This is, in my opinion, the primary underlying disagreement. Some people think that no amount of deaths from Covid is acceptable. Some people believe that even the peak pandemic mortality is acceptable. And others fall somewhere in between, by, for example, focusing on hospital capacity. I don't think there is any long-term solution to Covid as a social issue, something we talk about and can't move past, until some kind of consensus is reached on this.
I think the endgame is clear in the US. Most states have dropped all restrictions and those that haven’t will suffer economically and politically until they drop their restrictions. The only question is how much economic and political suffering individual cities and states will tolerate.
Virginia voters threw out their entire Democrat government and governor and will likely join the list of states banning restrictions.
In the end I don’t think it will be about Covid at all. One by one we’ll move on because the people will demand an end to restrictions.
Because whether we like it or not the virus is still going to be around and kill people and saturate hospitals.
So, to me, the question seems to be:
will living with the virus means "we don't treat covid patients anymore, if you get covid, tough luck, you are free to choose to wear a mask if you want, beyond that don't expect anything from public authorities"The second and third most populous states in the nation have banned Covid restrictions. I think the answer to your question is… absolutely not.
Still be around and kill people? Sure, but that's true of the seasonal flu, and even the common cold in rare cases. Saturate hospitals? No.
I wish people would stop comparing it to the flu, it's highly misleading.
1. With restrictions in place covid killed more.
2. One in ten people still experience illness 12 weeks after the infection. Covid gets into the nervous system by crossing the neural-mucosal interface. Way more people that wouldn't have ended up in hospitals with a flu do ended up in hospitals with Covid. Even with vaccines. Long covid is no joke. Etc.
> and even the common cold in rare cases. Saturate hospitals? No.
Hopium and wishful thinking.
"Despite California losing a congressional seat for the first time in history due to slow population growth and some high-profile technology companies and billionaires leaving the state, there is no evidence of an abnormal increase in residents planning to move out of the state"
The “bottom five” for percentage change is, in order… DC, NY, Illinois, Hawaii, California.
Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? If you don't want to be banned on HN, you can email us at [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
1. aggressive triage based on chances and QALY remaining
2. increased healthcare funding
3. voluntary isolation of individuals who see lockdown as being preferable to their personal coronavirus risk
Will it result in more deaths than February 2020? Sure. But we don't have that choice because sars2 exists now.
We think it's better to ration healthcare and therefore doom an unlucky minority, versus rationing life itself for everyone (via lockdowns and restrictions) and slow killing everyone.
As far as I can tell, most of the lockdown debate centres around an erroneous idea that we can just do X, Y, Z, and then immunosuppressed Harriet can rejoin the world and avoid contracting coronavirus.
But she just can't. Even the original strain would have eventually infected her with high probability unless we continued to cycle lockdowns or she voluntarily isolated.
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
Its just that, using Swedish data again, Western societies are significantly more aged: eg. there 120,000 80-84 year old men (prime COVID death territory) in 2020, vs only 101,000 in 2009. Its similar in many other Western countries: about 20% more elderly people, in absolute numbers.
As such, the 'same' types of respiratory viruses will simply kill more people.
The decisions is thus a social and political one: do we lockdown and force 6-monthly vaccinations on everyone, based on elderly deaths that will occur anyway simply due to the baby boomer cohort entering their twilight years?
I think we need to just get more efficient at end-of-life care, focusing on simpler treatments and comfort, as well as euthanasia-on-demand for anyone over age 75.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
The four elderly members of our immediate family are all fairly adamant that the young have suffered enough, and "hell, yes" they want to see their grandkids, and no, they aren't asking about vaccinations and negative tests.
I'm minded to respect their opinions.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211122/us-covid-deaths-202...
Given widespread availability of vaccines, I think it is acceptable to turn away any non vaccinated people without medical exemptions to preserve hospital capacity.
https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EMT...
I wish I could tell people that:
The vaccine does not prevent transmission as much as you think it does.
You do not spread as easily as you think you do, and you can personally attempt to reduce it even further.
You are vaccinated, and if it is indeed effective and you believe in it, you should not be worried much.
The unvaccinated are people too who probably do not have any malicious intent, and most likely pose little, or no risk to you.
