declare they can't deduct information about hospitalisation:
> add a comment on page 5 that the crude ratios of hospitalisations to cases give no information on severity on their own due to the differences in the age distribution of Omicron and Delta cases.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...
So your referenced article seems useless about hospitalisation ( the information you extracted from it)
This is also from the UK who had an increase in delta already before Omicron came. My guess is that Denmark would be a better reference to compare hospitalization for Omicron.
Except if you are seeing something that i don't?
Ps. Early data in Denmark is frequently updated and looks positive concerning hospitalisation.
( But still early after only 3 weeks)
The problem is anything that works will always look like an overreaction.
But it doesn't really matter anymore. With all of the fatigue and the failure of public health professionals to set public expectations around vaccines which are looking like they're going need to be taken seasonaly now the only poltically feasible course left at this point is "let's fuck around and find out."
With a growing number of real-life cases, hopefully there are multiple studies already in progress.
So the results should be better than in the study.
A month from now a new vaccine-escaping variant could emerge from some squirrel in Haiti that's a billion times more transmissible than Omicron and a thousand times more lethal than Delta.
The fact that this particular variant isn't an absolute catastrophe doesn't mean that a new devastating variant isn't around the corner.
Because hospitalizations, and deaths, trend later than infections, definitive conclusions are still some weeks away. However all the data coming out of South Africa is encouraging.
First, South Africa has about 25% vaccination coverage. With coverage skewing older.
Infections are up [1],but hospitalizations are flat, and so are deaths.
It's likely that the infection rate is grossly under-reported, especially among those without symptoms, as tests are (relatively) expensive. Annecdodally reasonably high percentages of asymptomatic infection is being detected in people being "randomly" tested (eg tested for travel and other-hospital reasons)
It is also crowding out delta, which is still present, but decreasing.
All in all travel bans may have been counter-productive (as well as ineffective) allowing time for more delta infections, and ultimately more deaths to take place.
It's still too early to be definitive, but this may indeed be the varient we all need - one which is super contagious, but also super weak, priming immune systems against earlier varient.
IF (and its a very big IF) this varient is non-fatal, then the faster and wider it spreads the better. We need to super-nova this thing, not a red dwarf.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...