Please rename it back to Covid Nu, so we can use Covid Xi for next round, who made this for the whole world to suffer.
Update on Omicron
191–200 of 794 posts
Re: Update on Omicron
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that this has been discovered in Africa doesn’t mean that it originated there in the first place. > Several scientists said they suspected that the variant had been spreading undetected in countries with lackluster sequencing efforts before it surfaced in Botswana and South Africa, giving it more time to scatter globally. Nevertheless, European nations did not find the variant until after South Africa alerte…
This is correct, but I don't believe it devalues the original comment any less. Any part of the world where vaccination rates are lower allows (I assume) any variant to grow in that region, and then makes it easier to export to other parts of the world.
That seems to be disputed too, this is an interesting read: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.[0]
> At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days
> Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.
> There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated
Of course that could be different for third world countries.
Re: Update on Omicron
#193The media blows these variants out of proportion. I've been doing research in computational epidemiology now for quite some time. Get concerned when we say there is a new strain. As for now, this new variant will be used for political purposes (look at us, we're doing something about it). This variant has been in the US for about two months, and it is easy to spot in the data in places like Colorado. Don't blame me,…
Are there any sources you know of regarding the related African countries selling their allocations?
Re: Update on Omicron
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wasn't that the most up-to-date data at the time? No, China was already arresting doctors for warning about human-to-human transmission in December. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/world/asia/Li-Wenliang-ch...
It was the most up-to-date data the WHO had their hands on at the time.
Weren’t there already YouTube videos documenting this at the time? Unless they came out the next week.
Re: Update on Omicron
#195South Africa's COVID-19 adviser, Prof Barry Schoub told Sky News that so far, most Omicron cases, were mild. https://youtu.be/3RSRtuRm92o Edit: "South African doctor who raised alarm about omicron variant says symptoms are ‘unusual but mild’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas... "Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy pr…
It is not yet clear whether infection with Omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants, including Delta. I thought this was weirdly worded. It's also not clear whether Omicron disease is less severe, either, right? A long time ago, long before the pandemic politicized messaging so much, a researcher posted a comment here on HN where they said that virus deadliness and contagiousness…
Delta managed to thread the needle and grow both more deadly and have higher transmission.
I'm sure some variant in the future will improve both deadliness and transmission. But there is a low chance that this variant (or any particular variant in general) will accomplish this feat.
Re: Update on Omicron
#196Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…
Absolutely true, but not the whole story unfortunately. While many African countries need more vaccines, South Africa was in the process of throttling shipments because less and less people were getting vaccinated. So the other big challenge is raising acceptance of the vaccines and fighting denialism.
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Re: Update on Omicron
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, I'm just the messenger. But the gist I get is this: locking down select subsets (of high risk individuals) is doable simply because locking down everyone is doable. But speaking for myself, the fact that early on there were such a ridiculous number of deaths in retirement homes (primarily in NY, NJ, PA and CA) never smelled right to me. We had data - openly mentioned in the media - about Italy and the elderly…
> locking down select subsets (of high risk individuals) is doable We can’t convince an idiot minority to spend five minutes getting a shot. We’re supposed to trust them to confine themselves at home?
You don't understand the problem, do you? Nor do you understand you're part of that problem.
It's - by definition - is a pandemic of everybody. Anyone who suggests otherwise is suspect. Those ppl fuel the discontent. The fact that they're allowed to furthers the divide.
The phrase that comes to mind is: "Divided we fall." An absolute truth if there ever was one.
Re: Update on Omicron
#198Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…
I don't think the virus could ever be stopped with today's vaccines, even if everyone was vaccinated. Data from fully or almost fully vaccinated countries clearly show that this doesn't eliminate the virus. It of course helps, but we have to depart from the idea that the "zero covid" strategies work.
Which are the fully vaccinated countries you're talking about here? Vaccines for kids 5-12 are just starting and even the countries with the most vaccine intake still have 10%-20% that won't take it. At any rate it's really enough to bring this to a low enough case per capita which generally the vaccines do help with. The less active cases the lower the number of random mutations.
Re: Update on Omicron
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did better information become available... Yes. We have significantly more information on the utility of cloth and surgical masking than we did in March of 2020.
Ahh, so the Asian countries that have been using them for decades, as well as medical workers all over, have been hiding their secrets from us until after March 8th, 2020. Perhaps the real answer is a little bit of both things can be true? That is, if you don’t consider Fauci an infallible deity?
Asian countries have been using them in part due to pollution. In March 2020, there wasn't much literature on the efficacy of it for disease prevention; we now have a lot more information on this.
Healthcare workers are trained not to "keep fiddling with the mask"; that aspect of Fauci's quote seems to indicate some of the concern was not the theoretical mechanics of masking, but the more practical aspects of having the untrained public doing it.
Re: Update on Omicron
#200The media blows these variants out of proportion. I've been doing research in computational epidemiology now for quite some time. Get concerned when we say there is a new strain. As for now, this new variant will be used for political purposes (look at us, we're doing something about it). This variant has been in the US for about two months, and it is easy to spot in the data in places like Colorado. Don't blame me,…
That's not wrong, but this time it was scientists who were ringing the bell.
This write-up [1] explains the particular mutations in Omicron in more detail. Basically, Omicron appears to be a perfect storm of various concerning mutations that had appeared in individual strains before - now all assembled into one strain.
Add to that a sudden, unusual spike in infections right where the variant is found and I guess things can start to look scary for a moment.
Of course, it's still guesswork and even though the genome looks scary, the real-world effects may be mild.
[1] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-concernin...