Merry Christmas!
Always puzzles me to see people suggesting all these “just let them die” silver bullet algorithms.
Is there any evidence that this is true at the point of presenting with equal acute symptoms? Sure, your symptoms are likely to be less acute if you are vaccinated, but that's not the issue, the issue is response to treatment given similar symptoms.
Person A is "fully vaccinated", last dose five months ago, hasn't taken a Covid test since.
Person B is unvaccinated, but had a PCR test yesterday and is negative for Covid19.
Let's say you're clinically vulnerable, which of A or B would you rather sit next to during a meal?
This is clearly not the case for the vast swaths of our public health institutions who have supported and eagerly carried out mass terminations of healthcare workers who refuse the Covid vaccines.
IMO, the rational answer to this question is 'the same risk and mortality that we have already accepted from influenza.' There is a lot of variability there, of course, but it is way above zero in any case.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211025/covid-pandemic-may-...
To be clear, they are attributing this drop off of this flu strain to be likely due to pandemic mitigation efforts, as well as maybe lucky timing and some specifics of how this strain spreads
Since it doesn’t seem plausible to repeat the wide scale pandemic mitigation controls any time soon, I doubt we can keep wiping out flu strains, but we could certainly reduce the damage the flu does if we want to
Vaccines, on the other hand, seem promising. Though the effective mutation rate seems quite a lot lower than influenza and there are good reasons to believe that the covid boosters will be considerably more durable than the original shots. If it really did come down to getting a booster every year, though, I think a lot of people would be okay with that if it meant no more attempts at lockdowns and mask mandates.
Very few people actually try to wrangle with putting numbers on the cost (in dollars) of a human life, or the economic burden of disease. There are no right or wrong numbers, but only if you begin there can you say you're rationally considering the economic or political tradeoffs.
Edit: and deaths could absolutely reach zero. If we threw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem, we would eradicate it in absolutely no time. The underlying question is the same here, namely whether the cost of eradicating the disease would be larger or smaller than what we would gain from doing it.
Then you're left with the "leaky bucket" of transmission between humans and animals... But this is a known vulnerable point which could be monitored effectively and very cheaply.
Despite all this, human cases of rabies still happen. Fortunately it's rather hard to spread rabies between humans and it's symptomatic by the time it becomes infectious. In the case of an easily airborne virus even with such measures available like vaccination and prophylaxis for possible exposure, it seems daunting to the point of impossible even in a very wealthy country. In the developing world it would be certainly hopeless.
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/rab...
Genetic surveillance is just around the corner, and will soon be / is now within reach even of developing countries, with solutions like Oxford Nanopore's ultra-portable sequencers.
The virus is here to stay. Eradication is a total fantasy, just a distraction and waste of time.
- what’s the date on these figures?
- can we extrapolate this to other countries?
- are these figures generally accepted, or are they controversial?
- how do you account for age, sex (differences in life expectancy, child bearing capacity, etc), education level or professional skill, etc?
Imagine if China didn’t or couldn’t pursue a zero covid policy. What happens when the world’s manufacturer closes? We’ve already seen huge supply chain issues.
Across the Western world the vast majority of the economic and social issues have been caused by legalities rather than pandemic reality.
For example, for better or worse, if the 10 day isolation and testing regime did not exist in the UK then staff shortages would not either. People aren't actually getting ill en masse - we've just recalibrated what ill means.
That's just hilarious.
There are so many reasons for staff shortages in the UK right now. Covid isn't even the main one.
How do we know we won't end up with that? Omicron evolved from Beta, which had pretty well disappeared when Omicron sprung up.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...
Seems this theory has only gained traction in the last 2 years.
Looking into it further, case fatality rate of during the 1889-90 outbreak seemed to be 0.1-0.28, much lower than Covid-19 has been.
A lower infection fatality rate in that previous pandemic is not at all surprising. Back in 1889 elderly people made up a much lower fraction of the population. And there was a lower rate of co-morbid conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.
