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

#421

Post by tasogare » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

jamesrcole wrote: post #384

oneoff786 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you believe. The reality is that most healthcare systems, at least in developed countries, handled the patients well enough.

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

#422

Post by tasogare » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

mekkkkkk wrote: post #373

spookthesunset wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What kind of life do you lead where mask mandates and moderate restrictions means two years of it is completely wasted. I understand freedoms being trampled and whatnot, but saying "they stole two years" seems pretty dramatic.

No he is totally right. I haven't been able to see my girlfriend for two years because of borders closing. I had to wait two years to see my parents. Friends and family that were supposed to visit me couldn't. Hundreds of event have been cancelled. I couldn't practice my martial art because our training place was close. I was denied entry in a library two days ago. I couldn't network or present my work in person at an international conference. Had to work remotely and didn't speak irl with coworkers for like 6 months. Restaurants closed very early. Etc, etc.

Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.

It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.

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

#423

Post by clairity » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #255

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 think a lot of the panic can effectively be ignored if you're a bit savvy technically and follow some benchmarks. I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red: - RT > 1 - Cases/100k > 10 - Test Positivity > 5% - ICU Usage > 85% If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my…

lots of people following that advice would create a bullwhip effect actually.

instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doesn't (exceptions like a holiday family gathering would still need to be handled exceptionally).

[0]: i'd suggest 'overall health' is the more accurate (if more vague) factor, but weight tends to inversely correlate with general health (overweight ==> weaker immune system, less efficient pulmonary/cardiovascular system, lower muscle tone, more visceral fat, higher diabetes risk, etc.).

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

#424

Post by parkingrift » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

rsfern wrote: post #418

parkingrift wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People come up with endless excuses to remain hysterical. There will never be enough evidence to show omicron is less severe. There is always some excuse as to why some data should be discarded or is not applicable. But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all. Some people just want the world to continue burning.

People want to believe the headlines that confirm their prior beliefs, when if you read the actual research reports your will find that there is still just a lot of uncertainty on the question of intrinsic severity. Those that want to report that omicron is milder focus on overall stats and average symptoms, and gloss over confounding factors. Those that want to report that it’s just as severe as delta seem to be jus…

It would be refreshing to see this level of scrutiny applied to bad news.

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

#425

Post by tunesmith » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:13 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #423

tunesmith wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of the panic can effectively be ignored if you're a bit savvy technically and follow some benchmarks. I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red: - RT > 1 - Cases/100k > 10 - Test Positivity > 5% - ICU Usage > 85% If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my…

lots of people following that advice would create a bullwhip effect actually. instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doe…

My own personal health is such that I wouldn't have to be so conservative if I were thinking only of myself. But Covid isn't just symptomatic, it's also contagious, as in, I can pass it to others who may not be able to handle it as well as I can, including those that aren't merely antivax. So the idea is more that if Covid is doubling at some rate, I limit my social activity so as not to contribute to the spread.

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

#426

Post by Jansen312 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

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,…

In real world I got critized badly even for pointing out media only showing "numbers of infected" and walk into any hospitals now one will see significant less patients than during the peak.

We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.

And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).

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

#427

Post by refurb » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #393

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.

Based on excess mortality numbers, it seems fairly likely that we're already over a million deaths that would not have happened without COVID19.

What will be interesting is to see the long term mortality rate. My hypothesis is we’re just accelerating the deaths of people over 70 years old (70%+ of the cases).

If that’s true, you’d see a decrease in mortality over the next few years. Covid is basically doing what the flu does every winter (but on a larger scale) - it pushes people close to death over the edge.

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

#428

Post by oneoff786 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

zuminator wrote: post #389

throwntoday wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“All” is an exaggeration but it’s accurate to say that obesity was one of the biggest drivers of the mortality rate. Obese people are not healthy.

Subjective boundaries aren’t an excuse to cover your ears and ignore strong correlations.

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

#429

Post by afrodc_ » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

forgotmyoldname wrote: post #402

spookthesunset wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not how drafting for a war works at all. There's extensive training for all the positions, unless you're considering the mythical notion of how Russia sent bodies to war with no weapons

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

#430

Post by sjg007 » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

Jansen312 wrote: post #426

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,…

In real world I got critized badly even for pointing out media only showing "numbers of infected" and walk into any hospitals now one will see significant less patients than during the peak. We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to…

Hospitals are packed... idk what you are talking about.