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South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

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Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#121

Post by inglor_cz »

alliao wrote: post #26
randomopining wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virus just wants to replicate and spread as much as possible. Sometimes the side effect of this is death etc. If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more. But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount o…

super fast spread even with milder effects will still meant overwhelming healthcare capacity let's not even go near the notion that more infection means brewing more variants we've never entertained herd immunity for polio, why covid..

Not necessarily. The load that the healthcare systems must carry depends not just on the absolute number of cases, but also on how long the average stay in hospital is. Think of it as IT notorious "man-days", in this case "patient-days".

If the infection is milder across the board, hospital stays will be shorter on average. People will improve faster and will be discharged sooner.

500 people who on average need 3 days of hospitalization are less of a load than 200 people who on average need 10 days of hospitalization - unless those 500 arrive at the same time, of course.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#122

Post by [deleted] »

toolz wrote: post #105
volkse wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.

South Africa is well under average vaccination rate globally. Also what do you mean by they've been exposed to the virus? Of course they've been exposed to the virus, that's exactly why it's interesting to see how their deaths follow cases. There's no indication that the first world, with much higher vaccination rates won't fare better than South Africa, which seems to be faring exceptionally well relative to other c…

[deleted]

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#124

Post by dpark »

vmception wrote: post #113
dpark wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out. Am I correctly understanding that you intend to move to a different region for the sole purpose of voting against restrictions that otherwise would not apply to you? You’re literally trying to be a problematic immigrant. I remember when I was in college a bunch of people did exactly this. They registered for residency in the state sole…

It would be where I’m already registered to vote, dont worry Tie any restriction to ICU capacity and only if efforts were made to expand ICU capacity Otherwise that means the state was only pretending to care because it was easier to govern if people werent doing anything If the state actually cares increase the ICU bandwidth or tell us the challenges encountered doing that and how those are being addressed

You specifically mentioned “any major US markets”. Are you admitting to voter fraud now?

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#125

Post by toolz »

nostromo wrote: post #108
cdrini wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chart is misleading; the rise/spike in deaths is always delayed from the rise/spike in cases. It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals. Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (W…

I'm glad it's more contagious than Delta, because Delta is much worse than Omicron. Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.

I can't wait until public opinion seems to catch on to the fact that we will never eliminate covid. It blows my mind that we see 100% vaccinated universities going back to online-only learning. What exactly are they waiting on?

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#126

Post by postalrat »

pvarangot wrote: post #75
randomopining wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virus just wants to replicate and spread as much as possible. Sometimes the side effect of this is death etc. If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more. But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount o…

Viruses don't "want", anthropomorphizing COVID like media headlines do is a bit of a "language virus" in and of itself that makes global understanding of what's going on more difficult. AFAIK the virus mutates randomly, and we just see more of the more infectious and less deathly (in the short and mid-term) variants because those are the ones that spread faster and successfully among humans, but attributing even coll…

Brain cells don't "want" either.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#127

Post by orblivion »

oneoff786 wrote: post #54

I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true. Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models,…

If you're right, that would be disappointing, because it means there's less immunity gained than I was hoping, for the (relatively small) amount of hospitalization we've seen. And I (uneducated on the matter) would expect that if it's not really getting around that much, it would not displace delta.

But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#128

Post by Marazan »

For anyone who wants to look at the raw data then you can find it here

https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...

This is direct from the SA government including archives of all the daily data for the duration of the pandemic.

Pay attention to the data lag. But it isn't _that_ laggy.

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#129

Post by [deleted] »

hourislate wrote: post #29

I was at Costco this morning (DFW) buying a big hunk of Prime Rib for Christmas Day dinner. No one either knows or cares anymore. I'm still wearing a mask for facial recognition purposes but I'm starting to feel weird considering no one else is wearing a mask anymore, not even the folks who look like they got one foot in the grave already. Omicron is already so yesterday it isn't even a memory.

[deleted]

Re: South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew

#130

Post by crummy »

toolz wrote: post #105
volkse wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.

South Africa is well under average vaccination rate globally. Also what do you mean by they've been exposed to the virus? Of course they've been exposed to the virus, that's exactly why it's interesting to see how their deaths follow cases. There's no indication that the first world, with much higher vaccination rates won't fare better than South Africa, which seems to be faring exceptionally well relative to other c…

From memory, SA has 3.3mil confirmed cases, and an estimated 7.8x total when you include unconfirmed. So roughly 75 percent of the population have caught covid. Plus vaccinations, that adds up to a lot of mild reinfections.
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