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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

#321

Post by jonnycomputer »

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,…

Won't downvote you, but I think that this is mistaken. I think that everyone will get omicron eventually.

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

#322

Post by com2kid »

slaw wrote: post #285
com2kid wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shor…

> The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses I never heard about it before. Could you provide link to your claim?

Some interesting numbers at https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/new-report-reveal... and https://abcnews.go.com/Health/3600-us-health-workers-died-co...

All of that is pre-delta, remember that when COVID first hit in 2020 we still didn't have a good idea how it spread.

The tl;dr is that the US government doesn't do a good job of collecting statistics of how many health care workers died of COVID.

1.5k nursing home workers seems to be the one reliable # from the first article, and The Guardian is saying around 3600 healthcare workers in total.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/21/who-estimate-115000-heal...

WHO reports over 100k deaths of healthcare workers world wide.

So statistically a small #, but it doesn't account for the # of nurses who got COVID and had long term symptoms that kept them from going back to work, or who just decided to no longer work at all.

And it looks like these #s are highly biased towards major population centers, so it wasn't an even distribution from the country or anything.

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

#323

Post by spookthesunset »

davidw wrote: post #286
tdfx wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> give up another year IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.

> People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.

Do you wear masks 8 hours a day for work? 'Cause I'm sure all the people who do might beg to differ.

Plus masks interfere with communication. Faces are important.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

davidw wrote: post #221
spookthesunset wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by rsynnott »

spookthesunset wrote: post #271
eropple wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all th…

> Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war.

Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.

ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).

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

#326

Post by xyzzy21 »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #321
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,…

Won't downvote you, but I think that this is mistaken. I think that everyone will get omicron eventually.

And it will generate herd immunity...

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

#327

Post by amelius »

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,…

Can you back this up with some math?

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

#328

Post by snth »

Talanes wrote: post #245
donquichotte wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't the usual complaint that people (politicians included) _under_estimate exponential growth?

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

#329

Post by rhino369 »

rsynnott wrote: post #313
spookthesunset wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ICU beds require something like 7 specially trained nurses each to operate. Generally, availability of trained staff is the limiting factor (developed countries, at this point, generally have more ventilators etc than they can use), and lead time on making new doctors and nurses is pretty long.

While a nurse is hard to train in 2 years, you can start pulling doctors and nurses from adjacent specialties and cross train them for COVID ICU wards.

If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.

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

#330

Post by jimkleiber »

spookthesunset wrote: post #316
jimkleiber wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say it's 100% of the government's fault, which I don't believe, but let's just say it for argument's sake. So why don't you run for office and do it differently?

> Let's say it's 100% of the government's fault, which I don't believe, but let's just say it for argument's sake. Who else's fault is it? It isn't the public, that is for sure. You can't blame people for human behavior and "not taking this seriously". These governments asked us to pay one of the highest costs you can pay--they asked us to donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause. And thus far, they have done…

These last two years have been some of the hardest years of my life, as a person who normally travels and works internationally with large groups of people, I have been inside the same house for two years with just my parents, one of whom went through chemo and a heart attack while covid was happening. So I feel you on how these past two years have seemed like purgatory, feeling stuck and watching life tick away.

I also wish the various levels of government would have responded differently. I'm assuming you mean in the US, but that's where I am so I'll go with that. I wish the Trump admin would have responded differently, the Biden admin, the US Senate and House (2020 and 2021 members), my governor in Michigan, the senate and house in Michigan, the county health department, my local mayor, and more.

At least in Michigan, they didn't ask me to donate 2 years of my time, much of that has been my choice, frankly against what the Michigan Congress voted. The governor pushed for strong closures in the beginning and the Congress overruled that. Many of the people here have been acting as if there is no pandemic, doing almost exactly what they did before covid-19 existed. Frankly, even many elements of the Trump admin and US Congress have told us to live our lives as normal.

So if anything, I think the government, at its various levels, have provided mixed messages on what we should and should not do. From complete and total lockdown, to open but wear masks, to complete and total return to normalcy. At least in my experience, I haven't heard a coherent "donate 2 years of our short lives to their cause," but rather a mixed message, coming from politicians, who, just as the public are people with human behavior.

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