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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

#341

Post by alkonaut »

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 don't think there is any panic surrounding omicron and deaths. The panic is around whether omicron has an extreme effect where lots of mild and moderate disease happens in a 2 week period. So saying "look it's mild stop panicking" isn't really correct. If Omicron has even a tenth of the cases the delta wave had, but concentrated in a smaller period of time, it could be just as bad or worse.

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

#342

Post by dragonwriter »

spookthesunset wrote: post #319
dragonwriter wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you are totally okay with the government flushing 2 years of your incredibly short life down the drain I reject that that's an even remotely accurate description of anything that has happened, or has any other relevancd to reality. > many places are locking down yet again What places? Unless you are using “locking down” as loosely as you’ve used “battlefield”, that's not actually happening, anywhere. > And they…

Sorry, not gonna play "its not a real lockdown" pedantry with you. I don't care what you call it. Any restriction we made in the last 2 years be it closed small businesses, masks, vaccine mandates, hall passes to go on dog walks, "not allowed to walk on the dry sand, only the wet sand", closed playgrounds, closed schools... all of it... it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase hea…

> it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity... right?

No.

The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development of effective preventive and treatment interventions, minimizing deaths on the route to that. (I suppose you can call that “building healthcare capacity”, but the goal has never been prinarily about bulking up the number of seriously I'll people hospitals can concurrently treat on a sustained basis, but the capacity to prevent people from getting seriously ill.)

(The original research indicated that after a general lockdown period, cycling local, often more modest, control measures would likely be necessary to that end.)

While the particular half-measures adopted and half-heartedly implemented have had mixed results in preventing health system overload (since we've seen temporary overload various places at various times), we have, in fact, developed various effective interventions and are on the road to more.

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

#343

Post by bufferoverflow »

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.

You're mistaken. There's no disease on this planet that infects 100% of people, even when constantly exposed. Our immune systems are quite amazing.

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

#344

Post by jimkleiber »

dham wrote: post #318

I think we should take advantage of Omicron right now and let it rip through the population as it's most likely less deadly. Not doing so could be catastrophic and lead to more deaths in the future if the virus mutates to be more deadly.

Yes, but couldn't it also be catastrophic if 1) the virus mutates to be even less deadly and infectious or 2) Omicron has long-term, currently unseen consequences?

I mean, not saying your strategy wouldn't be the better strategy in the end, just think it's hard to know the risk equation at this moment.

edit: not sure why someone downvoted this, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you did

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

#345

Post by jonnycomputer »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #343
jonnycomputer wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're mistaken. There's no disease on this planet that infects 100% of people, even when constantly exposed. Our immune systems are quite amazing.

Who hasn't had a cold?

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

#346

Post by jefftk »

com2kid wrote: post #322
slaw wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

1.5k nursing home workers out of a total of about 600k. That's 0.25%. Across the whole population, we've had 810k deaths out of 330M, which is also 0.25%. So we still have the same number of nursing home workers per capita. Except that, considered per nursing home resident, it's an increase, because the rate of nursing home residents dying has been much higher than the general population.

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

#347

Post by metadat »

polote wrote: post #93

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.

> Live like before

The people I know who have been doing this have all contracted covid at this point, unless they are a recluse who doesn't go outside.

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

#348

Post by spookthesunset »

dragonwriter wrote: post #342
spookthesunset wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not gonna play "its not a real lockdown" pedantry with you. I don't care what you call it. Any restriction we made in the last 2 years be it closed small businesses, masks, vaccine mandates, hall passes to go on dog walks, "not allowed to walk on the dry sand, only the wet sand", closed playgrounds, closed schools... all of it... it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase hea…

> it was all in the name of flattening the curve to build supplies and increase healthcare capacity... right? No. The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that (for all causes, not just COVID, since no ICU capacity kills people regardless of the reason they can't get into an ICU) to provide time for the development…

> The things that were about flattening the curve were about avoiding acute health system overload and increased mortality that would result from that

So we agree it is about healthcare capacity. You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it!

You know the unethical, immoral way of avoiding healthcare collapse? Force hundreds of millions of people into this purgatory we are living in right now while doing absolutely fuck-all to build capacity. Then blame them all for "not taking this seriously" when their brilliant plan of doing fuck-all fails.

Seriously. Do you not see how much bullshit it is to just expect the entire world, billions of people to put their lives on hold indefinitely for exactly one specific illness when the solution could be to simply build capacity to deal with covid surges? These governments did fuck all to solve the capacity problem. They dont respect any of us at all!! They pissed our lives away so they didn't have to do anything.

Do you not value your time on this earth at all? 'Cause if you do, I'm sorry to tell you but the government just hoodwinked you into thinking it was your job to sacrifice your life so they didn't have to do anything at all.

Life is short dude. Expecting everybody to do this because "original models" by some bullshit "expert" said so... bleech...

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

#349

Post by cynusx »

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…

You're right, I actually had the benefit of chatting with somebody who organized the lab test network around covid-19 and asked if they (Belgian government) considered ramping up hospital capacity and training non-qualified people the basics of taking care of covid-19 infected people... turns out they never considered it.

Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.

But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?

There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control

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

#350

Post by nsainsbury »

patcon wrote: post #147

Even ignoring deaths, "long COVID" is still a very real unknown: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/harvard-medic... As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise

From what I've seen there seems to be a growing body of evidence that "long COVID" is very much overblown. Eg. See this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most of the symptoms disappear. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876

Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

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