"the reanalysis of seroarcheological data suggested Influenza A subtype H3 (possibly the H3N8 subtype) as a more likely cause for the 1889–1890 pandemic"
There was no thoughts that it was Coronavirus related before this pandemic.
edit: Interestingly though, the 1889-90 pandemic was thought to have originated in Bukhara, part of the Russian empire at the time, which has been historically a cattle raising area. H3N8 is Equine influenza virus, where as HCoV-OC43 was a Bovine coronavirus.
(but a larger number of mild breakthrough infections is not itself terrible news either as the mildness indicates a population becoming more resilient against the virus)
Delta also had lower mortality than the first wave: this was confirmed by some fact-checkers and not by others (depending on how alarmist the fact-checker is) but looking at numbers, it does seem to be case.
It seems to be an evolutionary trend where the virus mutations that are successful became more transmissible and less deadly (probably because a dead host doesn't spread as much as an alive one).
You have to compare between two variants at the same time, not against previous waves. Omicron is the first major variant to actually be less severe on this metric.
A lockdown is probably impractical at this point, but we are stuck with a disease that will be a health burden on humanity that will be difficult to eliminate.
For example, if a disease kills 40,000 people per year. That's 400,000 people in a decade. A drop in the bucket of humanity for sure, but that's about a city size population. That's not counting the collectively lost days in term of feeling terrible.
Heart disease kills 659,000 people a year in the US alone (https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm), but for some reason we're not having COVID-level panic about it.
I'm struggling to find annual statistics for COVID, but I did find an article written September '21 stating there had been over 630,000 COVID deaths in the US since the start of 2020, so that's over a year and a half-ish, so a bit less than heart disease.
Of course, heart disease isn't contagious (at least not in the traditional sense - genetics and lifestyle factors could be considered contagious if you're flexible with the term), but it's also a cause of death we've grown disconcertingly accustomed to for how prevalent it is. I expect once this outbreak has run its course, we'll probably see annual COVID deaths settle at a much lower number thanks to vaccinations/immunity. I'm not sure when we'll come to accept it as just another risk of life, though.
Heart disease is well-understood, and largely avoidable with education; hence, it's not a problem as far as the ruling classes are concerned.
COVID and other infectious diseases, on the other hand, can hit literally anybody with a social life. They are fundamentally uncontrollable at the individual level, and have the potential to upset the social order if the numbers get out of control (as they did, shortly, last year). Until that continues to be the case, COVID will continue to be addressed as a significant problem.
I think you answered this yourself:
> Of course, heart disease isn't contagious
If heart disease were contagious and could be effectively curtailed by wearing masks and getting a vaccine, I think you'd see a similar reaction to it that you're seeing to covid.
Or put another way: 22% of all deaths in the US happen in nursing homes. But we don't say we should get rid of nursing homes. If 22% of all deaths in a city happened in their college dormitories, there would be an immediate outcry to shut down the dormitories.
Now, the harder question is that covid also disproportionately affects people near the end of their natural life (and probably so does almost every medical cause of death besides, like, SIDS and pregnancy).
So the question is then, how many people does covid kill "before their time," so to speak, and how does that compare to heart disease? One of the common arguments is that it does kill lots of people before their time - even thought it skews towards the older, it nonetheless kills a good chunk of older folks who would have otherwise lived happy and healthy lives for several more years.
One way to measure this is by looking at excess deaths. How many people are dying of any cause compared to the year before covid was around? If covid was, say, killing people who were about to be killed by heart disease, we'd kind of expect a drop in heart disease death statistics. If we're not seeing that, then that implies that covid shouldn't be bucketed as an "old age" cause of death, that there's a reason to be more concerned about the 630,000 covid deaths over the past almost two years than the 659,000 heart disease deaths in 2019. And in fact it looks like the number of heart disease deaths didn't drop in 2020 (and grew, in fact) even as covid killed 350,000 people.
(You can get these numbers out of http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html - which I found linked from the site you linked, thanks! - and break them down further by age etc.)
A lot of arguments that we should specifically care about covid (which is the camp I'm in) are predicated on the assumption that this is true; a lot of arguments that we should just treat it like we treat the flu are predicated on the assumption that it is not. I think this is a question of fact (though one that requires the statistics to actually be available) and not just a difference of opinion or worldview.
Covid spreads while still being non-symptomatic so that explanation doesn't stand that much. Flu is not getting milder.
