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Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#501

Post by mikeyouse »

landemva wrote: post #482
mikeyouse wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it worked at all, that'd be a great option.

NIH report says it does. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/ 'Ivermectin is an FDA-approved broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'

That's not an NIH report -- that's a random paper posted on the NIH domain. IVM may have some benefit in countries with parasite problems, unfortunately it doesn't do much in the rest of the world. Has already been discussed to death, there's no conspiracy, everyone would have loved for it to help but it really just doesn't;

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#502

Post by Heliosmaster »

lovecg wrote: post #354
random314 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lockdown prevents severe mutations from replicating because of lockdowns. Milder mutations don't result in lockdowns hence ...

But has this been true in practice? Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns? I suppose hypothetically if there’s a new strain with like a 10% fatality rate there will be new extreme measures where that could be the case, but it hasn’t happened yet. Even the extreme early 2020 measures failed to stop the virus.

> Was any variant successfully stopped with lockdowns?

Statstically speaking, almost surely yes: with millions of infections there are thousands of variants, every day. If somebody was prevented from infecting somebody with their variant (as patient 0) technically we stopped variants with lockdown. Maybe they more favorable for us, maybe they were more dangerous from us.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#503

Post by WillPostForFood »

GeekyBear wrote: post #339
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune (due to the immune escape properties). We’ll learn the answer in a few weeks when the strain has had a chance to infect the old and unwell and we will see if the hospitalizations and deaths increase.

>The big question is whether the disease is genuinely milder, or whether the mild cases are just a consequence of the virus infecting people who are partially immune The initial data says that even though South Africa has a much lower vaccination rate, omicron is mild. From today: > lack of high death and hospitalization rates, despite the fact that Omicron has spread at breakneck speed across the country and account…

The last paragraph of the WaPo article we are all commenting on:

“South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection,” she said. “We don’t think it’s a question of virulence, but more a question of exposure to vaccination and prior infection, so we would be cautious to try and interpret that this is a less virulent strain. We’ll have to see what happens in other parts of the world before we make a call on this.”

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#504

Post by jaywalk »

sjg007 wrote: post #201
wonderwonder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a state where mask mandates are essentially gone. Very few people wear masks here and they are not required in schools so only ~5% of kids are wearing them at my children's elementary school. Everything seems pretty good so far, no marked rise in cases and almost no cases in my kids school over the last year, maybe 25 total, all mild. I am in no way saying masks don't work, in fact I think that they do. Wit…

Just wear a mask in indoor public places until the pandemic is over.

No.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#505

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

AlexandrB wrote: post #425
sokoloff wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, it seems like you have to weigh the lifetime risk of dying from COVID against the loss of life enjoyment and decide “We shouldn’t subject ourselves to another 1.25% of our lifetime of this (whatever “this” is) to lower the fatality rate from Y to X.” (If you’re lowering from 5% to 1%, that trade makes sense for even severe social restrictions. If you’re lowering it from 0.5% to 0.4%, that trade makes n…

I think it's better to consider some kind of "casualty rate" that includes long COVID, rather than just the "fatality rate". At the moment it's possible some people may never fully recover full function after contracting COVID even though they survive.

While I don't think you're wrong, in practice I think most people use fatality rates as a proxy that kinda implicitly includes non-fatal harms. How often do people talk about heart disease or obesity in terms of "casualty rates"?

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#506

Post by Heliosmaster »

julianozen wrote: post #72
boringg wrote: post #21

I have a question for anyone who has a serious level of knowledge on virus evolution: As viruses evolve over time is there any correlation to severity - do they have trade offs as they evolve? I am hoping that it would be some kind of trade off that the virus makes in that it can spread more easily but not be as severe (I understand that it is unlikely nature requires a trade-off). I ask as my concern is that while t…

I am not a professional. I have been basing a lot of my virus information from Tomas Pueyo. Here is my source: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-omicron-qu... In this article he clarified that generally viruses that spread more are less severe (as killing the host makes it tougher to spread). The asymptotic nature of Covid sort of broke this assumption because Covid can lie dormant in someone for a we…

Yeah, technically a variant who lies dormant for a long time while spreading slowly is a better fit than one that is noticed.

Didn't we learn anything from Plague Inc?

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#507

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

I read an article somewhere that said something along the lines of "...due to fears of the omicron variant corona virus" and all I could think of was that, nobody has fears. Only the media outlets are the ones saying the word "fear" here. I haven't heard a single person where I live or elsewhere ever say they were fearful of the coronavirus in the past three months.

This is worse than Alex Jones freaking out about black hawk helicopters. This is a straight up echo chamber of a narrative being spit out. The only people who should be fearful are the vaccinated. To which, like the governor of Colorado said, "it's your own fault at this point."

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#508

Post by jaywalk »

spookthesunset wrote: post #353
notreallyserio wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the mean time we should do whatever we can to avoid filling hospitals to capacity.

Maybe build more hospitals? I mean, in march of 2020 we expressly locked down to build up healthcare capacity. Where is it?

It's almost completely a staffing issue at this point. Good thing we fired a bunch of healthcare workers because they didn't want to get vaccinated!

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#509

Post by jkubicek »

spookthesunset wrote: post #344
jkubicek wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now, it's clear that they won't end until populations start revolting. That's not at all clear. My very cautious Northern California county dropped the mask mandates when cases started dropping this summer and only re-implimented them when cases and hospitalizations started to rise again. I don't see any reason for them not to drop the mandates again when infection/hospitalization rates drop down to acceptabl…

> acceptable levels Define acceptable levels? And does this suggest we continue masking every winter when "cases surge"? There will always be a variant of covid. Always. It's never going away. Basing mask mandates of any metric, be it cases, hospitalizations or deaths means every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask.

Are you trolling or do you really think that "every winter you'll be wearing a state mandated mask"?

We've been in this pandemic now for close to 2 years. At every single point, government rules and guidance have lagged recommendations from the experts. I'm confident that there is exactly 0 chance that any governmental body in the US is going to continue to mandate masking after it's no longer necessary.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#510

Post by jimmyearlcarter »

pwthornton wrote: post #360
roody15 wrote: post #175

This is honesty good news. The best case scenario is a new less deadly highly contagious strain that become the most dominant and spreads worldwide. Way too many comments and articles that try and keep the fear train running full steam. A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world.

Depends on your definition of require. The flu doesn't require a vaccine, but if we had much higher vaccine uptake each year we would save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It's possible that with really high vaccine uptake and other measures we could make the flu a lot more rare. If we end up with a version of COVID that is less deadly and then we decide to not take vaccines seriously, we'll end up with endemic…

You know Covid-19, like the flu, is treatable right? https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/. Also in what universe does the flu kill hundreds of thousands of people?
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