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.<p>Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.<p>I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
The panic surrounding Omicron is absurd.<p>Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png</a> [1]<p>Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it.<p>1. <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/south-africa/" rel="nofollow">https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...</a>
Even ignoring deaths, "long COVID" is still a very real unknown: <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/harvard-medical-school-expert-explains-long-covid/" rel="nofollow">https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/harvard-medic...</a><p>As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise
Am I the only one who reads these less than scientific articles as much more than wishful thinking?<p>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 science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?
There was a brief spike in daily new cases that was extremely high, then it lowered. It will take more than a day or two to know if it is truly subsiding as fast as it’s growing, and what the meaning of that spike was, so this seems premature.<p><a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...</a>
For anyone who wants to look at the raw data then you can find it here<p><a href="https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covid-19/surveillance-reports/daily-hospital-surveillance-datcov-report/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...</a><p>This is direct from the SA government including archives of all the daily data for the duration of the pandemic.<p>Pay attention to the data lag. But it isn't _that_ laggy.
I think we should take advantage of Omicron right now and let it rip through the population as it's most likely less deadly. Not doing so could be catastrophic and lead to more deaths in the future if the virus mutates to be more deadly.
Why do people still care about covid ? Vax your old people, stop getting tested and live like before.<p>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.<p>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.
I became alarmed about covid since it first appeared in Wuhan, but these days I am more alarmed about people I meet saying that the unvaccinated shouldn't be admitted to hospital, etc
This is fantastic if it happens elsewhere as well. The only reason I am not super pumped is because SA is in Summer, and we’ve seen that sars-cov-2 is impacted my seasonality
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?
It's Farr's Law in action.<p>"Farr's laws is a law formulated by Dr. William Farr when he made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern. The time-evolution behavior could be captured by a single mathematical formula that could be approximated by a bell-shaped curve."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farr's_laws" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farr's_laws</a>
It seems likely that the US would still see waves over much of the winter.<p>South Africa has a population of about 60 million, fairly dense compared to the US. Compared to the US, their spike and fall would be expected to come on faster (and drop faster). The US is more spread out but with many more people. So its great to know that local spikes would come and go fast, it still is a very acute strain likely to be spread over months as it travels around the country.
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.<p>Omicron is already so yesterday it isn't even a memory.
I've basically given up on trying to figure out what the right response is to Omicron. I've seen moved on to trying to figure out the hidden incentives of the hysterics and the covid deniers. I've since regretted moving on from the first intractable problem.
It has been really interesting to observe the hysteria. From the moment they chose the name Omicron, which sounds like a nemesis in a Transformers movie. But more in observing how friends and family back home latch on to the media (which they remain constantly plugged into). The repetition of buzzwords and how enthusiastically they talked about booster shots now being 5 months instead of 6. I don't know anything at all about the medical realities, but can see loud and clear, more than ever how people's mental states are manipulated by media.
This is very bad news for pharma profits!<p>There are at least some people who have figured out the right covid policies, because some of them are running NFL. NFL has ruled that asymptomatic players who received the initial round of vaccinations don't need to be regularly tested. With the rise of omicron, populations of healthy young people whose families have access to health care don't need to fear infection and don't need "boosters". Of course, many families in USA lack access to health care because capitalism. NFL can't directly be held responsible for that, although many NFL owners are billionaires so <i>they</i> can. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...</a>