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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

#871

Post by Dylan16807 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #861
Dylan16807 wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mand…

So the first part is you being upset at things I definitely don't endorse but have nothing to do with masks.

The part about forcing non essential people to be paid to not work is confusing and I don't think I understand your point but sure I'd take that deal??

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

#872

Post by smaryjerry »

ceejayoz wrote: post #499
smaryjerry wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make sense but been the originally strains did not overwhelm hospitals. New York has the highest and craziest number of cases and deaths at the beginning and didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds. Hospitals did not run out of beds and now the biggest problem is running out of staff, the same as every industry. At our local hospital all of the nurses quit for better, highe…

> didn’t put one person onto the ship that was provided for temporary beds It wasn't for lack of need. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u... > But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all. > On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the…

If the emergency and need was that bad they would have absolutely figured out simple logistics to get people on a ship. The fact is most people were told go home and wait it out and are still told that and that is the treatment most people receive. There is no point in continuing our state of emergency when our emergency services are not and never were at risk. Every single lockdown and mask measure put in place has had no significant impact on the spread of the virus. It is that contagious.

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

#873

Post by dehrmann »

kyleblarson wrote: post #729
Animats wrote: post #676

Moderna is working on a vaccine targeting the Omicron variant for 2022.[1] The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part. Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like w…

Moderna CEO equity sales for the last couple years. Nothing to see here, no reason to distrust them pushing endless boosters: https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/BANCEL%20STEPHANE...

You'd think a booster push would mean they should hold, not sell.

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

#874

Post by zamfi »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #280
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…

Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control? How could the virus have mutated to become milder to suit the social response if the society, as it stands today, is continuing to do what they previously did..?

> Do you realise that mutation is not something the species can consciously control?

Very much so, and my post was carefully worded to refer to evolutionary selection pressure, and not any kind of agency on behalf of a virus.

I assumed the audience here would get it.

As an aside, there are much kinder ways to voice this kind of concern that don’t drip with contempt; consider taking a less accusatory tone in the future? That might trigger fewer downvotes the next time the reading comprehension module needs coffee.

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

#875

Post by zamfi »

nostoc wrote: post #551
RandallBrown wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's likely millions of virus variants out there already. Some will evolve to become much more contagious and most won't do much of anything. When a more severe variant starts dominating and everyone goes inside and stops spreading it that makes the more severe variant die out. As it dies out, and people go outside, variants that are milder will thrive because people won't lockdown as easily. This can repeat forev…

Except "Everybody goes inside and stops spreading" is not something that is unique to a variant of concern. When everybody goes inside, all the variants stop spreading. The pressure is the same on every variants, so there's no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.

> Except "Everybody goes inside and stops spreading" is not something that is unique to a variant of concern.

But it is — this will not be the response to a variant that doesn’t cause an increase in hospitalizations or deaths.

A given response exerts pressure on all variants, of course. But a milder variant may be able to spread widely before a more lethal one shows up and ratchets up lockdowns.

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

#876

Post by zamfi »

skulk wrote: post #617
nostoc wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "Everybody goes inside and stops spreading" is not something that is unique to a variant of concern. When everybody goes inside, all the variants stop spreading. The pressure is the same on every variants, so there's no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants.

> no source of evolutionary advantages on any variants. Any variant that is able to co-exist with (rather than kill) its host during a full lockdown has a significant advantage. We co-exist with several coronaviruses already.

Only true if the virus lasts long enough to outlive a lockdown. So far that hasn’t been the case for the vast majority of single hosts.

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

#877

Post by dragontamer »

stickfigure wrote: post #870
dragontamer wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Do you believe that covid continues because of excuses or weak wills or something psychological?

I believe COVID19 continues because we have a ~60% vaccination rate in the USA, which is far below the needed vaccination rate to slow down the spread of the disease.

A lot of these other diseases brought up have substantial 95%+ vaccination rates, or treatments that can hamper the spread.

No disease is equivalent to another. Smallpox and Measles had much higher spread R0 / replication rates. Others are bacterial. Cholera is water-borne and solved with other methodologies.

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

#878

Post by zamfi »

rich_sasha wrote: post #37
boringg wrote: post #21

I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while t…

Sort of. Sometimes. Viruses evolve according to evolutionary pressures. I'm surprised we don't see Covid mutations that invalidate PCR tests - perhaps it's too soon, or even, who knows, maybe they are there and we don't know? The common trope is that if the virus is too deadly, then it doesn't have a chance to find new hosts. This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pa…

> This is kind-of what happened to "SARS-1" - it tended to kill its hosts before they could pass it on.

Quick nit: while this is true, SARS-1 was also not particularly transmissible before symptoms appeared, in contrast to Covid, which made control much easier (in addition to the much higher fatality rate causing everyone to take it much more seriously).

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

#879

Post by [deleted] »

Nursie wrote: post #842
tekknik wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the flu vaccine isn’t required and social pressured, and also isn’t experimental at all. So probably a huge difference right? How many times has someone lost their job to not getting the flu vaccine?

The covid vaccines are not 'experimental' either.

[deleted]

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

#880

Post by dehrmann »

guerrilla wrote: post #858
markvdb wrote: post #856

Has there ever been serious research on the safety of "contagious vaccines"? I'm thinking of strains of problematic infectious diseases engineered to be super mild in terms of symptons, and relatively contagious. Ethical problems and risk of mutations make this a non-starter I guess, but I'm genuinely curious.

> Ethical problems and risk of mutations Hopefully there's no direct work on them for exactly those reasons.

Certain restrictions and de facto vaccine mandates are also arguably ethically challenging. So... we're already there.
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