Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by spookthesunset »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #854
spookthesunset wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines Many of my blue collar friends feel the same way. Getting bossed around by chicken shit triple vaccinated white collar workers too afraid to go into the office. They expect all expendable service class workers to do their bidding while they all “take this serious” huddled up in their fancy homes.

Well I'd probably be in the work from home group and I don't want any bidding, I just want people to stop spreading so much virus around. And if we are talking about what I want, I want "expendable service class workers" to be paid twice as much anyway. If that's not enough to make up for a mask requirement, then I'm sure there's some alternative we can figure out.

Tell you what, why don’t we require tech workers to wear a mask all day while they work at home? Better, cut off all these tech workers paychecks until some public health “expert” decrees it to be okay again. Then, force them back on unemployment at some random interval a few months later because “it isn’t safe anymore”. Don’t forget to stall their unemployment checks too… then yank their chain more with vaccine mandates and ceaseless masks.

I sincerely doubt most white collar workers are “essential” so they should never have been allowed to work during the pandemic, even if they could do so from home. It wasn’t right to let non essential people work no matter where they worked, period. Everybody non essential should have been on the government dole.

If the privileged white collar work-from-home crowd got the same complete shaft the common working class folks did, none of our response to Covid would have happened. Because out here in the real world there are a hell of a lot more problems than exactly one damn respiratory virus.

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

#863

Post by alvah »

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…

A death with Omicron has been reported, however the UK government have refused to release further details, so at the moment the confirmed # of deaths from Omicron is still 0. This will change of course.

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

#864

Post by spurgu »

megablast wrote: post #256
NicoJuicy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to what I heard through the Covid update of work. Omicron settles more in the nose and not as much in the long ( their source was a doctor). Although it's too early to be sure, it would explain both an increased transmissibility and a milder variant.

You understand that what you said is pure nonsense right?

Why is it nonsense? He meant "lung", not "long" btw.

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

#865

Post by jacobolus »

nikolay wrote: post #821
johnisgood wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before 2020, no mRNA technology platform (drug or vaccine) had been authorized for use in humans, so there was a risk of unknown effects.[79] The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic required faster production capability of mRNA vaccines, made them attractive to national health organisations, and led to debate about the type of initial authorization mRNA vaccines should get (including emergency use authorization or expanded acce…

No vaccine would have been authorized on billions of people before 2020 if it had such prevalent incidence of peri- and myocarditis! But now it's authorized even of toddlers, which have even higher chance for future heart issues! And all this, because politicians didn't have the balls to keep the face mask mandates!

There have been a few (I at least found one case study in the literature, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34664804/) people to have died from vaccine-related myocarditis, but my impression from skimming a handful of relevant review papers and news articles is that the vast majority of vaccine-related myocarditis cases were mild and temporary, and that those were still extremely rare among vaccine recipients.

By comparison, (a) these vaccines have directly saved millions of lives (including saving at least tens of thousands of lives of healthy young men), and (b) infection by Covid-19 itself causes myocarditis at much higher rates.

It is likely that these vaccines have in fact prevented more instances of severe myocarditis than they have caused, without considering the large constellation of other dangerous chronic or fatal effects of Covid-19.

The risk/benefit calculations are stark here (in favor of universal vaccination, including for 15–25 year old men), and from what I can tell there is no evidence that the vaccines put children at nontrivial risk.

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

#866

Post by Dylan16807 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #859
Dylan16807 wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I must not support 'these' mandates. I support ones that make a meaningful impact on spread though. And where I live there haven't been any mandates for vaccinated people anyway.

Who cares about “spread” when we have vaccines that anybody can get? That goal was over the first day all the old at risk folks got their shots.

> all

That's the problem, not everyone can be vaccinated.

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

#867

Post by XorNot »

gfodor wrote: post #710
snarf21 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean the other side of that punchline though is that Ivermectin is completely ineffective in clinical trials at reducing severity or mortality from COVID-19.

The worm hypothesis is practically a curiosity to solve later.

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

#868

Post by XorNot »

throw868788 wrote: post #725
not2b wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the patient is contagious before developing symptoms, the virus can spread very effectively even if many patients die. For better or worse all that means is that viruses may evolve to delay their symptoms rather than overall peak severity if that's possible. It means still just as delay but with a good enough delay to spread. I don't really see the selective pressure however for this virus to become more benign.…

The problem with becoming benign is the competition between needing to be breathed out onto people before the immune system destroys it, and respiratory diseases have never not been nasty.

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

#869

Post by zamfi »

cableshaft wrote: post #78
zamfi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only one pressure driving viral evolution. Another pressure is social response to infection: so far, the predominant response to a more-virulent or more-lethal strain has been lockdown and/or other behavioral change, see: delta in India. On the flip side, a variant that causes milder symptoms is less likely to cause the same social response, which allows the virus to spread more widely. This may (may!) be what…

I'd say that's normally true, but there's not a ton of lockdowns with even Delta right now, so while I agree that it probably isn't going to get worse , there's still not a ton of pressure from social response as it is right now for it to get milder (maybe you could argue pressure from vaccines I guess).

Sure, and this is where the immune erosion comes into play: as vaccination rates go up, so does selection pressure for immune erosion.

Re: delta, think of this counterfactual — what would happen if a new variant appeared that is more lethal, more virulent, and that caused hospitalizations more quickly? You can bet the lockdowns would ratchet up.

With Omicron, we didn’t even notice it until there was a random genome scan. Viral evolution rarely selects for host death — it’s just not useful as a goal. There’s also probably relatively weak selection pressure for symptoms, though probably casing sneezes in hosts helps with spread, it also acts as a signal that can cause the host to isolate and halt spread. (See: SARS v1.)

From a selection pressure perspective, the ideal virus (among humans!) probably goes completely unnoticed for as long as possible. Humans won’t fight something they don’t even notice, and we probably have tons of these viruses everywhere and don’t even know about them.

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

#870

Post by stickfigure »

dragontamer wrote: post #757
stickfigure wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rabies only has animal reservoirs, it isn't spread person-to-person. And it appears that the localities that have eradicated rabies have done so by dropping animal baits with oral vaccines. So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines. The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going t…

Leprosy. There's a lot of diseases we've eradicated. Surely something will come along that you don't have an excuse for.

Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological? Or that all "diseases" are equivalent? Perhaps I should read more into your confounding of cowpox with smallpox.

Leprosy is bacterial and treated with antibiotics. Same with bubonic plague, if that was next on your list.

Post reply on HN