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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

#351

Post by throwntoday »

akomtu wrote: post #334
Retric wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are currently sitting at at total of over 800,000 COVID deaths in the US and 1,500 COVID deaths per day, which is roughly where it’s been since September 1st. That’s approximately an additional half a million dead people per year. So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.

We shouldnt forget that something like 80% of them were already old people with a variety of health issues.

And all of the young "healthy" people who died had comorbidities like obesity and diabetws or some congenital issues unknown to them.

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

#352

Post by mekkkkkk »

pg314 wrote: post #278
estaseuropano wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Covid-19 doesn't kill rapidly, so there is no pressure for it to mutate to become milder.

The milder it gets, the less noticeable it is. As it gets less noticeable, the chance of exposure to new hosts increases. Seems reasonable.

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

#353

Post by umvi »

metadat wrote: post #347
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.

Pretty much everyone will contract covid at some point, just like common colds, influenza, etc. You can't expect to never get sick the rest of your life, can you?

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

#354

Post by oneoff786 »

amelius wrote: post #327
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?

Look into random graph models. Or exponential random graph models.

Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.

You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.

More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.

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

#355

Post by School-Cotton »

amelius wrote: post #327
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?

It's an empirical observation, not the output of a mathematical model.

The graph of human social contacts is not even close to uniformly random, so it makes sense that simplistic formulas would not work.

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

#356

Post by BrazzVuvuzela »

specialp wrote: post #173
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,…

A place where it hit exponential levels with really bad results is here in NY at the beginning. We had no precautions, testing, or vaccines in place yet, and hospitals were overwhelmed. It was honestly a scary time. That was where we started "flattening the curve". Now with vaccines available if there are surges and they are not literally building hospitals on fields like they were near me that is something we have t…

No post body was provided.

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

#357

Post by analog31 »

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,…

At the start of the pandemic, when downloadable data became available, I started charting it every day. The curves for many countries were uncannily exponential. Of course I knew that those curves had to tip over at some point, but I decided that I would use the exponential growth curve as a baseline and watch for deviations from it.

I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.

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

#358

Post by rsynnott »

spookthesunset wrote: post #331
rsynnott wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 concentra…

Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people. You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold. Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for h…

> Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people.

That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.

> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.

With what staff?

> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.

As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.

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

#359

Post by oneoff786 »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #345
bufferoverflow wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“A cold” is not a single virus.

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

#360

Post by Karsteski »

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'm still wearing a mask for facial recognition purposes

Real talk, wth is going on in your head...

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