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

washingtonpost.com

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

#201

Post by nradov »

cdrini wrote: post #64
nostromo wrote: post #13

The panic surrounding Omicron is absurd. Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all. https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1] Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it. 1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

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…

Even in ICUs, very few COVID-19 patients are now placed on ventilators. It is considered a salvage therapy and survival rates are low.

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

#202

Post by ses1984 »

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,…

Spread doesn’t have to get close to 100% for things to get really bad.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

nostromo wrote: post #13

The panic surrounding Omicron is absurd. Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all. https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1] Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it. 1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by jimbob45 »

nostromo wrote: post #13

The panic surrounding Omicron is absurd. Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all. https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1] Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it. 1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

For us young people (probably most everyone on here), the fear is not and has not been death for some time. The fear is long COVID, which remains poorly understood.

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

#205

Post by soperj »

hammock wrote: post #162
martin938 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Irrelevant. As the new strain outcompetes the old, the old dies away forever. For example, Delta became 99%+ of cases in the US.

Omicron evolved from Beta... so not really.

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

#206

Post by fortran77 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #175
fortran77 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And obese! https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n623

Most people are obese.

Well, "overweight" by CDCs definition (BMI > 25 == overweight). But there's a strong link between complications from COVID and Obesity. It's a shame nobody wants to make the obese pay for their externalities -- even the people who'd like to make the unvaccinated "pay" in some way turn a blind eye to this issue.

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

#207

Post by spookthesunset »

davidw wrote: post #189
toolz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What exactly are they waiting on? The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave. Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.

If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid? Wasn't that the entire rationale of these lockdowns in the first place? To build capacity for covid?

Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.

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

#208

Post by jerlam »

ralfd wrote: post #195
jerlam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark is the other country with an Omicron-fueled spike, but they have a corresponding increase in deaths: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

But compare that to the delta wave last winter! The infections are 3-4 times higher and the death count is 2-3 times lower (so far).

So far, it does look much better than last winter, but last year they had neither vaccines nor significant previous exposure.

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

#209

Post by brazzy »

martin938 wrote: post #135
globalise83 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has been running at 500 deaths per day from Delta for several weeks ( https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/de ). The evidence from the UK is that Omicron overtakes Delta in just a few days ( https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... ). As the most recent research in the UK suggests ( https://www.politico.eu/article/omicron-variant-coronavirus-... ), and the data in the parent comm…

Quoted post unavailable.

GP meant that they will just get infected and thereby acquire a degree of immunity, with higher risk of death than the vaccine, but (hopefully) not as high as with previous variants.

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

#210

Post by nsxwolf »

fortran77 wrote: post #206
nsxwolf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are obese.

Well, "overweight" by CDCs definition (BMI > 25 == overweight). But there's a strong link between complications from COVID and Obesity. It's a shame nobody wants to make the obese pay for their externalities -- even the people who'd like to make the unvaccinated "pay" in some way turn a blind eye to this issue.

That's the issue though, everyone points out the correlation, but of course there's a correlation. Everyone's overweight. Need more analysis to show just how much it affects COVID outcomes. While it would have been nice for the governments to make more of an effort to get people to lose weight during the pandemic, it's not guaranteed it would have had the results some people expect.
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