Also, how many times more do you think you can get hit in the face by Manny Pacquiao instead of Mike Tyson and survive because his punches are milder ?
How many times can we keep catching mild covid and escape long term damages (edit: and death and everything in between) ?
If it was a common cold or a flu ? Maybe.
> “Although COVID-19 has been described as a respiratory syndrome, evidence supports the involvement of multiple organ systems, with fibrosis, and inflammation in the lung, heart, kidneys, central nervous system (CNS), liver, adrenal glands, bone marrow, lymph nodes, and gastrointestinal tract. SARS-CoV-2 infection has also been associated with serious thrombotic complications, including strokes, pulmonary embolism, and cardiac injury.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/10/leon-n10.htm
Endemic we want ? Then we want yearly (or 6months it seems) vaccines. And masks. And ventilation.
Reinfections will get more severe with age once vaccine or infection elicited sera wanes.
> What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nightmare that would keep this rolling.
Omicron being the new kid on the block doesn't mean another more dangerous variant isn't building itself up in a body somewhere.
Maybe two years into the pandemic is not enough to let the reality sink in that we will never come back to before. Maybe we need ten years but by then we'll all be used to the new normal anyway. “Learn to live with the virus”, they said. Indeed.
I'm more of an optimist. Having a small percentage of the population that's at greater risk of serious implications from infection (respiratory or otherwise) is something we've learned to live with before (see: the flu) without masks, mandates, or dramatically rearranging the way we live.
There are no path back to normal unless the virus disappears. We have vaccines that work for a limited time, we'll soon have pills@home. It will still not be `back to normal`.
> and taking a stance that we never will strikes me as somewhat defeatist.
We'll also never have FTL spaceships or teleportation star trek style.
> I'm more of an optimist. Having a small percentage of the population that's at greater risk of serious implications from infection (respiratory or otherwise) is something we've learned to live with before (see: the flu) without masks, mandates, or dramatically rearranging the way we live.
Covid is not the flu. Hoping it'll magically turn into a flu or that we can manage it like a flu is ignoring the reality currently unfolding.
40 years later and we still need condoms. We are not back to sex as it was in the 70's. Generations of teenagers have had their first time with a condom. This is what is normal now.
This is flat out FALSE.
There are two different possible endpoints for vaccine efficacy. One is efficacy against infection, one is efficacy against severe disease and death.
Efficacy against infection is very difficult because it is mediated by circulating neutralizing antibodies. It is just difficult to get sterilizing immunity against a muscosally invading respiratory virus in the first place. And then neutralizing antibodies wane over time.
Efficacy against severe disease is almost certainly going to be more durable because it is mediated by memory T-cell and B-cells having been already formed due to prior exposure to a related antigen.
Unfortunately the result of the phase 3 trails on the mRNA vaccines were way too good on VE against infection and it was sold as being 90% effective and as that waned people declared them to be ineffective. That should never have been the yardstick though. And in fact before those results were announced Fauci was trying to condition the population to expecting a 50% VE against infection number as being good enough. The 90% efficacy results just blew that all away though.
What gets lost is that they're still >90% effective against severe disease/death and nothing has changed there. And you can see it in the headlines with Omicron. It is almost still certainly as intrinsically virulent as D614G, if not actually more intrinsically virulent than Delta itself, but hospitalization rates and death rates are plummeting. That is the human humoral immune system working.
I'd argue everyone should probably get boosted because of the maturation in immune response which is measured against Omicron. Once we're done with that though I fully expect that people can stop getting any future vaccines and they'll just get a cold next time they catch SARS-CoV-2 until they wind up being over 65 or a cancer patient or something -- just like every other ILI-causing virus.
(Or you know keep getting boosters like you get flu shots -- I'm honestly not sure what I'll do about it, but its going to look a whole lot more like yearly flu shots than the world-record mass immunization campaign we've seen up until now).
> This is flat out FALSE.
Allow me to rephrase: We have vaccines that protect us from severe diseases and hospitalizations (what you wrote after and which I mostly agree with) but its efficacy for milder symptoms wane after some months. And mild symptoms that translates into perma brain fog and other conditions is not something I want to take my chance with.
