Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by peteradio on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:30PM
(#29740432)
When 100% of the population was dry tinder hospitals were under strain X.
Now we have 1/10th that by your estimate. Why wouldn't we be under significantly less strain?
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by pfg on Thursday December 30, 2021 @04:15PM
(#29741516)
Current variants are significantly more infectious (R0 used to be around 2.5-3.0 for the ancestral strain, Delta was 5+, Omicron estimates go up to 10). Vaccine efficacy is also reduced for these variants. We've also scaled back non-pharmaceutical interventions in many places.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by krona on Thursday December 30, 2021 @06:36PM
(#29742946)
You've neglected to account for the substantial difference in average hospital stay period between Delta and Omicron.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by pfg on Thursday December 30, 2021 @08:57PM
(#29743968)
Do we know how large this effect is for the unvaccinated? I'm still not sure if the numbers we're seeing from countries with relatively high seroprevalence through either vaccination, infection, or both can easily be applied to other countries.
This UK report[1] does show a corrected Hazard Ratio of 0.76 relative to Delta, but more than half of this group seems to have had a previous infection. Not sure what it would look like if you exclude them.
[1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by lamontcg on Thursday December 30, 2021 @08:17PM
(#29743738)
Because it has never taken more than a small fraction of the immune-naive population getting coronavirus to have the severe cases overload the hospitals and Delta made that worse.
And Omicron is able to reinfect through the recovered/vaccinated population and we're not taking any precautions at all now so the rate of infections is through the roof.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by vxcayx on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:34PM
(#29740468)
The Omicron curve in South Africa looks like a Bell curve and is in the process of dropping as fast as it rose. Without vaccines or boosters.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/28/omicron-is-not...
"Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said."
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by colordrops on Thursday December 30, 2021 @04:17PM
(#29741541)
There should be special scalable government covid wards to handle overflow at this point. This is no longer a collective problem, considering that the remaining unvaccinated are mostly by choice. The externalities are far worse than the disease now.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by alistairSH on Thursday December 30, 2021 @07:24PM
(#29743337)
There aren’t any excess medical professionals to staff a scalable COVID ward.
Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students
by colordrops on Friday December 31, 2021 @03:46AM
(#29746129)
Are we really that unimaginative as a society so as to walk the decision tree all the way down to "not enough doctors and nurses" as the intractable problem behind all this suffering and strife? I used the word "scalable" with intention. There has been more than enough time to design a protocol and train less experienced staff that could be utilized in most cases. Highly trained medical professionals would be reserved for unique situations, which surely are not the bulk of covid hospitalizations. Hundreds of billions could have been invested into a scalable protocol that doesn't require drafting of existing medical professionals, and the cost would have still just been a drop in a bucket compared to how much has been spent on relief and how much has been lost by society as a whole. Other than R&D in pills and shots, the response to covid has been lethargic and hopeless. They didn't use this excuse of lack of medical professionals during the polio epidemic - for those that got left behind by the vaccine, they used ingenuity and created the iron lung.
I mean yes, that's still sort of the point.
There's still probably about 10% of the population which is unvaccinated and unexposed. If they all wind up catching Omicron in the next 2-3 months (due to its ability to reinfect and ignore neutralizing antibodies to travel through the population to find those still-vulnerable hosts) then the fraction of them winding up in the hospital will be sufficient to knock over the hospital system again. We didn't have any excess capacity in our medical system when this started, and we have less now.
The population's tolerance for any sort of behavioral changes is low, and the unvaccinated aren't listening to anyone, so the real only remaining lever to pull is recommending boosters to try to provide some level of protection against disease and transmission over the next couple of months in order to flatten the curve yet again.
The modelling estimates that I've read though are that we're at about 90% of the population being exposed (depends somewhat widely on vaccination status and how hard the area was hit by Delta though), so we're just about done with the pandemic. Omicron should mostly finish the job that Delta started of finding all the holdouts and burning through all the dry wood in the population. In the meantime though that last 10% is enough to put the medical system under too much stress again.