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

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

#501

Post by clairity »

oneoff786 wrote: post #497
clairity wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a mathematical convention, not simply an epidemiological term. the 0th term of any function, like R0, is generally understood as the initial condition constant (at time t=0). R(t) is a function of time and R0 is the value of R at time 0, the initial condition. R0 tells you exactly nothing about the future, it only pins down the starting point (which is important information, but not the be-all-and-end-all of…

That’s not correct. While R0 is indeed R at time 0, time is not the important part of that. It’s that at time 0 everyone is presumed susceptible so the growth is going to be as exponential as it’s going to get. R0 is a strong indicator of the limits of how the disease will spread and is very useful for predicting the future, both in terms of the speed of the initial exponential spread, but also the upper bound on spr…

no, the epidemiological model in question has two degrees of freedom, and one of those degrees is stipulated by the assumed shape of the curve (exponential, even though that's a poor fit overall, logistic being a better fit). R0 does not constrain the other degree of freedom; it only gives you the initial condition. it requires knowing that other degree of freedom, which you're making implicit assumptions about, that governs what you can say about the rapidness of spread and makes some statements about bounding. this is rudimentary calculus and linear modeling.

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

#502

Post by jacquesm »

jefftk wrote: post #498
jacquesm wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor...

The 115k worldwide (I was trying to talk about the US, but ok) number comes from the WHO: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345300/WHO-... Their methodology is based on an assumption that healthcare workers are as likely to die of covid as the general population, that is, their job does not expose them to elevated risk. You can see the start of their methodology as: "As a start, the number of deaths am…

Ok, I have done some serious searching and nothing came up that substantiates the claim so I'm moving into your camp.

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

#503

Post by davidw »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #466
spookthesunset wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean again I'm no expert but it seems to me that if all these people are supposed to do is treat exactly one illness, it would be possible to train a certain set of people on how to manage 80% of the workload and escalate the exceptions to somebody with more knowledge. It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else. Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to f…

> They haven't even tried This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was con…

When COVID first hit Italy, they started calling up retired doctors and also sending people in medical school into clinical support positions. And it just wasn't enough.

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

#504

Post by davidw »

xigoi wrote: post #465
davidw wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know the best way to avoid healthcare collapse? Build more of it! No, the best way is to not need it in the first place. Vaccinating people is vasty more efficient in terms of people's time and money.

Who said anything about vaccination? You can have vaccination without lockdowns.

This whole conversation is about the notion that we should have massively expanded hospital capacity, which is an extremely expensive endeavour, and probably not feasible because of the lack of trained people.

Universal vaccination uptake would obviate that.

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

#505

Post by JSavageOne »

mistermann wrote: post #336
spookthesunset wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked. If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge s…

I think we're probably in luck somewhat: if something actually serious came along, I agree that people would be much less disagreeable, and perhaps we'd have enough actual problems so authorities wouldn't have to engage in make work projects. That said, I think massive numbers of people (likely the majority still, although the tides seem to be shifting extremely quickly lately) would strongly disagree with us on the…

What's most shocking to me is how little interest there seems to be in educating the population. We're constantly bombarded with the latest COVID-19 case/death numbers, editorialized headlines designed to instill fear, and told to basically shut up, get our vaccine shots, and trust the "experts", and there's been no attempt to educate the population on the real numbers.

For example, how many people know the:

- Case fatality rate of COVID-19 (in the U.S, it's 1.6%) - Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 (can only be estimated, but probably around 0.1-0.3%) - Hospitalization utilization (not just now, but also before COVID-19 so one can compare to prior flu seasons and such. Personally I have not found this data) - Demographics of those who died with COVID-19 (in the UK the median age of death is 84, above the life expectancy of 82. Most deaths are old people and/or those with co-morbidities)

Most people drastically overestimate the danger (eg. by at least 5x according to one survey) because they're bombarbed with news and government fear-mongering, forced to take vaccines and be subject to draconian restrictions, then told to shut up and "trust the experts" while being kept in the dark on the data. Even Big Tech was censoring those who questioned the mainstream narrative (eg. Chris Martenson briefly being banned on Youtube)

In any civilized democracy, the citizenry should be educated so they can make the most informed decisions. There obviously seems to be no interest in educating the people except when it serves the narratives of the elite - which right now is basically "get your shot" and do whatever it takes to reduce COVID-19 numbers regardless of any collateral damage (eg. businesses going bankrupt, people losing work/income, hospitals reducing capacity for other kinds of care, schools shutting down, mental health crisis, restriction of freedoms like movement, general fear).

