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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

#41

Post by barbs »

yosito wrote: post #21
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 saw some charts out of South Africa today showing that deaths are starting to rise with a three week delay. I'm optimistic that Omicron is less severe, but it's also possible that it's just taking a little longer than expected to start killing people.

Do you have a link for those charts?

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

#42

Post by volkse »

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...

It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.

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

#43

Post by HPsquared »

PraetorianGourd wrote: post #9

This is fantastic if it happens elsewhere as well. The only reason I am not super pumped is because SA is in Summer, and we’ve seen that sars-cov-2 is impacted my seasonality

In hot places with widespread air conditioning there is also usually a summer peak (people go indoors and close windows, just as they do in cooler places in winter). SA has had peaks in both winter and summer.

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

#44

Post by earthbee »

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...

It typically takes three weeks to go from being a case to dead, given how quickly it was rising it was very hard to get a good sense of how many people were likely to die before it was already infecting huge numbers of people.

That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.

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

#45

Post by kadoban »

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...

Hospitalization lags cases, and deaths lag hospitalization.

So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure.

In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).

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

#46

Post by woodruffw »

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 am cautiously optimistic about the severity of Omicron. But as others have pointed out before: deaths trail infections by 2-4 weeks.

Omicron was first reported to the WHO on 11/24 and wasn't categorized as a variant of concern until 11/26. It hasn't even been a month since it was acknowledged much less has become the dominant variant in most places.

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

#47

Post by standardUser »

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...

Deaths have literally just shot up in SA in the last few days. The 7 day average has doubled in two weeks.

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

#48

Post by esturk »

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...

> 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]

Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string.

On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death chart you can clearly see the graph shifted away from the word "average".

By the same reasoning, the death count could still spike albeit not as high.

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

#49

Post by vmception »

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...

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 flow of conversation, maybe its what they actually beleive. Either way this is called a strawman argument.

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

#50

Post by snet0 »

voxadam wrote: post #14

Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking? I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed…

There is a recently released preprint that concludes that omicron-infected have an 80% reduced likelihood to be hospitalised compared to non-omicron infections.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...

Of course, it's not yet peer-reviewed, and doesn't model the possible outcomes based on the conclusions, but it certainly seems to be great news.

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