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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Ireland and I know at least 100 people who have had covid, including my wife, father, mother and 2 sisters. Omicron is prevalent here right now.
Germans are notoriously „under-tested“
We're in a situation now where our PCR test system has pretty much fallen apart.
I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.
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I live here and know many ;) But in the north, we generally made it through it better (recent club openings with mass infections notwithstanding, I do not know people who go to mega-clubs during a pandemic).
But Belgium also overcounts deaths ( should be /2 when I checked in 2020), which means any untested death is counted as COVID. Most people don't seem to be aware of that.
https://www.dw.com/en/belgiums-coronavirus-overcounting-cont...
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Ireland and I know at least 100 people who have had covid, including my wife, father, mother and 2 sisters. Omicron is prevalent here right now.
Germans are notoriously „under-tested“
Not sure about the under-tested in general, all the public testing stations were always super busy.
I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.
Here in the UK there seems to be some sort of cold that is ticking all the same symptom boxes as Omicron (sore throat, headache, nasal congestion, cough) but “isn’t Codiv”. My whole family had it before Christmas. I would describe it a rotten cold, we all sat on the sofa for like 5 days but weren’t bed bound, tested negative with LFTs the whole time (each did one at least every other day for a week). We isolated anyw…
Official guidence:
> There are different tests you can get to check if you have coronavirus (COVID-19). The test you need depends on why you're getting tested.
> The 2 main tests are:
> PCR tests – mainly for people with symptoms, they're sent to a lab to be checked
> rapid lateral flow tests – only for people who do not have symptoms, they give a quick result using a device similar to a pregnancy test
> Both tests are free.
Source: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/testing/g...
omicron has solidly taken over Vancouver BC. Anecdotal evidence: in the past two years (except this past week) I have only known 1 person who got covid. In the past week I know over 20 people who have got covid. I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.
I still know no one in Germany who ever had covid, only one person in the US and one in South Africa (who also died from it), so I’m not sure about that.
I thought that a second variant was essentially an independent stochastic process. If I have that right that suggests that, had Omicron not occurred Colorado would currently be Corona-free. I doubt that is true though. Maybe some of the people who now have Omicron would have gotten Delta later on? I don't see how one variant can truly extinguish another variant otherwise. But I am hoping someone here knows better tha…
If it’s milder than Delta - then that’s good right? Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-...
> Professor Andrew Hayward, of University College London, earlier told Sky News that it is unlikely there will be a variant more severe than Omicron.
He said: "This one will be hard to outcompete... given how successful it is."
Professor Hayward added that for a "variant to stick", it needs to have "some advantage over the existing variant and that advantage needs to be really in terms of increased transmissibility or escape from immunity".
He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."
If it’s milder than Delta - then that’s good right? Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?
Scary thing is. Milder disease is a constant factor improvement in hospitalization. But faster spreading (higher R value) is an exponential worsening in hospitalization. It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.
Sure, but those aren’t the only choices. Over the last 30 days the daily case average has increased by 500%. During that same time the daily average hospitalized has risen 100%.
And the test positivity rate has increased to almost 30%, which implies an almost comical undercount in actual cases.
The contagiousness and severity are diverging in an extraordinary way. We’re likely undercounting cases by 1/5 or 1/10th.
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Maybe but “exponential growth” is a conspiracy theory promoted by epidemiologists. In reality, growth follows the S-curve, so a milder, faster spreading disease will also saturate the population (flatten the S-curve) much sooner, so overall the impact will be much less.
I've seen this argument elsewhere and I don't get it. From my understanding the limitation on exponential growth, the flattening of the top part of the S-curve, comes from total population. There is no one left to infect, basically. If the rising part of the S-curve is steep, that means people get infected within a shorter timespan and a corresponding higher load on hospital beds and healthcare personnel, which is wh…