211–220 of 515 posts
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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.
Wait, natural immunity is real?
Why do people still care about covid ? Vax your old people, stop getting tested and live like before. The faster we get everyone infected the faster old people who didn't get vaxxed will either recover or die and after that the ones who die we can't do anything for them. Trump was right (by chance) all along, that's just some kind of flu, the only difference is that it's the first time our body sees it.
In Germany some hospitals are postponing "planned operations" and as much as this sound like no big deal, every operations that is not an emergency is "planned" so this affects cancer removals as well. People are dying of cancer because covid patients saturate ICU beds.
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And that theory about viruses becoming less deadly isn't an universal rule in the first place. For example, smallpox and measles never got less deadly. In many cases, the virus becoming less deadly is because the population acquired immunity from vaccinations or previous infection, not because the virus evolved that way. In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious befo…
It does seem to be true of respiratory viruses though. Asiatic flu is still around, probably HCoV-OC43, now a nearly harmless common cold virus. Spanish flu is still dangerous like all flus, but not the killer that it was. It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.
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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…
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2. "obscure, experimental, for older strains": Look, the vaccines are not obscure. Billions had them. Experimental: Sure. Much as not getting vaccinated is. Remember, we haven't seen that virus before. Older Strains: Turns out protection against severe effects is still strong. I'd say experimentally you're better off partially immunized with one of the well-known vaccines than when waiting around for one of the variants to catch you naive.
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...
Genuine question as I haven’t been following COVID news closely. What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID? Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
Look around this thread and you will find many links to data that indicates Omicron might have less severe outcomes, but it's really still a bit early to really have confidence in that data because there are a lot of confounding factors.
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> 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.
Elective procedures were mandated to stop by policy - not due to capacity constraints. Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
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...
The plot doesn't show that. You're looking at the moving average which doesn't move much, but the underlying data (daily, presumably) shows a drastic increase in the last one or two data points, in line with the expected lag time.
Others have already pointed out the other major issue with your comment, that the situation in South Africa doesn't transfer to many other places in the world due to the exceptionally high pre-existing immunity rate there.
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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?
This is what a liability state looks like. Nobody gets sued for following the CDC, that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi or rare steak
Pretty good advice in my opinion.
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SA severity may not be representative because of greater prior immunity and a younger age skew.
Exhibit B will be the UK. Their cases started spiking about two weeks ago. So far their hospitalizations haven't budged and are even a bit lower than they were a month ago, less than a quarter of their pandemic peak[1] [1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare