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Update on Omicron

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Re: Update on Omicron

#271

Post by pseudoramble »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #228

Summary: PCR tests still work, certain therapies still work, and interestingly, they claim to already know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while claiming to know basically nothing else (not even whether it is more transmissible).

I think the wording is kinda weird, and maybe it was a bit of encouraging people to still get vaccines? Since it's effective against Delta and other variants, it's still pretty important to get them. But it sounded unclear what impact would be at this point.

The whole snippet here:

> WHO is working with technical partners to understand the potential impact of this variant on our existing countermeasures, including vaccines. Vaccines remain critical to reducing severe disease and death, including against the dominant circulating virus, Delta. Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death.

Re: Update on Omicron

#272

Post by aisengard »

LasersGoPew wrote: post #237
samwillis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History shows that as a Virus mutates and evolves they tend towards more transmissibility but lower morality rate. There is a high chance Covid-19 will flow the same path. That’s not to say that a more deadly variant won’t appear it almost certainly will (or has already) but it is unlikely to become the dominant variant.

The current vaccines don't prevent infection, reinfection, or transmission -- which eliminates much of the selective pressure for lower mortality. We could end up with a situation where everyone alive on earth is vaccinated, carries the virus, receives regular boosters, and anyone who isn't or who misses a few boosters, faces certain death. Similar to Marek’s disease in chickens.

Nothing completely prevents infection, but vaccines are the best way to mitigate it.

Re: Update on Omicron

#273

Post by dxbydt »

ant6n wrote: post #207
mattrighetti wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That article is garbage, full of randomly picked data points, not accounting for other variables, blatant misinterpretations and convenient omissions. Anti-vaxxers love posting it.

The authors haven’t done any questionable transforms of the dataset - its literally the whitehouse dataset as a scatterplot. How is it garbage ?

Re: Update on Omicron

#274

Post by dnautics »

azangru wrote: post #177
ellyagg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a researcher posted a comment here on HN where they said that virus deadliness and contagiousness were in tension. I've heard this statement a lot, and have been rather puzzled by why this must be the case. It's certainly true over a long period of time (a deadly pathogen that will kill off its hosts too quickly will also perish); and it's also certainly true that if a pathogen is very contagious but not deadly it…

it doesn't have to be the case, but it often seems to be the case. I think there is a model by which deadliness is usually due to an accident -- note that most contemporary deadly pandemic diseases (even flu!) jump from animals to humans, so the deadliness is "accidental" in some sense, it's less deadly in the animal reservoir.

But maybe the better way to think of it is entropically/random walk POV. Starting from a base sequence S0, if the virus starts out at a local maximum of deadliness (or at least an increase in deadliness that only has certain mechanistic "channels of escape"), and then optimizes strictly for contagiousness, statistically speaking most mutations in an S1 will make it less deadly (even if marginally so), unless contagiousness and deadliness are mechanistically linked.

I think our understanding now is that the first order bottleneck in deadliness is something like "binding to a receptor", so most increases in contagiousness will have a strictly neutral-to-deleterious effect on deadliness.

Re: Update on Omicron

#275

Post by Muromec »

djbusby wrote: post #182
Hermel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We got to zero polio. What's stopping it from happening here?

We didn't get to zero polio really and people in some countries stopped vaccinating children against it.

Re: Update on Omicron

#276

Post by gotoeleven »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #269
aetherspawn wrote: post #154

Ok, 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 agree with this—not only do we have the usual moral imperative to help others, but it’s actually in our primary interest. The US has actually done exceedingly well here, having delivered more donations than all other countries combined (not sure if this is still the case; I haven’t checked in a couple of months). But there’s still more work to do and other rich countries need to get on board quickly. Apropos of not…

Most third world countries don't have the infrastructure to reliably deliver refrigerated vaccines at scale. And they've got to deliver two doses, months apart.

Its very "on brand" as the kids say now on twitter for NPR to platform a race-baiter though. The west, a product of mostly european people, came up with the vaccine but blah blah blah racism. Come up with your own vaccine then NPR race bait lady.

Re: Update on Omicron

#277

Post by flerovium »

samwillis wrote: post #167
mr_sturd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true; and even if Omicron turns out to be less dangerous than previous variants, it's a case of when, not if, a deadlier variant will emerge from a poorly-vaccinated population.

History shows that as a Virus mutates and evolves they tend towards more transmissibility but lower morality rate. There is a high chance Covid-19 will flow the same path. That’s not to say that a more deadly variant won’t appear it almost certainly will (or has already) but it is unlikely to become the dominant variant.

This is not true. COVID-19 is unusual because symptoms don’t tend to develop until the second week of the infection, by which time most of the active virus has been neutralized by the body’s immune response.

Unlike most viruses, COVID-19 does not have the same selective pressure to become less deadly.

Re: Update on Omicron

#278

Post by ExtremisAndy »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #228

Summary: PCR tests still work, certain therapies still work, and interestingly, they claim to already know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while claiming to know basically nothing else (not even whether it is more transmissible).

I also thought the line about current vaccine protection against severe disease/death sounded a little more confident than the evidence seems to justify. I’m no expert in this field and would never pretend to be. But I would like to know what they base that confidence on when there’s so little data at this point.

Re: Update on Omicron

#279

Post by sol_invictus »

aetherspawn wrote: post #154

Ok, 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’…

Well, your 2 cents would be wrong since SA is actively rejecting vaccines due to low intake: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...

Re: Update on Omicron

#280

Post by throwaway894345 »

Hermel wrote: post #165
aetherspawn wrote: post #154

Ok, 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.

I don’t know. You don’t need 100% efficacy to achieve herd immunity (obviously I’m not an epidemiologist and my terms are imprecise) if you have a sufficiently vaccinated population.

I generally agree that we should depart from a covid zero strategy, but not because the vaccines aren’t effective; rather, because too many people are making decisions based on FUD and there doesn’t seem like much that can be done about that in the sort of timeframe during which a “covid-zero” strategy might work.

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