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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

#701

Post by londons_explore »

drited wrote: post #576
kansface wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this study. Why not compare the hospitalization/fatality rates between _current_ omicron/delta infections between similar cohorts? Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off. Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting? edit from the summary :-/ : Vac…

Thank you for removing the uncertainty on that! Agreed regarding the unspecific reporting. Seemed to me to be one of those areas where the author assumed you'd assume... I dislike that as it introduces the possibility of misinterpretation. Now the next question is what is the percentage reduction in deaths for Omicron vs prior variants. It seems like more than the 29 percent reduction in hospitalisation given the fir…

Most countries are not doing very many full genome sequences, so confirmed cases of Omicron are very low. For this to coincide with a death is unlikely. Deaths also typically take ~3 weeks from infection. 3 weeks ago, there weren't many cases.

Omicron cases are 'suspected' via a partial match in a PCR test (widely done), but this isn't definitive.

End result: There are very few confirmed deaths.

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

#702

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

mchusma wrote: post #695

Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…

If we're only looking at deaths, only for vaccinated people - then yes.

If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.

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

#703

Post by legutierr »

data_dan_ wrote: post #691
vimy wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes me wonder why it takes so long this time?

Testing and clinical trials!

It would have been much faster if regulators and ethicists hadn’t been so squeamish about challenge trials.

In order to save dozens of lives that might have been lost in challenge trials, we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives so that we could wait for more ethically-sound vaccine trials to complete.

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

#704

Post by bink »

jjk166 wrote: post #207
fer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually. But as it appeared it was more virulent than its immediate ancestors.

Eventually in this case being approximately 18-24 months from the first wave, which coincidentally is very close to where we are in the current pandemic.

The Spanish Flu is a single data point. I wouldn't read too much into the 18-24 months stat.

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

#705

Post by s1artibartfast »

vimy wrote: post #700
data_dan_ wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing and clinical trials!

We don’t do clinical trials for the yearly flu vaccine update, do we?

We also have 80 years of experience with the flu vaccine opposed to 8 months

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

#706

Post by oneoff786 »

mchusma wrote: post #695

Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…

It’s not “banned” it’s just not approved yet. The US is making plans to buy tons of it in advance. Banned has a very specific connotation that is wildly out of place.

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

#707

Post by bink »

willcipriano wrote: post #652
vkou wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the antivaxx/snake oil/it's just the flu folks were held to that standard.

I don't think you'd believe anything they would have to say, would you? Either way, if you are a public health official you have to be held to a higher standard than a guy with Facebook account.

They are held to a higher standard. That's why they aren't making assumptions based on such limited data. They're being cautious until enough data is gathered to make an informed decision.

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

#708

Post by ajsnigrutin »

legutierr wrote: post #703
data_dan_ wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing and clinical trials!

It would have been much faster if regulators and ethicists hadn’t been so squeamish about challenge trials. In order to save dozens of lives that might have been lost in challenge trials, we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives so that we could wait for more ethically-sound vaccine trials to complete.

The problem are the vaccine mandates.

If you (soft or hard) mandate a vaccine, and you kill someone with it, that's a lot of responsibility to take, if the vaccine didn't go through a full trial.

If the vaccines were as optional as eg. flu vaccines are, then a simple waiver would solve most of the issues.

(a 20yo girl died in slovenia due to jannsen vaccine not that long ago, and she got vaccinated, becase she was soft-forced by the government mandates (48 hour testing, far away from home, but unable to use the bus without a test, to go to the testing site, 12eur/test,...).

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

#709

Post by bigodbiel »

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 isn't apples to apples. Some studies show that SA has >70% seroprevalence [1], most of which from infection. If it holds that recovered immunity confers __better__ protection than naive vaccine immunity [2], then that 30% decrease might as well be from the protection conferred mostly by the former, and we have no idea how that would translate to vaccine naives, who are the majority in highly vaccinated developed countries.

[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.18.21266496v... [2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...

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

#710

Post by gfodor »

snarf21 wrote: post #414
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%+…

The worm hypothesis is a hypothesis, and a good one. But it is a hypothesis. assuming good sounding hypotheses are true and running with it have been the root of a lot of problems in this pandemic.
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