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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

#361

Post by manwe150 »

chimprich wrote: post #334
roody15 wrote: post #175

This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.

> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world. There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections. The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fanta…

Well, logically speaking, we never needed vaccines, since some percentage of the human race will survive COVID regardless. The question always was just whether you can improve your own odds of staying healthy. And so far that data seems to have been strongly in favor of vaccination of yourself and those around you, with further increased benefit demonstrated from opting for a booster shot. But still never being essential or necessary for survival.

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

#362

Post by lovecg »

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…

Viruses that evade the PCR test for Covid would be a different species almost by definition, and with enough mutations that could happen. These tests don’t detect other common cold causing coronaviruses for example.

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

#363

Post by peteradio »

GeekyBear wrote: post #339
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.

>The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild. From today: > lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and account…

Dude that article is saying its due to underlying immunity according to the source vaccinologist:

> Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at Wits University in Johannesburg who ran trials on AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine, believes it is the substantial percentage of the population in places like Gauteng province — which includes the urban hubs of Pretoria and Johannesburg and has seen a dramatic uptick in new infections — with underlying T-cell immunity that is preventing the disease from becoming more severe.

It should bring deep shame on people to see their own source material used directly in contradiction to their claim.

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

#364

Post by jollybean »

The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it.

So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.

Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.

FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1]

[1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article

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

#365

Post by roywiggins »

defaultprimate wrote: post #352
roywiggins wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already data that shows masks work. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bangladesh-mask-study-do-... https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article "At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were…

Look, I'm not qualified to evaluate a study like this, but between Science and "el gato malo" published on Substack, I think I'm going to have to go with Science on this one, pending some recognized expert in the field with a human name saying otherwise.

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

#366

Post by NoblePublius »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #283
NoblePublius wrote: post #232

Who cares? If you die with Omicron, you are very old and dying above the average life expectancy, or already sick with chronic preventable illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices. We should be banning McDonalds advertising, not deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police. If you are not very old or already sick and get omicron, whether you have antibodies or not, you’re going to experience mild symptoms, if any…

> deputizing waitresses to be vaccination police Oh god, I fled post-the_donald reddit to avoid trite drivel like this. Please don't.

You've obviously never worked a service job.

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

#367

Post by rolph »

chinathrow wrote: post #268
calebm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).

How can a virus have a "strategy" when all which occurs are random mutations during replication? I wonder about this a lot.

the random mutation concept is close to but not exactly the situation. there is a low frequency event that results in mix and match of large regions of sequence. This is very different from error prone replication error, or point mutation.

this occurs when a host is coinfected with two or more viral strands of differing origin. most often virus of close familial lineage do this, but that isnt exclusive.

the mechanism is molecular promiscuity during replication, there is a jump from one strand to another in proximity, thus recombining.

cocirculation is required for this to occur, high frequency of co infection is required for recombinant mutants to occur with predictive certainty.

like the gatekeeper and the keymaster, we should avoid allowing delta, and omicron to contact each other, and surveil the sequences closely.

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

#368

Post by throwawaymsft »

calebm wrote: post #224
roody15 wrote: post #175

This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.

I agree. Maybe COVID has changed to be more cooperative with humanity (it's a good strategy for parasites to not kill their hosts).

People think the virus has a strategy, like it’s playing a sport and deciding an outcome.

Tell the Black Plague its strategy of killing 30% of is suboptimal. Or to the species driven to extinction by a disease. “Inanimate object, that was suboptimal to your existence!”

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

#369

Post by native_samples »

Sargos wrote: post #169
dham wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spanish Flu definitely not the same severity as COVID, not even close.

Apparently though people's risk perceptions about COVID are wildly off base, by orders of magnitude.

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

40% of US Democrats think COVID hospitalization risk if you're unvaccinated is 50%! Fifty percent! The real answer is less than 1%. Other polls have shown similar things for fatality rates, like estimated 16% IFR on average in France. It really makes me realize why people act in such extreme ways, if that's what they think.

COVID is to a large extent a total failure of our societies ability to disseminate accurate information. Unfortunately this misinformation catastrophe is largely the work of the very same people who are constantly complaining about misinformation.

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

#370

Post by renaudg »

roody15 wrote: post #175

This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.

> The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide.

No, this scenario wouldn't be good news at all.

Firstly, a marginally lower case fatality rate is a linear improvement, whereas much higher transmissibility is an exponential worsening.

In other words, the reduced risk of an infected person getting into hospital is dwarfed by the exponential increase in the number of sick people, and the net result is way more hospital admissions. This could easily overwhelm healthcare systems in the coming weeks and make them unavailable for anyone who needs them, not just Covid patients (unfortunately, these indirect casualties of Covid are undercounted)

Secondly, each new infection is an additional ticket in the great variant evolution lottery. The more infections, the higher the risk of a vaccine-escaping, serious disease-causing new variant being selected. Low vaccinations rates in South Africa, plus the high number of untreated HIV+ patients there (who struggle to get rid of Covid and are a perfect breeding ground for variants) are thought to have contributed to Omicron's emergence.

That's why "let it rip through so we get natural immunity" is such a short sighted stance.

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