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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

#411

Post by jdminhbg »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #231
aantix wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That risk is an order of magnitude lower. Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.

> Moreover, you're not taking that risk "...every time you drive". That risk is much lower, of course, given that most people drive more than once a year.

The OP comparison of Covid to a football game has the same issue, of course.

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

#412

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#413

Post by chimprich »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #377
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.

>Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear training running full steam. Enragement is engagement, and how better to enrage people than scaring everyone out of their wits and politicising everything as far as humanly possible? I'm certainly no COVID denier nor vaccine sceptic, though to me it's astonishing how little discussion has happened around the fact that everyone from some randomer's blog to…

The evidence of the past year or two suggests otherwise.

For the first few months of 2020, media outlets were constantly downplaying the threat of pandemic. They consistently under-reported the risk. "Should we be worried? No! The threat is remote!"

What also sells papers (or attracts eyeballs) is giving people an impression of superiority: "look at all those ridiculous other people panicking!"

There's also the generation of anger: "you're being lied to! It's all a hoax / other people are trying to manipulate you by making you scared!"

Another angle is making people feel good: "everything is fine, don't worry about anything!"

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

#414

Post by snarf21 »

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…

I think we have to be very careful with data from around the world. There are a lot of co-factors. We already know that generally being immuno-compromised makes covid a much riskier proposition for those groups. In a recent deep dive into the Ivermectin studies done around the world, it was shown and proven that in Bangladesh that Ivermectin reduced covid mortality. However, when digging deeper, Bangladesh has a 80%+ infection rate of worms with most people having 7-23. So taking Ivermectin helped save patients from covid mortality but only in the sense that it made them less immuno-compromised. The US population (e.g.) doesn't have worm infections like that. Any data from a specific geographic area/country/race/etc. may only have validity within that same group.

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

#415

Post by mikeyouse »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #405
mikeyouse wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny too - there's apparently no consideration given to "maybe I don't know anyone who's died because everyone in my community is so cautious".

That's a good point.

Just as an anecdote -- I moved from a very cautious place (SF) to a place on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I knew a handful of people who were infected in SF but none who died, but I know a ton of people here who have got the disease, including a bunch who have died. The local Facebook group is filled with prayer requests for loved ones who are being admitted under very dire circumstances and my healthcare worker friends here are completely shellshocked from all the death they've seen in the community.

Give me "unnecessarily wear a mask while walking the dog" and no deaths every day if my other option is "never wear a mask anywhere" and be surrounded by death.

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

#416

Post by spurgu »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #390
GeekyBear wrote: post #339

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 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…

One of the issues of fast spread is that hospitalizations and deaths lag behind infections for a few weeks. If you don't correct for it, it's easy to see "10x as many cases but few deaths" just because cases went up so quickly that deaths didn't start yet. Of course, this can be corrected for, and I'd expect a good study to do so - but I would NOT trust a typical news article to make the distinction, nor would I trus…

A few weeks? From what I've seen staring at case/death charts I'd say it's somewhere around two.

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

#417

Post by defaultprimate »

roywiggins wrote: post #409
defaultprimate wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study is not and has not passed peer review.

Hasn't it? Looks published to me. It has a doi and everything. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

My mistake, the link in the article you first posted still shows it as a working paper and I couldn't find it with the original title when searching.

Interestingly the DOI does not show up

https://dx.doi.org/

Here's some further criticisms:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1073440/latest.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01296

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

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

#418

Post by the_doctah »

kevinpet wrote: post #276
simonh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we treat Covid before hospitalisation? I just caught it at the weekend and feeling pretty crappy. I'm not aware of any particular treatment I should be taking.

There's one approved drug that is probably effective against covid, Fluvoxamine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8633915/ Everyone knows Paxlovid is safe and effective too, but you aren't allowed to take it yet.

"Everyone knows"? Paxlovid was submitted for emergency approval to the FDA just last month.

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

#419

Post by thaumasiotes »

dragontamer wrote: post #404
stickfigure wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir. Good news, selection pressure is for more-contagious and less-deadly. It will happen eventually, and then covid will be just another common cold.

> It is the only endgame. The covid virus is not going away. Even if everyone on the planet suddenly got vaccinated simultaneously, the virus has an animal reservoir. You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right? We still wiped it out. Smallpox, Measles, Polio. We've wiped out diseases before, and we can do it again if we so try. I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of dis…

> You know that Smallpox was in cows (aka: Cowpox), right?

It seems unlikely that many cows caught smallpox, given the prevalence of cowpox. Cowpox is a different disease, and was the first vaccine, after which the very concept of "vaccination" is named. Milkmaids had long been known for their immunity to smallpox. If smallpox had been in cows, milkmaids would have been known for universal smallpox exposure instead.

> I'm frankly more flabbergasted that people don't even know the history of diseases

Not a good look.

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

#420

Post by the_doctah »

barbazoo wrote: post #311
34679 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the quote that says "with" instead of "from" until the data is released.

I love how we often assume every single word someone says is carefully chosen to 100% reflect what one wants to communicate.

For press releases like this, they damn well should be.
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