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Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#151

Post by dtech »

rich_sasha wrote: post #37
boringg wrote: post #21

I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while t…

Sort of. Sometimes. Viruses evolve according to evolutionary pressures. I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests - perhaps it's too soon, or even, who knows, maybe they are there and we don't know? The common trope is that if the virus is too deadly, then it doesn't have a chance to find new hosts. This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pa…

> I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests

PCR tests for RNA or DNA, that's not something a mutation can change. I don't know for Covid, but usually a PCR test targets something fundamental & stable. That might need to be updated with new variants.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#152

Post by jmull »

ufo wrote: post #13

The title is misleading. It is possible that Omicron is just as severe and that the effect in the study is because a large percentage of the population had some immunity from a previous infection or vaccine. > South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection. We don’t think it’s a…

The headline looks good to me.

Few headlines work without context so what we want is for them to choose the most obvious, pertinent context. I think we all care a lot more about what Omicron means to us now, not what it would have meant if it were the main variant at the start of the pandemic.

And, of course, anyone who cares about the topic should read past the headline.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#153

Post by ed25519FUUU »

ceejayoz wrote: post #45
listless wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should plan on getting it at some point. That’s what endemic means and that’s where we are. You’re just prolonging the inevitable.

"Prolonging the inevitable" still has a benefit for hospital capacity. If every uninfected person went and got it tomorrow, it wouldn't be pretty. I'm still wearing my KN95 to busy indoor places in part because it's been nice not getting colds/flus for the last two years, too.

I can still remember my boss telling people with a cold to take a DayQuil and power through their workday.

I really hope that mentality never comes back.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#154

Post by ceejayoz »

aantix wrote: post #103
jjk166 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoping it's mild is great. Betting your life it's mild is dumb.

243 deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality ). The death distributions are very clear. If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.

Some NFL stadiums host 100k people. Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#155

Post by stef25 »

Is the "less severe" part just from a roll of the dice? I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years. Be it a variant of Covid, or something new altogether.

That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#156

Post by iso1631 »

galangalalgol wrote: post #120
wokwokwok wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting something to be true does not make it true. Even if it turns up to actually be true , the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true. The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “i…

Don't all viruses become more mild over time? Even Ebola gets much less lethal towards the end of an outbreak as it evolves to preserve its habitat. Small pox is a possible counter ecample it seems like it was pretty lethal for millennia.

No, they tend to become more spreadable, but there's no reason they couldn't become even more harmful as they evolve, rather than less. The strains that will win out are those that do less immediate harm (thus become more spreadable as people don't stay in bed ill), but that doesn't mean after a week or two they couldn't get really harmful (we saw in the first wave that covid was generally a week of nothing, a week of symptoms at home, a week in hospital, a week in intensive care, and then into the grave, with a certain chance of recovering each week. Imagine a mutation which reduced that recovering chance, that would cause more death, but not affect the spreading in the first week)

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#157

Post by jjk166 »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #107
tgv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would not have been a particularly good advice in times of polio.

People probably fear being paralyzed more than they fear death.

Neither are particularly desirable.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#158

Post by dham »

marpstar wrote: post #65
panarky wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a little optimistic? Sure, for this immediate wave [more transmissible less virulent] is better than [more transmissible more virulent]. But that's awfully myopic. What happens after that? Since mutation rate is a function of the number of viral particles, and more transmission means many more hosts incubating many more particles, we should expect to see more new variants, faster. So the probability just went up th…

It's a miracle that the human race has survived this long, and COVID is clearly not driving us to extinction.

If the world wasn't so fat and it was 50 years ago, COVID probably would have been nothing, or the Hong Kong Flu.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#159

Post by iso1631 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #154
aantix wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

243 deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality ). The death distributions are very clear. If you're healthy, betting that you would be OK is a very reasonable bet.

Some NFL stadiums host 100k people. Would you go to a game if you knew 243 people were going to be randomly executed at it?

I suspect many people would go especially if they knew 243 people were going, the types of people who believe it wouldn't happen to them, only to others (probably someone who made the "bad choices" in life because god/fate/karma/etc)

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#160

Post by nicoburns »

galangalalgol wrote: post #120
wokwokwok wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting something to be true does not make it true. Even if it turns up to actually be true , the fact that so many people want it to be true is an excellent reason to be cautious in how you look at things here, because that is causing a lot of people to say things that haven’t been proven to be true. The evidence so far looks like cause to be cautiously optimistic, but when the people giving out that evidence say “i…

Don't all viruses become more mild over time? Even Ebola gets much less lethal towards the end of an outbreak as it evolves to preserve its habitat. Small pox is a possible counter ecample it seems like it was pretty lethal for millennia.

No. They often do, but not always. Other counter examples: Rabies. Spanish Flu.
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