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Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

covid19.colorado.gov

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Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#471

Post by lovecg »

jollybean wrote: post #454
peder wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most privileged takes I've ever read. OH GOOD HEAVENS. You were sick for a whole 2-3 days. Best lockdown the country to avoid what most people experience 1+ times per year.

? It's killed 800 000 people. The 'privileged' comment is 'I got COVID it was just like a cold, I can do this every year ... so there's no more pandemic'. Conflating their personal anecdote with the range of outcomes. For now, we're still in a pandemic. Hopefully it will get better.

Omicron didn’t kill 800 000 people. There’s also vastly more immunity (whether through vaccines or previous infections). Let’s wait and see but there’s hope it’s a different, milder disease.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#472

Post by nradov »

awb wrote: post #451
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...

Many of the first infected in SA previously had Delta. I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that contracting Omicron gives you natural immunity to Delta. Here are some links saying you can get both: https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/omicron-delta-en... https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1543522/can-you-... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...

You can get infected with both, but there is still a significant level of cellular immunity across all common variants.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#473

Post by tjr225 »

babypuncher wrote: post #431
hitpointdrew wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Old normal will not return until our hospitals are also back to normal

Our daughter had a fever for four days over the holidays. We literally could not even get into see a pediatrician or an urgent care. There was nothing available.

If a minor cold is enough to cripple our healthcare system, you have to wonder if maybe there is some other reason our hospitals aren't able(or willing) to go back to normal.

I spend thousands of dollars on health INSURANCE every year. If I go to the ER it still costs me over $2k. The last time I went to the ER, I didn't even see a doctor ONCE.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#474

Post by barney54 »

zpeti wrote: post #457
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.

Just a thought after reading the good news - ok this is great for the US and the west where there is decent vaccination. What the hell is going to happen with the omicron spread in countries with hardly any vaccination? I mean if it really is like measles, this could be terrible.

Countries like South Africa? Steep increase in cases and now a steep fall in cases. Some increased deaths, but nothing like delta or alpha. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#475

Post by time_to_smile »

jaywalk wrote: post #281
cduzz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something's a one a million event, happening billions of times per day, it'll happen pretty much constantly. This one, omicron, seems to mostly infect nasal passages and upper respiratory tract. The next, maybe after spending 2 years spreading across all the weasels of upper winchester county, may affect the lungs again. This is a lottery that's less fun to play... (edited for clarity)

Yeah, sure. Who knows what viruses could be spreading and mutating amongst those weasels. It's not like SARS-CoV-2 is the first, and it won't be the last. But when you say > This is a lottery that's less fun to play How exactly do you propose not playing? Lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc. for life? We're eventually going to have to start treating Covid the same as we've always treated "the flu" and it defin…

> Lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc. for life?

If you can't handle these things as a part of your life you're really not going to like what climate change brings to the relatively near future.

But you don't have to worry about arguing in forums, you've already won. Nobody respects lockdown, and never really did, even at the highest rate of infections I see people wearing masks beneath their noses, crammed next to people in airports. After omicron I can't imagine anyone caring at all even if we double our current death count.

Covid is here, it will stick around forever, it will probably be notably worse than the flu for years to come. But in a few more years that will seem like a quaint thing to worry about.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#476

Post by bingohbangoh »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #152

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…

I'll give my two cents then. People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important.

I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day).

I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms.

I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice.

[0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#477

Post by sudosysgen »

cosmiccrisp wrote: post #450
sudosysgen wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to normalize by age. Unvaccinated people in Canada are overwhelmingly very very young, in Quebec most of them are too young to be vaccinated. That's why they don't get hospitalized as much :) Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

I want to lookup data on the average age of unvaxed patients currently in the ICU but so far have not found any.

That's not the metric you should look for (at least you don't need to). You should look at the average age of unvaccinated people. That way you can estimate the prior probability of infection.

You can go here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccination-cover...

From that, you can figure out that there are more people unvaccinated under 12 years old, than in the entire rest of the population, by a large margins - out of 7.6 million people without full vaccination, 2.9 million are between 5 and 11 years old, and 1.9 million people are under 5 years old.

So out of the 7.6 million people who aren't fully vaccinated, 4.8 million are under 12 years old!

And from 2.8 million remaining, 430k of those are under 18, and 1.0 million are under 30.

From this, we can figure out that the pre-vaccine hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated population is much, much lower than for the normal population.

This is without taking into account health status, of course!

Quebec publishes age-ajusted hospitalization rates per vaccine status, the latest number is a 7.7x odds ratio, which would be even worse for the ICU : https://mobile.twitter.com/sante_qc/status/14791225681667481...

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#478

Post by lamontcg »

elif wrote: post #214
hitpointdrew wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I think that may be a completely rational perspective from within the United States... however, from the perspective of countries with effective containment strategies, that sounds prematurely defeatist, and also ignores the vast good that comes from containing spread for mutagenic purposes.

> the vast good that comes from containing spread for mutagenic purposes.

We're never getting a T-cell escape mutant that dramatically increases the risk of hospitalization/death in the vaccinated/recovered.

There's really very little to worry about variants if your vaxxed and boosted.

Experts still don't have any idea how intrinsically virulent Omicron is, and it may be every bit as intrinsically virulent as Delta was (there's lots of issues with the TMPRSS2 studies in mice, while the dominant effect is that Omicron is an escape mutant and is reinfecting and infecting the vaccinated).

The lower hospitalization rate of the Omicron wave can be explained entirely by human immunity. The properties of the virus are likely much less important than the headlines indicate, which suggests the the slow process of the human race building up immunity is going to grind on and future waves will be less and less effectively virulent (although it seems like human emotions are really attracted to the idea that the virus is changing to become less virulent and that seems to be driving emotional acceptance that the pandemic is winding down).

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#479

Post by awb »

nradov wrote: post #472
awb wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the first infected in SA previously had Delta. I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that contracting Omicron gives you natural immunity to Delta. Here are some links saying you can get both: https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/omicron-delta-en... https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1543522/can-you-... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...

You can get infected with both, but there is still a significant level of cellular immunity across all common variants. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1

For someone not well versed in virology, can you please explain what that means?

How do you get infected with significant levels of cellular immunity? And does that mean the infection is less severe?

Re: Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

#480

Post by lovecg »

the_doctah wrote: post #434
mullingitover wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So if everyone gets Omicron, we will have a ton of pre-existing immunity?

Seems that we don’t have much choice in the matter so we will find out pretty soon. That wouldn’t be the worst outcome.
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