Most likely, if the best case scenario happens, I'd still take they yearly covid shot.
> but hospitalization rates and death rates are plummeting. That is the human humoral immune system working.
Not what's happening in countries around me. UK (17%), France (175%), Germany, Finland are seeing hospitalizations rise up again.
It remains to be seen if this is the last wave and you are right or if it's now the new normal.
Whatever the cause, considering the damages a mild covid can have, this is not a virus you want to wreak havoc on your system too many times in your life. Killer t-cells are fun but you don't want your immune system in perpetual immune response mode.
edit: regarding protection against severe form (we should be talking of consequences rather than form): vaccines had a ~95-97% efficacy. With Omicron, even tough it stays high, it doesn't stay that high. What worries me is that we are talking yearly flu shots but covid will likely require 6 months booster shots if you want to keep riding the vaccine for protection against all form/consequences.
The vaccines are quite effective against a variant that is no longer in play and hasn't been for quite a while.
The people who are vaccinated against original Wuhan-Hu-1 make memory B-cells against Omicron as well. Even after boosting with Wuhan-Hu-1 spike antigen the neutralization titers against Omicron in the blood are high, even after all the spike mutations.
And again, there are around a thousand T-cell epitopes to spike and around 80% of them are conserved with Omicron, and there is very, very good reason to think that number doesn't ever get close to zero.
Your naive model of how the immune system works like a key and lock where if you change one of the pins then the vaccine stops working entirely is deeply flawed.
The human immune system is the end product of a hundreds of millions of years arms race between organisms and pathogens, and this isn't its first trip around the block with a pandemic virus that mutates. The whole way the humoral/memory immune system works is designed to deal with mutations.
That isn't fair on your part.
The bit that you picked out is factually correct. It is also correct that the vaccines + previous immunity will give an improved chance at a positive outcome.
But it's not the same as it was for the first wave, the vaccines were very specifically developed and tested in that setting and every future mutation had a worse response, due to attenuation due to time and mismatch with the target. This is not a 'lock that doesn't fit the key', it is a vaccine that simply works less well on things that it wasn't very specifically designed for, and that is totally expected. The degree to which the difference materializes changes with time and further mutations, with each of those contributing some element to the final efficacy calculation. How much is impossible to tell ahead of time.
Again this is just wrong.
If you've been vaccinated then you have B-cells that match Omicron, even though you weren't vaccinated with Omicron's spike.
Maybe my analogy didn't work, but you have a flawed understanding of the immune system.
As a concrete and well-studied example, the H1N1 strain of influenza stopped spreading in the human race in 1957. Nobody after that was exposed to it, everyone born before that was exposed going back to 1918. It was displaced by the H2N2 pandemic in 1957. It mutated in pigs for 50 years. Then it underwent triple recombination in 2009 and jumped back to humans -- with an H1 gene that was derived from the human strain and an avian N1 gene that hadn't ever been seen before.
The impact of that 2009 pandemic was considerably blunted by human cross reactive T-cell immunity in the older population who had seen the long-lost relative of H1 protein back before 1957. That 50 year old "pre-vaccination" did not wane and was cross reactive after 50 years of mutation and adaptation in pigs, and was still effective enough to protect against severe disease and death.
Nobody had immunity against infection of course, but that cross reactive immunity to H1N1 in all the older people helped to dramatically blunt the impact of the 2009 pandemic to the point where the human impact was lower than normal human influenza.
Cross-reactive B-cells and T-cells to future variants to SARS-CoV-2 are going to work the same way. Most of the epitopes will still be conserved and the T-cell reaction will be able to clear the disease and protect against severe disease and death.
You don't need reimmunization every time the virus mutates slightly, that would be poor design. The humoral immune system works closer to a Bayesian spam filter (arguably better).
Do you believe that there will be vaccine 'updates' (which especially for Moderna they were talking about from very early on), or is it that this mechanism is strong enough that until there is a real immune breakout we won't need them?
Wait, didn't the 57's H1N1 strain reappeared unchanged in the 70's and didn't a vaccination campaign happen then ? (I seem to remember it's mostly likely an unintentional lab leak, which would explain it didn't change in 25 years).
