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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

#161

Post by aantix »

dTal wrote: post #149
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.

That works out to 1-in-400. 6 times more deadly than base jumping. Not factoring the risk of long-term disability from post-viral CFS. I'll happily give those odds a miss.

Those (likely) aren't your odds.

Without knowing your specific background, your numbers are probably much less.

E.g. ages 0-17, there's been 644 deaths. Across a cohort with ~75,000,000 people.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...

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

#162

Post by mitigating »

tannisphere4 wrote: post #124
zzzeek wrote: post #27

cue the "it's just the flu!" army. on this end, I do not want covid at all, straight up. I will keep wearing my N95 to all the dirty looks I keep getting and boost as much as the boosts are there.

But would you also engage in these behaviors if you couldn't go online and A) project action onto an "army" that neither exists or has occurred; and B) gain social prestige by allying with a dominant narrative? The question isn't intended to be rude, or suggesting your motives are tarnished. Just a query into the extent online projection (and presumptions about it) affect our choices. Note also that I am distinguishi…

Since zzzeek is an online identity, how much social prestige is he getting? Does he direct other people to posts that he wears a mask?

Maybe on Facebook where people often use their real name I could see that as a possible motive but here?

Why is it so hard to think that people who disagree with you about masks are wearing them because they want to be safe? I wonder if the divide and anger is because each side believes the other is taking action to make a point and nothing else.

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

#163

Post by johnchristopher »

trutannus wrote: post #35
bognition wrote: post #9

There are a few important bits here: First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020." and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 perce…

It sounds from this like the diminished efficacy is being compensated for by the reduced lethality of the new virus.

Reduced lethality ? How many times can we catch covid ? Symptoms might be cold like in ~90% case but long term damage ?

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

the-dude wrote: post #143
lambdaba wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of anthropomorphism is acceptable, it's not like the poster doesn't understand how evolution works... I'm pretty sure "experts" have used the phrase as well. The gist of the comment is correct though.

A variant could emerge which is more contagious and more deadly.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by Fiahil »

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…

Play with Plague Inc. (https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-inc)

Every single press title the last two years can be related somehow to a single Game. New variants, new mutations, spreading faster vs killing more people, ... All these tradeoffs are quite well modeled.

Building a resistance to vaccines ("the cure") is also one areas where your virus can evolve, and -to be honnest- I prefer it to fight vaccines than to develop a "total organ failure" mutation.

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

#166

Post by ineedasername »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19
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…

I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this…

Optimism on the part of news outlets can be dangerous here. It may cause people to prematurely relax their precautions, and if it turns out to be wrong it will further erode trust in media outlets that jumped the gun. Considering the study was comparing Omicron to the initial wave of 2020 infections (a strange choice) I am not confident in the results. If it turns out to be correct, it will be more of an accident than accurate analysis.

As for the doctor that discovered it: Here experience with infected individuals is anecdotal data. She has not, to my knowledge, been involved in systematic studies. She is a general practitioner so here experience with this has been on the ground, primarily with the patients she has seen. Certainly this is useful but it is not a replacement for well-formed studies. Medical research and epidemiology are distinctly different activities from medical practice, even if many people involved in both have a medical degree.

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

#167

Post by _pmf_ »

jjk166 wrote: post #89
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suspect that most people who are were already vulnerable have already passed or built immunity if the virus is equally dangerous, resulting in a lower than equal death rate despite equivalent risk. Although... Can we never, not even once, be a little optimistic? To me, the news that we may be replacing COVID with a less severe strain is some of the best news of the year. COVID clearly isn't going away at this…

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

> Betting your life it's mild is dumb.

But keeping the panic dialed up to 11 for two years is very healthy.

Signed, someone who probably now has a cardiac neurosis.

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

#168

Post by aantix »

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?

Would you attend the game if it were 11 people?

Because that's what you do every time you drive. 11 crash fatalities per 100,000 people.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

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

#169

Post by Sargos »

dham wrote: post #158
marpstar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Spanish Flu was over a hundred years ago and hit the world the same way Covid did even though there was no McDonald's or obesity epidemic back then.

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

#170

Post by hnaccount_rng »

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.

Only if you restrict to viruses that haven't killed their host population ;) But even then you could just wait until another higher-intelligence species appears and give them the same pathogen.

If everything survives, the resulting community can live with each other and that requires a sufficiently mild virus. However that doesn't help predict the future, because you can't enforce the precondition of everyone surviving.

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