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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

#801

Post by Dylan16807 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #545
alex-korr wrote: post #475

Prediction - nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. I am seeing it in my company already - in the today's tech virtual townhall "omicron is going to hit hard, so why go back to the office in Jan" was the most upvoted comment in the stream.

> nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. And push for mask mandates that require people with jobs at stores and stuff to continue wearing their mask 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week until forever. "It's just a piece of cloth" say all the privileged tech workers typing from their cozy home office. If tech workers had to wear masks their entire workday, I bet most of them would be…

Why would I want a delivery person to wear a mask all day? And I prefer to check out my own groceries.

A mask for cooking is probably a good idea in general.

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

#802

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

Just 29% lower is nothing. NOTHING.

Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.

If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.

Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.

So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.

With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.

Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/masonbissada/2021/12/03/scienti...

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

#803

Post by renaudg »

drited wrote: post #602
aqme28 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's growing exponentially and deaths are a lagging indicator. The true denominator is far from 78k people.

I know deaths lag cases. I mentioned just the cases in the south African study because those are the earliest cases we have. None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec. This can be deduced from yesterday's Reuters article I linked which said the first reported death globally was in the UK (not South Africa) and from the fact that the study looked at 78,000 cases…

> None of the 78,000 cases up to 7th Dec in South Africa resulted in a reported death up to 13th Dec.

Covid takes about 3 weeks to kill. The Omicron epicenter in SA has a much younger demographic than in western countries.

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

#804

Post by zzzeek »

CountDrewku wrote: post #721
cipheredStones wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloth masks are somewhat effective at protecting those around you, but only slightly effective at protecting you; masks like the N95 do both quite effectively, if you wear them properly.

Almost no one is wearing any mask appropriately. Even the n95 needs to be changed more than daily. I highly doubt any decent percentage of people are doing that. At this point it's just a statement and nothing to do with protecting themselves or anyone else. Alternatively, they're suffering from psychosis.

That's for hospital workers wearing them 18 hours a day in highly contaminated environments. I am exposed to other people for an hour a day with social distancing, tops. The N95 is much more protective than a cloth mask and it is entirely for self protection, the last thing in the world I want to do is make a "statement" in the places i go. However the intolerance for my silent practice is fairly frequent.

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

#805

Post by F6F6FA »

cknoxrun wrote: post #665
JudasGoat wrote: post #636

I am going to go against the grain here and ask someone more knowledgeable than myself if the large number of changes in this variant is typical in virus evolution? Because as an outsider, it appears to me that studying the history of past pandemics would present a road map as to what must be modified to attenuate the damage potential in a virus. I suppose my question really is, why are we chancing GOF research, if n…

Your question caused a likely ludicrous and unoriginal idea to pop into my head - I wonder if it would be possible to purposefully engineer and release a mutated form of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 that demonstrates the ability to replace more dangerous strains, but causes only mild symptoms? Essentially to accelerate a process that we hope to see happen naturally.

WIV was studying bat-vaccine viruses: release the vaccine in a population and let infection do the rest.

Wuhan variant, shows a mortality of around 10% (all the miners died, and healthy doctor, who was silenced then martyred, also died).

Branch after Wuhan quarantines in Italy was mixed S and L variant. Mortality of around 1% after settling. Xi-Omicron variant now seems around 0.1%.

Would a country with a more advanced biodefense release such a counter virus if it had the option? Perhaps if the damage to the economy and international relations became too grave.

Then again, Spanish Flu also lasted 3 years and ended with an endemic virus. Maybe we just waited for nature to engineer this, while trying to speed up opening up for the economy, having young people vaccinate to protect the rich and elderly, and a few years worth of mRNA data volunteered/mandated by the public.

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

#806

Post by desktopninja »

Not an expect in this subject matter and not even an anti-vaxxer but do wonder: If I were the COVID organism, its beneficial for me not to be lethal to the host I infect. Initially I would but other mutations and time I'd learn not be. My host is useless to me if I kill it.

The point: perhaps we're hyper focused on "COVID is out to kill us senseless"

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

#807

Post by renaudg »

oneoff786 wrote: post #644
aqme28 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more simply, 5x as contagious but 1/2 as deadly? That's still a lot more deaths.

No it’s not. Contagion spread is logarithmic, and has obvious upper bounds. E.g. about a third of the us has gotten Covid. 5x contagious does not give you 166% of the population infected. Nor does it give you 100%. Probably not even 90%. I would bet no more than 50% over the next year. Half as deadly on the other hand is a big deal. It’s not just deaths, it’s also hospitalizations. If you imagine the bell curve of ou…

It sounds like you don't know the first thing about epidemiology modelling : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6962332/

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

#808

Post by mjg59 »

desktopninja wrote: post #806

Not an expect in this subject matter and not even an anti-vaxxer but do wonder: If I were the COVID organism, its beneficial for me not to be lethal to the host I infect. Initially I would but other mutations and time I'd learn not be. My host is useless to me if I kill it. The point: perhaps we're hyper focused on "COVID is out to kill us senseless"

The virus has no idea what's beneficial to it. A virus that infects you for two weeks and which can pass itself on to two other people in that time is going to infect fewer people than a virus that kills you after two weeks but can pass itself on to four other people in that time. Once enough people start dying then the numbers start changing (if everyone around you is already dead, you're not going to infect anyone else), but the virus doesn't know that.

So no, COVID isn't out to kill us senseless. But nor is it out to maximise the length of time it can persist in the population. It's RNA. It's not out to do anything. It has no ability to learn. It has no awareness of the fact that it's in a host, let alone any preferences about what happens to that host. Don't anthropomorphise it.

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

#809

Post by renaudg »

bagacrap wrote: post #534
renaudg wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inc…

there really can't be an "exponential" increase in the number of cases, whatever that means, given that there's a hard upper bound which is the number of hosts.

Look, no need to be pedantic about this : the only thing that counts here is whether it's still in the initial exponential phase by the time we hit maximum hospital capacity. It seems likely.

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

#810

Post by [deleted] »

not2b wrote: post #720
parasense wrote: post #698

I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it. I would imagine all viral contagions would…

There's no guarantee that it will work that way: smallpox didn't get less deadly. Only vaccination wiped it out. If the patient is contagious before developing symptoms, the virus can spread very effectively even if many patients die.

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