And it frightens me a bit because it shows they do not care about our well-being, public hospitals saturated policy has the nice side effect of not killing us but that's it.
Of course the vaccine will help tremendously (relative to, e.g., retroviral STDs), as will the constant pressure for people to return to their normal lives.
We won't be taking precautions forever though. Reinfection and vaccine breaktrhoughs will be mild. T-cells and B-cells don't wane the same way Nabs does and protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be durable.
There will be loss of protection as you age, but we already have that with all the ILI illnesses and viruses that lead to pneumonia and death in old people.
There won't be some worse virus that somehow punches through T-cells, that's getting into the realm of science fiction. While there's about 20 epitopes on spike that need to change for the virus to escape Nabs there's a few thousand T-cell epitopes that would need to change and many of those will be concentrated in conserved regions of the genome that can't mutate or the virus stops working.
And once you have a mature B-cell response your body can quickly respond with NAbs to prevent the viremia that leads to multiorgan infection. In fact with vaccine boosters it seems we may already have this level of protection, even against Omicron, and the jury is of course still out as to how durable that is and it may be more durable than initial shots were.
Once the virus completes the vaccination campaign the hard way then the pandemic is over and the human race has a new cold/flu virus, and we should treat it like a cold/flu virus. It is also unlikely that we'll continue boosting with vaccines. We're unlikely to get enough people boosting with vaccines every year to make a dent in spread and boosting will mostly be confined to people over 65 and those who are immune compromised. We won't ever boost our way to zero virus.
The "its just a flu" people were dead wrong in 2020, but very soon they're going to be entirely right. That doesn't fit neatly into the way that we carve up our society into Team Blue / Team Red though so its difficult for a lot of people to understand.
While I do agree (of course) with what you say about how the immune system cope with covid I still do disagree that those people will be right. Covid is still not a flu and unless the next variant loses its ability to wreak havoc on multiple organs it won't ever be like the flu.
I was not much into team blue/team red but last time I said to an antivax in my family that I was still wearing a mask in public transport despite being vaccinated and she told me she wished for me to get covid so I would stop be scared of it so much I decided to drop my empathy level a bit.
This is quite infuriating. We had a pretty good window when we could have done something about this and we totally squandered it.
> You'd have to eradicate all the deer, mink and every species you don't know about that has been infected with it
How much transfer is there in animal populations? Do we have any idea of the size of the populations affected? How does this translate to the original spillover event? After all, there must have been an animal reservoir prior to someone in Wuhan becoming the index patient.
We do similar things for various other animal borne plagues with varying degrees of success but there is more than one example of a successful eradication.
I honestly doubt it. We could have blunted the impact but it was out of Wuhan and in Italy before any doctors in Wuhan even knew about it or suspected. We were never going to lock down the entire world the way that China locked down. Even if the Western world did, then what would your plan be for Africa? What about the slums of Bangladesh and other areas in SE Asia?
We fucked it all up and a lot of people died who didn't need to, but I doubt the virus was ever stoppable starting from the first day it was even suspected.
> How much transfer is there in animal populations? Do we have any idea of the size of the populations affected?
Estimates are that around 1/3rd of the white tailed deer are infected and it readily transmits from deer to deer. According to the CDC:
> Recent experimental research shows that many mammals, including cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus. Cats, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, racoon dogs, and white-tailed deer can also spread the infection to other animals of the same species in laboratory settings.
Deer so far are the only known species where it is spreading epidemically in them in the wild, but there's likely to be others. We probably don't even know exhaustively all the species in the world that it might infect through having similar enough ACE-2 receptors, and you can't miss one.
And we've never eradicated a virus that has an animal reservoir. Successful eradication is only something you can really attempt if you don't have an animal reservoir (or you need to do something about the reservoir like wiping out the mosquitoes that feed on humans).
Ok, I accept that.
The problem with COVID-19 as far as I understand it compared to SARS-CoV is that with COVID-19 you first become contagious and then you start showing symptoms. That tiny little difference, first the danger, then the warning instead of the other way around is why it is going to be impossible to eradicate it, and in fact why this was likely impossible from the beginning.
