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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

#241

Post by joshocar »

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,…

What about the population of the unvaccinated? What percentage should we expect of the unvaccinated to get omicron given how contagious it is?

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

#242

Post by spookthesunset »

voxadam wrote: post #14

Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking? I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed…

Does it even matter? Covid is here forever. Doesn't matter if the next variant is "good" or "worse" or "horrible". It's here forever. We cannot continue playing this restriction / mandate game any longer. We have something like a dozen vaccines globally, multiple treatments, etc. We've had 2 years for government's to build healthcare capacity to handle any "surge" we get and it is no longer fair to the public to keep blaming them any time some hospital gets full.

It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.

Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.

Move on.

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

#243

Post by kansface »

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).

The people who were killed last winter can’t be killed again. They were definitionally the most susceptible and we haven’t replaced that demographic. You can’t naively compare the two waves without a control since they effect very different populations. In other words, if you ran the same experiment backwards, you could plausible get the same results.

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

#244

Post by estaseuropano »

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,…

There is a lot to unpack but I doubt you are as right as you think you are. For instance in new variant outbreaks there ate usually harsher responses than for known variant outbreaks, so it is very difficult to identity the real infectivity.

But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.

In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.

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

#245

Post by Talanes »

donquichotte wrote: post #83
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,…

Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.

Asking politicians to not over-estimate exponential growth is like asking water not to be wet.

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

#246

Post by svara »

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,…

Not sure what you're trying to say. Of course there is a limited pool of people to infect. And various effects can cause infections to spread in multiple waves even far from herd immunity.

And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.

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

#247

Post by awb »

nradov wrote: post #231
awb wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re right, social distancing is no more realistic for many people than maintaining a healthy diet and exercise routine. My point is that we have tools to stop these diseases, we just view using these tools as worse than getting the disease.

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

#248

Post by vmception »

dpark wrote: post #223
vmception wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll move back to one of them You’re reading what you want to read, it was worded specifically and intentionally Its not any one of them, its the one that I am registered to vote in.

You literally said any. But I’m still stuck on why. What is the point in getting yourself involved in something that doesn’t affect you personally? Why is it worth getting yourself involved with someone else’s self governance?

Its almost as if I live in and am registered to vote one of the few major counties and states that are prone to reintroduce restrictions, and am not currently physically there right now.

The goal being that there would eventually be one less county and state that would consider restrictions.

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

#249

Post by eropple »

spookthesunset wrote: post #224
davidw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of it is finding the people, beyond the physical space. You can't just 'spin up' nurses like AWS instances. They're in short supply right now, and many are feeling burned out. There's a post going around about a doctor who got assaulted by deranged family members of a man who died. Don't know if it's real, but a lot of people were saying they've experienced similar and are just done with it.

When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capabl…

"I readily admit that I don't know what I'm talking about but at the same time I'm going to insist that my hypothetical situation is definitely correct and the knowledgeable people working on medical staffing and capacity management for their entire careers simply do not know as much as me, a computer toucher."

Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.

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

#250

Post by spookthesunset »

catillac wrote: post #28
alliao wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people who have families working in healthcare would beg otherwise

More than five million probable died from Covid, the vast majority since summer 2020. The pandemic isn’t over because someone decided it was. This person’s comment is asinine.

> The pandemic isn’t over because someone decided it was.

Doesn't matter. The virus has nothing to do with how humans react to it. The virus didn't tell us to shut everything up and hunker down for 2 years. We could decide to move on tomorrow if we chose. Many places moved on almost a year ago with very little repercussions.

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