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

washingtonpost.com

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

#71

Post by jacquesc »

voxadam wrote: post #14

Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking? I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed…

They discovered the variant less than a month ago. The science will take time, all we can do in the meantime is make our best guesses

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

#72

Post by simonw »

esturk wrote: post #48
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...

> 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] Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string. On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death cha…

7-day average graphs are pretty misleading when you have a new variant that grows at the rate that Omicron does. You might have no Omicron at all at the start of the seven day period and majority Omicron by the end of it, at which point the 7-day average really doesn't mean anything useful.

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

#73

Post by boplicity »

hourislate wrote: post #29

I was at Costco this morning (DFW) buying a big hunk of Prime Rib for Christmas Day dinner. No one either knows or cares anymore. I'm still wearing a mask for facial recognition purposes but I'm starting to feel weird considering no one else is wearing a mask anymore, not even the folks who look like they got one foot in the grave already. Omicron is already so yesterday it isn't even a memory.

This is so regional; and it has little to do with the local death rate, unfortunately. Where I'm located, deaths are relatively low, and people have no problem masking up. In other places, such as Arizona, lots of people are still dying, and masking is also relatively rare. It's cultural and/or political, in many regions, as opposed to based on need/risk.

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

#74

Post by JPKab »

volkse wrote: post #42
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...

It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.

Isn't the same percentage in the US exposed, either via vaccine or previous infection?

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

#75

Post by pvarangot »

randomopining wrote: post #7
TaylorSwift wrote: post #3

Does anyone have insights/thoughts as to the implications of this variant growing as fast as it subsides? Does that mean a new variant will emerge which will be more/less infectious or more/less deadly?

Virus just wants to replicate and spread as much as possible. Sometimes the side effect of this is death etc. If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more. But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount o…

Viruses don't "want", anthropomorphizing COVID like media headlines do is a bit of a "language virus" in and of itself that makes global understanding of what's going on more difficult. AFAIK the virus mutates randomly, and we just see more of the more infectious and less deathly (in the short and mid-term) variants because those are the ones that spread faster and successfully among humans, but attributing even collective behavior to COVID, like to an ant colony, is too liberal of a use of our imagination.

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

#76

Post by arn »

volkse wrote: post #42
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...

It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.

The other related factor is omicron is more likely (than other variants) to infect someone who has been vaccinated or previously exposed to covid. So the number of infected low risk individuals is higher, than with previous strains.

The denominator is higher than if, let’s say, delta was let loose in the same population at the same time.

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

#77

Post by howinteresting »

GDC7 wrote: post #36
catillac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than five million probable died from Covid, the vast majority since summer 2020. The pandemic isn’t over because someone decided it was. This person’s comment is asinine.

Quoted post unavailable.

Let's look at years of life lost, then, shall we?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3

> YLL in heavily affected countries are 2–9 times the average seasonal influenza

And that is after all the societal changes to deal with the disease.

I personally think that YLL of 2-9x the flu after mitigations clearly justified the mitigations.

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

#78

Post by standardUser »

ds206 wrote: post #59
standardUser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths have literally just shot up in SA in the last few days. The 7 day average has doubled in two weeks.

Link to data?

It's in the article in the form of a chart. But if you can't see because of the paywall, you can look up the same data on this page: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/mapping-s...

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

#79

Post by nostrademons »

yosito wrote: post #21
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 saw some charts out of South Africa today showing that deaths are starting to rise with a three week delay. I'm optimistic that Omicron is less severe, but it's also possible that it's just taking a little longer than expected to start killing people.

Yeah deaths have been creeping up for the last week, hospitalizations for the last two and a half weeks. Hospitalizations are actually now at about 1/3 of the Delta peak. This is all roughly consistent with the timeline for previous strains (hospitalizations lag cases by about 10 days, deaths lag hospitalizations by about 2 weeks). The specific growth rates are a bit lower than what would be expected based on how quickly cases went up, though.

I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.

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

#80

Post by ufo »

voxadam wrote: post #14

Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking? I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed…

And that theory about viruses becoming less deadly isn't an universal rule in the first place. For example, smallpox and measles never got less deadly. In many cases, the virus becoming less deadly is because the population acquired immunity from vaccinations or previous infection, not because the virus evolved that way.

In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.

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