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

#506

Post by JSavageOne »

foepys wrote: post #213
polote wrote: post #93

Why do people still care about covid ? Vax your old people, stop getting tested and live like before. The faster we get everyone infected the faster old people who didn't get vaxxed will either recover or die and after that the ones who die we can't do anything for them. Trump was right (by chance) all along, that's just some kind of flu, the only difference is that it's the first time our body sees it.

Because hospital capacity is limited and despite what you might want, people will still be admitted to the hospital when they caught covid. In Germany some hospitals are postponing "planned operations" and as much as this sound like no big deal, every operations that is not an emergency is "planned" so this affects cancer removals as well. People are dying of cancer because covid patients saturate ICU beds.

> In Germany some hospitals are postponing "planned operations"

Are these hospitals doing this because they've currently run out of ICU beds to staff COVID patients, or in anticipation of a future influx of COVID-19 patients?

Also over 90% of people who die with COVID-19 have co-morbidities. For example, Colin Powel recently died with COVID-19 in his system, but he also had myeloma (blood cancer) and was 84 years old.

In any case it's been 2 years now since COVID-19 started. At this point if hospital systems still can't manage this, then that's a failure of the governments and the healthcare systems.

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

#507

Post by JSavageOne »

ryanobjc wrote: post #163
polote wrote: post #93

Why do people still care about covid ? Vax your old people, stop getting tested and live like before. The faster we get everyone infected the faster old people who didn't get vaxxed will either recover or die and after that the ones who die we can't do anything for them. Trump was right (by chance) all along, that's just some kind of flu, the only difference is that it's the first time our body sees it.

The flu has been feared throughout history, as it is... frankly quite deadly at times. Now a days we have excellent flu monitoring, and flu shots, and have been able to manage it, also at great cost. But to dismiss the flu, and covid-19 as "nbd" is... not the kind of analytical strength I am expecting on HN. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu At the time of the breakout of Covid-19 in Jan/Feb 2020, the re…

Not sure why you're bringing up the beginning of the pandemic, because 2 years in that's no longer the situation. The case fatality rate in the U.S is currently 1.6%, and we now have a better idea of how the virus works.

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

#508

Post by riekus »

mardifoufs wrote: post #295
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…

Exactly. It's crazy how some people think that shutting down pretty much everything within days is a more viable alternative or even more doable than ramping up healthcare capacity in... 2 years. They'll usually wave away the massive repercussions that shutdowns cause but they will become very perfectionist when it comes to standard of care and how we need fully trained doctors and nothing less. It's an emergency, as…

Totally agree. I have been talking about this for the past year. The cost of lockdowns in the Netherlands is ridiculous. Everyone says we can't scale IC blabla. In a crisis we can even put mechanics at beds if we need to.

For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe

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

#509

Post by riekus »

spookthesunset wrote: post #305
mardifoufs wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's crazy how some people think that shutting down pretty much everything within days is a more viable alternative or even more doable than ramping up healthcare capacity in... 2 years. They'll usually wave away the massive repercussions that shutdowns cause but they will become very perfectionist when it comes to standard of care and how we need fully trained doctors and nothing less. It's an emergency, as…

I think what amazes me is how little it seems some people value their own time and life. Like, life is super short. I sacrificed a non-trival amount of it so these "experts" could build up healthcare capacity. They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond…

Amen, but where I live you are discribed as mentally ill for thinking this way.

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

#510

Post by riekus »

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…

That ratio is in the Netherlands. Which also has huge costs associated with lockdowns
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