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Update on Omicron

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Re: Update on Omicron

#291

Post by Ginden »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #280
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.

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…

> 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.

Treshold of herd immunity depends on transmitability. For delta variant, if r=6 estimates are true, you would need 100% of population vaccinated in last 5 months (because after that infection immunity drops too low).

Re: Update on Omicron

#292

Post by missingcolours »

pedalpete wrote: post #176
mattrighetti wrote: post #159

Earlier 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.

Given the apparently low efficacy of the current batch of vaccines in preventing infection and transmission, I'm not sure that it's any harder for variants to occur in, say, New Mexico than South Africa. If the case rates are higher, the odds of variants is higher.

Re: Update on Omicron

#293

Post by dunco »

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.

Define "work". Countries that pursued zero covid largely avoided hospital overcrowding and massive amounts of preventable death. It might never have been possible to actually zero covid out to extinction, but it was possible to be close to zero for long enough to get everyone vaccinated. Millions of lives have likely been saved because of these strategies.

"zero covid" is still the right strategy for a disease for which the population is unvaccinated; even if it doesn't achieve full elimination.

Re: Update on Omicron

#294

Post by afavour »

dahfizz wrote: post #98
afavour wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wish people would be more specific when saying “the media”. There are a lot of media outlets out there, some are level headed, some are hysterical.

Usually when people say "the media", they mean the mainstream liberal leaning news companies like CNN[1] or New York Times[2]. When talking about Fox (conservative media), people usually just say that. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/28/world/coronavirus-omicron-var... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/governors-omicron-covi...

You’re kind of proving the point here, the media does not only exist in some “conservative vs not conservative” binary. CNN is a cable news network, NYT is a subscription based newspaper. Their output differs accordingly.

Re: Update on Omicron

#295

Post by dnautics »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #283
xg15 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there are Zero Covid strategies that work, see China or New Zealand. The problem is just that those measures are so drastic that many countries would probably not accept them. The goal in western countries is to get to the "endemic phase" of the infection - i.e. "live with the virus". That's all well and good, unfortunately this requires the disease to become significantly less deadly than it still is. We're…

The first and most important step in the New Zealand strategy is “be an island”. You need a lot of draconianism to make up for land borders.

This tracks. Hawaii still has the lowest COVID in all of the US, and even the city (note: not the county) of alameda has the lowest COVID rate in all cities in the bay area (it's kind of a pain in the ass to get to). Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, are all islands. And South Korea is... politically an island.

Re: Update on Omicron

#296

Post by hx2a »

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’…

> The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.

Even if it were possible and achievable to vaccinate all humans, we'd still have a problem because COVID has spread to other mammal species. There's no reasonable plan that I know of to vaccinate animals in the wild.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/10/1054224...

> 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’ll never get out of this.

But you're 100% right about this. I don't want what I said about your last sentence to diminish the importance of wealthy nations sharing the vaccine with other countries. We're all in this together. The idea that a country can vaccinate only their own citizens and then consider this problem solved is completely false.

Re: Update on Omicron

#297

Post by ageofwant »

xg15 wrote: post #170
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’…

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.

Due to low trust in government after decades of corruption and mismanagement of basically everything who can blame them ? And who stepped into into this void of authority... Facebook, bastion of truth and science and critical thinking.

America's inability to curb its own propaganda machines and its capitalism uber alles rhetoric and group-think boomerangs right back. This pandemic has certainly shaken a lot of nuts out of the rug, but where did those nuts came from ?

Re: Update on Omicron

#298

Post by cole-k »

enlyth wrote: post #110
cole-k wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answers address your question here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52676/did-the-w...

This answer does not address the why, only the 'did it happen'. Like other commenters have said, Nu was skipped because it sounded too similar to "New", and Xi was skipped because of Xi Jinping. It's not a conspiracy, it's to avoid political controversy, before someone starts a flamewar on here.

Well, if you want to be picky, the parent comment asked

> When did it get renamed to "Omicron"?

which is neither "why" nor "did it happen".

Regardless, it seems that the other commenters you're referring to are citing the same sources in the stack exchange thread [1] [2].

I'm not sure what additional clarification your comment has to offer, as there is already speculation on why Xi was skipped [1] [3].

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/52686

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29374052

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373580

Re: Update on Omicron

#299

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

pseudoramble wrote: post #271
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 va…

> maybe it was a bit of encouraging people to still get vaccines

This is exactly what it feels like - and what we need is clear, honest statements of facts, not attempts to mislead for some higher goals.

Given the whole context (this is a post about Omicron) and the fact that they aren't qualifying some of the other statements either ("Corticosteroids and IL6 Receptor Blockers will still be effective for managing patients with severe COVID-19"), I am going to treat this statement as a claim about Omicron. I don't really care much whether they are explicitly trying to make a statement about Omicron, intentionally writing it in an ambiguous way to make people think it's about Omicron while being able to claim that that's not what they meant, or whether they're incompetent to communicate clearly - either way, if the statement turns out to not be supported, it's a further signal that everything coming from the WHO cannot be trusted.

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