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

Post by aaron695 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

donquichotte wrote: post #83

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,…

Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.

Post by Trumpi » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #43

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.

Post by dontcare007 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #405

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 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 inf…

Post by School-Cotton » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

rory wrote: post #416

School-Cotton wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for explaining, that sounds highly plausible!

Post by throw0101a » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

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…