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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

#741

Post by spookthesunset »

kelnos wrote: post #699
peakaboo wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural immunity is the ONLY way back to a sane planet. It's time you take a step back, look at what happened for two years now, and realize we don't need this insanity anymore.

Given how quickly the virus can infect people and put them in the hospital if unchecked by masking/social distancing/etc. and vaccines, just letting everyone get infected would rapidly overwhelm our health care system and cause a lot of deaths that could have been prevented. If the world had collectively done nothing about COVID over the past two years, sure, the pandemic might be "over" by now, but the total death t…

The world “experts” clearly didn’t do anything at all these last two years if they are still freaking out about “healthcare collapse”.

There is zero excuse to push lockdowns, masks or any of that nonsense at this point to “protect healthcare”. Healthcare should have been “protected” by now if this is supposed to be a normal thing

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

#742

Post by hutzlibu »

marvin wrote: post #730
hutzlibu wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public. " When was that ever forbidden, except on demonstrations?

Can't speak for the US, but e.g. generally Norwegian teachers aren't allowed to wear masks at work. Unless things have happened behind the scenes that I'm not aware of, this is under threat of being fired, although I doubt anyone has actually been fired over it. Surely there must be other professions with similar rules, or cultural quirks to the same effect.

Are we talking about health masks, or burkas for example?

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

#743

Post by s1artibartfast »

deelowe wrote: post #717
oneoff786 wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the approval process is ensuring there’s enough supply to support the intended use and, if there’s not enough, do a limited approval. That’s likely what’s going on here.

If you mean supply the population, this is not correct

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

#744

Post by spookthesunset »

imbnwa wrote: post #587
johnchristopher wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No. Covid reeinfects. There's only a short-lived immunity. Covid is not a cold. If it doesn't get your the first or the second or the third time it will get you the 15th time. Long term damage is not getting enough attention. In decades maybe we get a mild covid. > Way too many co…

> Long term damage is not getting enough attention. Too bad all those back-to-office-adamant employers completely ignore this. Like, OK, I get infected cause I had to commute to work and then you fire me/lay me off and I'm left holding the bag, financially and physically cause you really wanted to make your leasing payments "worth it".

Yet somehow each and every day grocery store workers manage to go into their office. What makes you so special?

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

#745

Post by systemvoltage »

spacechild1 wrote: post #738
hutzlibu wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public. " When was that ever forbidden, except on demonstrations?

Austria has made it illegal to hide your face in public. They did this to effectively stop women from wearing Burkas but because of equality principles they couldn't spell it out like that. Instead they added lots of exceptions (scarfs, carnival, sports, street artists, etc.) It's ridiculous.

We should let people do whatever they want. Wanna wear a helmet all day? You bet. Wanna wear Burkha everywhere you go? Sure, I just wish it wasn’t a symbol of oppression. To me it’s the same as someone wearing a Swastika. Knock yourself out with whatever fits your mojo. Don’t expect me to show respect for it though and don’t tread on my rights to speak against it. We have a deal.

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

#746

Post by mensetmanusman »

anonfornoreason wrote: post #429
akamaka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Africa’s excess deaths amount to 1 out of every 200 people. The most vulnerable have already been removed from the sample set. I’m going to wait for severity data from where I live, because that’s what matters.

every year more vulnerable people are added to that set as population ages, gets fatter, has more advanced coronary or metabolic disease, etc. not trying to contradict here I think it will be less each year. maybe governments will even start telling people their dirt and exercise choices are exacerbating this disease!

The government will never shame people like that.

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

#747

Post by hutzlibu »

systemvoltage wrote: post #745
spacechild1 wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Austria has made it illegal to hide your face in public. They did this to effectively stop women from wearing Burkas but because of equality principles they couldn't spell it out like that. Instead they added lots of exceptions (scarfs, carnival, sports, street artists, etc.) It's ridiculous.

We should let people do whatever they want. Wanna wear a helmet all day? You bet. Wanna wear Burkha everywhere you go? Sure, I just wish it wasn’t a symbol of oppression. To me it’s the same as someone wearing a Swastika. Knock yourself out with whatever fits your mojo. Don’t expect me to show respect for it though and don’t tread on my rights to speak against it. We have a deal.

"Sure, I just wish it wasn’t a symbol of oppression."

For me it is such a symbol, too. But there are women who say it means something different for them and they want to wear it out of their own free will. And I am not the one telling them what they have to think, because you know, that would be opression?

edit to your edit:

And the swastika is a perfect example, too. Because the swastika is thousands of years old and the Nazis are not and just occupied it. So someone who wears that symbol might do it for way other reasons, than because he likes the Nazis.

(less likely in europe, though, but more likely in india or mongolia for example)

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

#748

Post by ericb »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #708
legutierr wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Your reply is totally off-topic for the parent you replied to.

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

#749

Post by mensetmanusman »

joebob42 wrote: post #670
gilbetron wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one replying has a "serious level of knowledge", so instead, turn to sources that do (or report serious sources!) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-viruses-ev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30734920/ (really good one) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7255208/ In short, we don't know and won't know until this is all "over" a few years in the future, at least.

Imo part of the joy of hn is that this isn't actually true. Obviously not everyone knows what they are talking about, but some of the people who really do have serious knowledge on any given topic are on hn, and the average person here is at least slightly less likely to think they have knowledge when in fact they don't.

Yeah I remember in June of 2020 discussing the new aerosol data on HN and cringing about the 6 ft recommendation with cloth masks indoors. Finally a year+ later the WHO admitted as such (aerosol risk can be >50 ft for hours after a spread event), so sometimes we are ahead :)

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

#750

Post by heavyset_go »

tunesmith wrote: post #718
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…

We could have saved so many more lives. I remember midway through the first year (pre-vaccine) people arguing against mandates and masks and lockdowns, while severely underestimating the damage. One exchange I had here was from a person allowing that maybe they'd reconsider if we ever reached US deaths at something like 350,000, as if that were an astronomical figure. And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet…

> And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I saw an estimate of projected deaths from COVID in a scenario where mitigations were taken and in another scenario where none were taken. It was the difference between projecting 300k to 600k dead in the US after more than a year, and 2 million to 6 million dead in the US.

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