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Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

covid19.colorado.gov

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Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#291

Post by nradov »

monological wrote: post #113
etchalon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if we can say it's "over". People were saying the same thing after the Delta waves started subsiding and behold … Omicron.

But now we’ll be able to reach herd immunity. Very mild and highly transmissible. This is the best possible outcome.

There will be no real herd immunity effect to protect those who lack immunity. Instead virtually everyone is just going to get infected, and most survivors will retain cellular immunity which gives them significant protection against severe symptoms during later reinfections.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Fortunately the current vaccines and other therapies are pretty effective at preventing deaths.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#292

Post by hedgehog »

spurgu wrote: post #248
causality0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy it's not a battle for you, but it is for my wife.

I'm sorry about your wife, hope she gets through it fine. It's mainly that you provided a personal anecdote in one direction and I found it prudent to provide one in the other direction - one that echoes everything we've seen so far, cases skyrocketing, hospitalization rates barely nudging.

Motivated anecdotes aren't prudent or useful. We know from the 2ish years of this we've had so far that the dynamics are tricky to pick apart. For example when young low-risk people are out at bars (very high exposure) and older or higher risk people stay home what happens is the hospitalizations lag because it takes some time for the first group to get sick, infect the second, and then some of those people to go on to the hospital. On the other hand older people are much more vaccinated so the relative risk between the groups will likely be different from previous waves.

That aside, hospitalizations are going up faster than they have at any point prior so not sure where your "barely nudging" comes from.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#293

Post by dougmwne »

shrikant wrote: post #260
spurgu wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have omicron right now (4-5 months after 2nd jab, so pretty much no effect from that) and it's just like a common cold (certainly wouldn't call it "battling omicron"). I have zero problems with getting this each year.

Congratulations. Both my wife and I (double vaxxed for 5 months, not boosted yet although were just about to do so) caught Omicron-flavoured Covid in the lead-up to Christmas and it wiped us out each for 2-3 days each, with a combination of fatigue, aches, fever, and violent coughing. Certainly worse than any cold or flu we've had up until that point. I still have a pretty nasty cough and a throat inflammation. Aren'…

It’s terrible to feel terrible, but getting over the worst part of Covid in 3 days is an enormous improvement from how unvaccinated people fared in the initial waves. Even for people not hospitalized, they dealt with pneumonia and shortness of breath for weeks. I think we can celebrate the progress we are making in reducing the average severity of this disease and there are more tools coming soon with Pfizer’s new pill and newer multivalent vaccines.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#294

Post by chasd00 »

rafale wrote: post #107
nradov wrote: post #93

The CDC publishes a weekly chart showing the proportions of circulating variants for the US as a whole. The Delta variant had previously driven most other variants near extinction, and now Omicron is doing the same to Delta. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...

Our savior Omicron. The ultimate vaccinator. Nature finally had mercy on us.

i wonder what countries like China and New Zealand who are taking a zero COVID approach are going to do. COVID is endemic in the rest of the world except for those places where it doesn't exist at all? I don't see that working.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#295

Post by spurgu »

mullingitover wrote: post #256
spurgu wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mild for non-vaccinated South Africans as well. The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.

SA had very high numbers of previous infections, so there was a ton of pre-existing immunity.

Which some would see as a partial argument against lockdowns.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#296

Post by systemvoltage »

time_to_smile wrote: post #240
systemvoltage wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Berkeley and this is basically 90% of the people I meet, see and interact with. Btw they’re also almost all vegetarian and Soylent drinkers. I felt awkward having a sausage pizza yesterday with a friend. So my observations are at the very lease factual in my area, pretty sure factual across the Democratic Party. Progressivism isn’t what it used to be (Obama era).

> vegetarian and Soylent drinkers. How does this contradict optimism? They're doing these things because they believe this will lead to a brighter, better future. Just because they disagree with your path to get there doesn't mean they are pessimists.

I wasn't speaking about optimism, but just the general culture here. I am fine with vegetarianism or whatever, but making me feel awkward and imposing that on others is bothersome. "I feel like eating meat is immoral"... while I am eating a sausage pizza. I should clarify, he wasn't a proper friend, just a co-worker.

They don't want a brighter future. That's the message I am getting. In some ways that's pessimism, no?

One more anecdote - I had a someone from work come over to help me for moving furniture. He goes "Why do you want to have kids? Do you really want to bring them into this world?". It's this pervasive sense of pessimissm that emanates from this culture. I am pretty convinced.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#297

Post by convolvatron »

callumprentice wrote: post #252
jbeam wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth. Lets say that there is one delta infection and one omicron infection in the population. Each delta infection causes two more people to be infected, while each omicron infection causes three more people to be infected. The growth of a single delta infection: 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64 Versus a single omicron infection: 1 -> 3 -> 9 -> 27 -> 81 -> 243 -> 729 Omicron started out as 50% of the…

Nod - that explains why omicron grew so quickly but why, in doing so, does delta not persist?

i assume that the immunity you get from having O helps damp down cases of D

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#298

Post by JPKab »

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.

Coloradan here:

I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.

My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.

My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.

The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.

The data is now this:

People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)

See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-mil...

FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#299

Post by betterunix2 »

jaywalk wrote: post #194
phonypc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... mild symptoms after being vaccinated. It's almost like the vaccine worked or something. How weird.

Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"

Yet it is predominantly the unvaccinated who are overwhelming hospitals with more severe cases. In NYC it is something like 15x difference -- 30 per 100000 unvaccinated versus 2 per 100000 vaccinated people wind up requiring hospital care. Those may be small numbers, but with omicron clearly being both more contagious and evading prior immunity it rapidly becomes problematic.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#300

Post by regularfry »

omnicognate wrote: post #167
hogrider wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dumb question that's been vaguely nagging at me: If a host can have both at the same time, in what sense are they competing? There are plenty of cells to infect in a particular host aren't there?

They're competing to infect the next hosts in the chain. With two present, the one that can get itself passed on more often wins overall.
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