South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by zerocount » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #92

vmception wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, if any major US markets reintroduce restrictions, I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out in favor of some hardcore health gambler like De Santis. I played along, now they’re done. edit: the responder assumed something that wasn’t said, and then wrote an essay about something thats not happening and an example from Mississippi. Maybe to save time from having a natural f…

> 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…

I'm pretty sure it was hyperbole.

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

#252

Post by tdrdt » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

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...

A Japanese study showed that Omicron is reproducing 70 times faster in the bronchi but 10 times slower in the lungs than Delta. That's why it is giving less lung problems and therefore doesn't make people as ill as Delta.

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

#253

Post by tdfx » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

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…

People will say "well you can't just make more nurses and doctors in 6 months!" However, had we built or repurposed buildings as COVID-specific treatment centers there would be a fairly standard treatment protocol that could be applied by people without 4-8 years of medical training, allowing the highly trained nurses and doctors to supervise the process and multiply their effectiveness. Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, with some going from knowing nothing to being able to run IVs and be fully certified EMTs in 6-9 months. Stories abound of how bad they are at hitting the vein the first time, but it's certainly preferable to dying in the waiting room.

The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.

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

#254

Post by erichocean » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

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,…

> Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.

Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.

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

#255

Post by tunesmith » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

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...

I think a lot of the panic can effectively be ignored if you're a bit savvy technically and follow some benchmarks.

I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red:

- RT > 1

- Cases/100k > 10

- Test Positivity > 5%

- ICU Usage > 85%

If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my social activities. This seemed about right to me for Delta. For Omicron, I'm holding steady with that strategy for now, but if it turns out that Omicron isn't as severe for unvaccinated people, I might relax the strategy to only look at ICU usage.

What's been interesting over the past six months is that it has tended to turn red when everyone was partying, and it'd turn green again when people were still freaked out.

At any rate, it means I can ignore a lot of the rhetoric, because if Omicron subsides quickly, it just means my benchmark will turn green sooner.

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

#256

Post by willcipriano » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #217

toolz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

COVID patients completely overran the hospital where I live. We're a not so big city that serves a lot of really rural areas. The ICU was full. The regular hospital was full.

A lot of rural hospitals were closed last year[0]

[0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...

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

#257

Post by midasuni » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

oneoff786 wrote: post #133

stefan_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit silly to go "it's less severe" based on death statistics when after two years of Corona waves, there are plain less individuals around for it to kill.

Death of the vulnerable is a thing, which I referenced, but it’s a relatively minor factor compared to vaccinations and immunity build up from past infections. Most people who would die from covid if they caught it did not catch it. I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.

The problem is by the time you see the effect (hospitilations) it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s like driving with a 20 second lag in your vision.

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

#258

Post by spookthesunset » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #62

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.

I find it mind-boggling that a person could live through nearly 2 years of this pandemic and still not understand how hospitalizations lag cases and deaths lag hospitalizations by a number of weeks. I'm optimistic about Omicron, but I'm not going to pretend I don't know the pattern we have seen over and over and over again.

> hospitalizations lag cases and deaths lag hospitalizations

Why aren't you upset with your governments for not making this a non-issue? You gave them 2 years to figure it out and all I hear are excuses like "you can't just spin up new staff". Bullshit. These governments have virtually unlimited resources to build healthcare capacity to deal with covid. If there was a will to do so, they could have built capacity specific for covid that includes proper staffing.

The fact that entire regions of 17 million people get thrown into month-long lockdowns and asked to cancel christmas because the region can only support like 400 people in the ICU is a travesty.

People should be furious with their governments continuing to blame the public for "possible healthcare collapses". We paid with 2 years of our short-ass lives waiting for them to fix capacity issues. There are zero excuses.

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

#259

Post by throwhauser » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

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…

> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want.

> Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.

What makes you so sure?

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

#260

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

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?

Not if you factor time into that math. 5x more infectious on the first cycle means just 5 times the infections, and equal hospitalizations, but the next cycle all of those 5x the number of people spread it again to 5x the number of people. So even though it's 5x milder, you've still got 5x the people showing up in the hospital. It gets worse and worse the more cycles you go. 25x in hospital, 125x in hospital, etc. You run into mitigating factors in real life, as the entire population is consumed, but that's a super steep slope comparative to the baseline.