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Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

covid19.colorado.gov

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Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#151

Post by _greim_ »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #103

Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished. Or am I missing something?

As far as I can tell, there ends up being no practical difference between "the pandemic is over" and "this virus will be in circulation forever". People use one phrase or the other to emphasize different concerns.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#152

Post by bratwurst3000 »

Just giving my 2 cents. Got boosted 3 weeks ago. Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast. I did wear a ffp2 mask with nearly every social contact and if we didnt wear mask we would test ourself. I am sure I got it from the streets from people passing by. That said I am in the french alps and it was vacation time here.

And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare

I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#153

Post by ricardobayes »

causality0 wrote: post #118
benjaminwootton wrote: post #103

Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished. Or am I missing something?

You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.

I will say beforehand that I'm heavily pro-vaccination and reducing risks regarding covid. Do we know at this point what are the hospitalization rates of omicron compared to the flu? p.s. I hope your wife gets better soon.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#154

Post by pavon »

pier25 wrote: post #144
causality0 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.

> Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms. Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.

In general, vaccines do lower transmission, by decreasing the viral load and duration of infection. Of course when you are dealing with a mutation that the vaccine has low effectiveness against, that is all out the window.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#155

Post by pikma »

causality0 wrote: post #143
polski-g wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also catch the cold over and over. 1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.

Covid has a death rate hundreds of times higher than a cold. Colds don't make healthy women in their twenties stay up all night coughing so hard their oxygen dips into the 80s. Colds don't cause lung, heart, and cognitive damage that is potentially cumulative. If covid brain fog compounds over time there will be some serious damn consequences.

Actually my wife had a bad cold this summer and she coughed so hard during the night that we had to take her to the ER and she was lacking oxygen (not sure by how much). She is otherwise healthy in her early 30s, though she was pregnant, which might have made it worse. It surprised me, I always thought that colds were harmless.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#156

Post by stefan_ »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #142
benjaminwootton wrote: post #103

Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished. Or am I missing something?

>Surely this is the end of the pandemic? Yes, welcome to the endemic. Covid is here to stay, it doesn't matter if 100% of the world were vaccinated tommrow, covid would not go away. It doesn't matter if you get the vaccination or not, in your life time you WILL get covid (just like the flu, no one escapes it, you typically get the flu about every decade or so regardless of shots). We need to just accept this and move…

You have a rather crucial misunderstanding. There are lots of endemic viruses; that is part of why we vaccinate new humans against so many of them.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#157

Post by TobTobXX »

parkingrift wrote: post #69
rocqua wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary thing is. Milder disease is a constant factor improvement in hospitalization. But faster spreading (higher R value) is an exponential worsening in hospitalization. It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.

> It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations. Sure, but those aren’t the only choices. Over the last 30 days the daily case average has increased by 500%. During that same time the daily average hospitalized has risen 100%. And the test positi…

Unknown cases don't use up ICU and hospital beds and don't result in deaths, so who cares?

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#158

Post by hogrider »

callumprentice wrote: post #123

Can anyone point me to a reliable source that explains in layman's terms why one cancels out the other and it's not possible to have both (say) delta and omicron at once. Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)

Just a no sources comment: you can get confection of the flu and covid or any variant with any other variant at the same time. It's just over time one variant out competes the others because it's more fit.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#159

Post by Scoundreller »

pier25 wrote: post #144
causality0 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.

> Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms. Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.

If a vaccine reduces your cough/oozing orifice severity, wouldn’t that reduce transmission?

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#160

Post by enragedcacti »

gz5 wrote: post #84

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, has a nice substack from perspective of an epidemiologist. Two notable recent Omicron posts on that substack: The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa... The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good... Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.

Thanks for this, just in those two blog posts she answered many lingering questions I had about how omicron has been changing things. the SEOd google results are always a flood of incomplete or speculative information when I try to find answers to covid questions so this is a dream come true.

If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.

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