But we could have massively slowed down the initial transmission (at severe economic cost but probably not nearly as bad as what we have to contend with now), buying time to get those vaccines developed and out there resulting in a much smaller first wave and subsequently fewer lives lost and people severely ill.
> Even if the Western world did, then what would your plan be for Africa? What about the slums of Bangladesh and other areas in SE Asia?
Yes, this was a global problem from day #1. But that is something that we don't seem to universally recognize even today.
> Deer so far are the only known species where it is spreading epidemically in them in the wild, but there's likely to be others.
ok
> We probably don't even know exhaustively all the species in the world that it might infect through having similar enough ACE-2 receptors, and you can't miss one.
The parallels with computer security are interesting here. Indeed, a single species missed and it would be matter of time before the whole circus would start over again. But at this point in time I do not believe there is a viable path to controlling the virus in the human population.
> And we've never eradicated a virus that has an animal reservoir.
Ok.
Given that Omicron has higher viral loads, shorter serial interval and shorter incubation period than Delta, it is much more likely that Omicron is more intrinsically virulent as well and would be worse if you dropped it on a totally naive population in the summer of 2019. The current population, however, is longer immunologically naive, and I think that researchers are underestimating the existing seroprevalence.
At the same time if there's still pockets of entirely unexposed/unvaccinated people out there in rural areas or something, Omicron will likely find them since it seems to largely ignore unboosted Nabs to prior infection or vaccination. Kids in colleges will be taking Omicron home for Christmas to rural families right about now and a few weeks from now we should find out how many seronegative people are left.
If it Omicron fizzles though it is going to just be that Delta didn't leave anyone immune naive in its wake.
There may also be a hard-to-infect/hard-to-seroconvert portion of the population left that could practically walk unmasked through a COVID ward in a hospital and not get infected. If they exist then the seronegative proportion of the population will start to be composed mostly of them over time through "purifying selection".
This is also why I'm somewhat skeptical about all the vaccine efficacy numbers that studies are throwing around. I don't think an adequate control group exists any more.
What? Omicron is a more infectious version of Delta.
Omicron causes the same number of deaths and hospitalisations and long covid as delta. It just also infects a lot more people more easily, and those people are at low risk and push the CFR down.
There’s still not enough data to conclude about mortality.
The good news is that prior immunity seems to confer a large degree of protection from severe illness still
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YBB9yZNJuz5j8hLdP/omicron-po...
> Your risk of getting hospitalised with SARS-CoV-2 (any variant) depends on two things? 1. how likely are you to get infected? 2. what is your chance of getting hospitalised once infected
> In simple terms, because omicron can escape immunity from past infections and vaccines, your protection against infection against omicron is vastly lower than with delta. This means risk of 1. is vastly increased- as you're less protected & also v. high background transmission.
So covid being "over" is really a state of mind/choice of when to accept that it's endemic and drop the hysterics/restrictions.
Omicron should be cheered as an effectively natural vaccine that looks to quickly end the worst of covid, yet media continues to fear monger about case counts, by and large. I am seeing some articles speaking to it as beneficial though.
The fear a lot of people have over covid is totally out of proportion with the actual data, and media by and large continues to stoke these fears.
And the point is Omicron is largely benign, which is reflected in data at this point.
There's no need for 95%+ of people who catch it to go to the hospital. Look at the South African data... Hospitalizations are order of magnitude below cases with omicron, vs Delta.
But single variable policy proponents, like you appear to be, don't care about the facts or the science, just number of cases.
Personally I'd rather advocate for policy that looks at the actual data in regards to health outcomes, as well as other variables that take into account second order effects of any policy. That's called following the science.
Covid extremists are the religious ones at this point. I'm glad society is finally rejecting their failed views and authoritarian virtue signaling. Of which has made 0 difference state by state in the US, by and large. Check FL or TX vs CA or NY (e.g. the data, the science).
We're living in a bizarro world where these people think they have the scientific high ground, but are actually following mass group think/bubble mentality and ignoring anything beyond case counts.
In the medium term yes; in the short term, with millions of unvaccinated people and a very fast exponential growth, it still has potential to overflow healthcare.
What a stroke of luck that we are here vs a more infectious strain of Delta or some other nightmare that would keep this rolling.