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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

#231

Post by nradov »

awb wrote: post #188
smm11 wrote: post #158

In other news, heart disease is still the number one killer in the US.

You could go down the rabbit hole and say that misinformation, poor decision making, logical fallacies, mental health issues, etc. are the actual catalysts. My point is that COVID and heart disease are largely preventable at an individual level if you have ability to eat healthy foods and take the vaccine and/or practice social distancing.

You can't seriously expect people to continue to practice social distancing. That is absurd.

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

#232

Post by cpncrunch »

tome wrote: post #118
cpncrunch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation in Denmark as well. Huge number of omicron infections, but deaths haven't budged and number of covid patients in hospitals are actually decreasing.

This comment links to Reuters, which says "Denmark reports its largest number of coronavirus-related deaths since the start of the pandemic: 57". Where are you getting your data? https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654645

From google's covid data. It doesn't seem to have today's update yet.

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

#233

Post by mistermann »

spookthesunset wrote: post #207
davidw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 whil…

I believe that covid has given us incredible insight into the human psyche, including how well we are able to respond to problems that have political/tribal attributes to them.

Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.

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

#234

Post by svara »

snet0 wrote: post #86
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,…

On the subject of oversimplified exponential models, we don't even need covid data to know this to be true. The fact that there is a duration of an individual case being contagious is enough to make that obviously incorrect.

That's not right, you can build a maximally simplistic SIR model with a finite infectious period. That will initially display approximately exponential growth, and slow down as acquired immunity increases.

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

#235

Post by com2kid »

spookthesunset wrote: post #207
davidw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 whil…

> 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?

The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.

Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.

On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)

So, you know, business as usual in the US.

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

#236

Post by parkingrift »

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...

People come up with endless excuses to remain hysterical. There will never be enough evidence to show omicron is less severe. There is always some excuse as to why some data should be discarded or is not applicable.

But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all.

Some people just want the world to continue burning.

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

#237

Post by abainbridge »

gammarator wrote: post #169
joshuahedlund wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is a legitimate theoretical concern, however empirically it looks like South Africa's hospitalizations are peaking at slightly more than half their previous wave, with deaths on pace to peak even lower[1][2] [1] https:/…

SA severity may not be representative because of greater prior immunity and a younger age skew.

Comparing SA with itself, omicron looks less severe than delta.

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

#238

Post by rich_sasha »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #186
gammarator wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hospital admissions are actually up a little: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ (parent link of the one you provided).

That said, deaths are still dropping, and have been dropping since November, which was a local minimum in case numbers.

The pertinent fact, I think, is that the UK is vaccinating like crazy, coming up to 1m boosters per day recently (total population just short of 70m IIRC), even 12-18 year-olds are getting jabbed now.

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

#239

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

zerocount wrote: post #211
hammock wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, natural immunity is real?

Sure is. There's millions of us walking around without getting shots every six months.

Via previous infection? And if so, you're not concerned about waning protection? It would appear that people even with previous wild/delta infections have hit or miss immunity to omicron.

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

#240

Post by jakeinspace »

snet0 wrote: post #61
alliao wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

It only means overwhelmed healthcare if the hospitalisation/requirement for healthcare rate is high enough. If this variant is 5x more infectious, but 5x less likely to result in hospitalisation, the net effect on healthcare resources should remain level, no?

No, there is no formula quite that simple while we're still in the transient, exponential growth stage for omicron. 5x transmissibility can lead to single-day infections much greater than past peaks. If omicron does cause a disaster in the US and other western countries, it will probably be due to a short (2-3 week) window of insanely high daily case rates, leading to very high daily hospitalization/ICU requirements. If the US hits let's say 1M confirmed cases/day for example (3x the peak last winter), with a daily demand for beds (non-icu) of ~25k, things would get very bad in urban centers. The combo of exponential growth and localized hospital resource constraints means that what would seem at face value to be an even tradeoff of transmissibility for lethality is not so simple.

Omicron might be a blessing in disguise, but there is a very bad plausible outcome for the coming month.

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