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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

#381

Post by dpark »

arghnoname wrote: post #136
dpark wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Jurisdictions set their own rules for time of residency before being allowed to vote (e.g., registration X days before an election, Y days of the past Z days in the district, etc). Some people do decide where to live based on political considerations. If they are voting in accordance to the rules set by the relevant jurisdictions, I don't see a problem. This happens on "both sides." I will note that it's easier to br…

> I will note that it's easier to break the rules and commit voter fraud when you can vote by mail. In person voting at least requires that you be physically present on Election Day.

Haven’t most (all?) jurisdictions supported vote by Mail for absentee ballots since a long time ago? All that vote by mail has actually changed is that people can vote from their homes.

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

#382

Post by 7952 »

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.

I think the effect is the same once the patient is quarantined. If they survive two days or two weeks the virus is unable to spread either way.

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

#383

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

throwntoday wrote: post #351
akomtu wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Had corona not of existed, would they still be dead?

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

#384

Post by jamesrcole »

oneoff786 wrote: post #289
svara wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that 1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad 2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right…

> 1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad

I believe quite a few hospitals around the world overflowed pretty badly.

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

#385

Post by mmcnl »

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...

Just because you're presenting a more optimistic narrative based on two charts without context doesn't mean the panic is absurd. There's a lot of uncertainty that could end up the wrong way with potentially devastating effects.

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

#386

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

snth wrote: post #328
Talanes wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends where you are, some parts of australia have certainly been fairly conservative. Opinions aside, they certainly estimated on the upper bounds of severity much more than the US. I personally am grateful that the aus gov did this, saving countless lives in the process.

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

#387

Post by jamesrcole »

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…

The capacity issue is staffing, and that can’t just be spun up. Basically because it takes time to train people

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

#388

Post by rory »

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 you're saying is supported by the data, but do you (or does anyone) know why infections slow down when they do? I can't think of any intuitive reason for it, and haven't been able to find an explanation why the waves crash, so to speak.

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

#389

Post by zuminator »

throwntoday wrote: post #351
akomtu wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just a no true Scotsman argument in disguise. To wit, anyone who is young and healthy won't die from corona, therefore anyone young who died from it wasn't "really" healthy and had "unknown" issues.

You can make that argument with any illness, and people do. E.g., you can't get cancer if you eat healthy, oh, you got cancer? You must not have been eating the right diet for your body type.

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

#390

Post by bewaretheirs »

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.

There's also no evolutionary pressure to conserve its lethality.

What appears to have happened with Omicron is that it has mutated in a way that increases transmission at the expense of lethality:

https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-c...

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