South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

moksly wrote: post #375

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,…

> it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots…

Maybe you should, I dunno, ask why your government hasn’t built up healthcare capacity instead of forcing some dystopian “new normal” nonsense on people?

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

#402

Post by forgotmyoldname » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:35 AM UTC

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…

After two years and seeing just how crazy society can be, you really think drafting random people and telling them to put IVs in someone's arm with minimal training is a good idea?

Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.

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

#403

Post by Retric » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

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.

“Old people” where much better about vaccination and isolation so the 80:20 age dropped over time. Currently well over 1/4 of total death are under 65 which is significantly different than when COVID first showed up. When you look at current data it’s even more shocking the under 55 population is making up a rapidly increasing share of total deaths presumably due to relative vaccination rates.

For example the first omnicron death in the US was in their 50’s that had already had COVID but never got vaccinated. By many metrics that’s old but their still well below average life expectancy.

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

#404

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #309

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…

Are we just ignoring all of the doctors and nurses who were fired for refusing vaccinations? They don't count?

Did they become farmers after quitting, or remained doctors and nurses in locales they find agreeable?

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

#405

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

estaseuropano wrote: post #244

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,…

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 isn't particularly deadly. The selection pressure that can cause a virus to become weaker is mediated by the virus dying off in the corpses it creates. People aren't dropping like flies from COVID, so that selection pressure isn't there, and the virus is free to mutate into more virulent forms. There's no reason to expect a relatively mild, yet still deadly, virus to become weaker, especially if our medical infrastructure keeps people alive that would've otherwise died from infection.

Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.

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

#406

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #358

spookthesunset wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hol…

Bullshit you can’t staff them. You have entire nations worth of resources at your disposal. You absolutely could staff a Covid ICU in a month if it was truly an emergency. It would be janky and imperfect but you could do it. It’s an emergency after all. You don’t have time for perfection.

It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.

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

#407

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

bewaretheirs wrote: post #390

pg314 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

That depends on whether the mutations that cause it to replicate better also make it more virulent. The symptoms that help spread Ebola, for example, are the same symptoms that kill those who become infected with it.

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

#408

Post by jader201 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #103

cdrini wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chart is misleading; the rise/spike in deaths is always delayed from the rise/spike in cases. It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals. Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (W…

It is delayed, but not by a month. Remember the spike began around Thanksgiving, and it's almost Christmas now.

Are we looking at the same chart, or are you talking about some other data/country?

That chart shows it spiking just days ago (~Dec 15) in SA, not on Thanksgiving. So it’s still too early to know the effect on deaths (though I still agree that it seems they won’t be as bad).

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

#409

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:48 AM UTC

mekkkkkk wrote: post #352

pg314 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The milder it gets, the less it is able to spread because disease symptoms are what help spread the disease in the first place. Also, there are selection pressures that select for increased virulence, otherwise all viruses would have evolved to be completely benign billions of years ago.

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

#410

Post by School-Cotton » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

rory wrote: post #388

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.

My guess is the non-uniform nature of the graph of human contacts, which is probably made up of several densely-connected clusters each with relatively weaker links to other clusters.

E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.

So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.