Moderna is working on a vaccine targeting the Omicron variant for 2022.[1]
The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part.
Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like we're stuck with the original vaccines.
Yes and this means governments can quickly adapt to new variants by reformulating the vaccine, dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations, or dumping it, and buying new stock from big pharma.
Since developing nations will always have far lower vaccination rates than first world countries, the virus will continue to mutate and proliferate outside of America and Europe, ensuring new opportunities for revving the vaccine.
That's a sustainable business model for the first world.
Meanwhile, the Biontech CEO thinks that a fourth booster may be needed. For all the agility of mRNA, the reality looks like we are indeed stuck with the original vaccines.
And I suspect that countries which want to implement mandatory vaccination like Austria and perhaps Germany will force people to get the now worthless first and nearly worthless second doses of the original vaccine, because anything else won't be available.
First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020."
and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”"
Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
I don't understand this study. Why not compare the hospitalization/fatality rates between _current_ omicron/delta infections between similar cohorts?
Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off.
Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting?
edit from the summary :-/ :
Vaccine effectiveness:
The two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination provides 70% protection against severe complications of COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation, and 33% protection against COVID-19 infection, during the current Omicron wave.
Reinfection risk: For individuals who have had COVID-19 previously, the risk of reinfection with Omicron is significantly higher, relative to prior variants.
Severity: The risk of hospital admission among adults diagnosed with COVID-19 is 29% lower for the Omicron variant infection compared to infections involving the D614G mutation in South Africa’s first wave in mid-2020, after adjusting for vaccination status
Children: Despite very low absolute incidence, preliminary data suggests that children have a 20% higher risk of hospital admission in Omicron-led fourth wave in South Africa, relative to the D614G-led first wave.
Don't forget this part:
"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"
So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.
If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.
Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.
So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.
With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.
Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.
I think we have to be very careful with data from around the world. There are a lot of co-factors. We already know that generally being immuno-compromised makes covid a much riskier proposition for those groups. In a recent deep dive into the Ivermectin studies done around the world, it was shown and proven that in Bangladesh that Ivermectin reduced covid mortality. However, when digging deeper, Bangladesh has a 80%+ infection rate of worms with most people having 7-23. So taking Ivermectin helped save patients from covid mortality but only in the sense that it made them less immuno-compromised. The US population (e.g.) doesn't have worm infections like that. Any data from a specific geographic area/country/race/etc. may only have validity within that same group.
it isn't apples to apples. Some studies show that SA has >70% seroprevalence [1], most of which from infection. If it holds that recovered immunity confers __better__ protection than naive vaccine immunity [2], then that 30% decrease might as well be from the protection conferred mostly by the former, and we have no idea how that would translate to vaccine naives, who are the majority in highly vaccinated developed countries.
> Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
In this very specific demographic. Other countries will have different outcomes, as seen with the current state of the pandemic (looking at Europe, for example).
Did anyone notice the comparison of vaccine-based immunity to natural immunity in the findings within the source PR [0]? With a little work, you can compare them.
If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection.
Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization.
From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated
From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron
Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics?
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 this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it.
I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation.
I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
> I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
A factor that comes into play is the following. Diseases tend to be less dangerous to children. When a new disease emerges, no-one has immunity to it, so there's plenty of adults who may get it more severely. But, after a certain point, the people being born are exposed to that disease when they are young, where it won't affect them as badly.
This can look like the disease getting milder, but it's just that after a while most people will experience it when young when they will get milder effects from it. And after that point they'll have some immunity for it.
Viral evolution can go down that path, provided there are selection pressures that select for weaker viruses. Viral evolution can also not follow that path at all. Evolution doesn't have a chosen path, and it doesn't have an end-goal. Evolution is the name that we give to the effect that chance has on genetics.
The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of viral hosts. The stronger viral variants literally die off in the hosts they kill, and can't keep spreading, whereas the viral variants that didn't kill their hosts before spreading their genes can keep replicating.
The majority of people with COVID do not die before spreading it to other people. That selection pressure isn't there for COVID, therefore there is nothing really stopping it from mutating into stronger variants. If it starts killing people like Ebola does, then the selection pressure for weaker variants might exist because a lot of hosts will die. Even in that case, it isn't a given that a highly fatal virus would mutate to become weaker. It could very well wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on.
All of this selection happens over evolutionary timelines, which span over many human lifetimes. If the virus becomes weaker, it could take many human lifetimes to reach that point.
From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:
> “Becoming more transmissible and less lethal are absolutely what’s best for the pathogen,” said Day. “But the problem is that it’s not always possible, and in many instances is never possible, to be more transmissible and also less lethal.”
> Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken.
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
“
The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.”
29% LOWER THAN OG COVID
In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess if it can become the dominant strain, why are we still peddling fear about omnicron instead of hope?
Out of curiosity, do we really require these studies? Like it is good to have more and more sources, but wouldn't the expected outcome to be the following:
- vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload
- naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective because the body made immunity to the payload alongside the total viral shape
Yes, we need to know how severe the illness from this variant is.
It was never a question of transmission. When we got news from Norway where 120 vaccinated negative tested people came into the restaurant for a couple of hours and at least 60 of them came out with positive omicron test - it became clear that we are fucked. Also, news from South Africa, where two people were quarantined in a hotel their rooms was across the corridor, and virus got from one to another, despite they never get out, just opened the door to take food and make tests.
So it looks like everybody will have this variant in the next year, except maybe people in distant places. The question was how many will get seriously sick and how many of them will die. Looks like numbers will be lower than expected.
The virus can only modify the spike protein so much before the spike protein won't work to infiltrate cells any longer and go extinct. It appears that the body is forgetting how to make antibodies rather quickly the vaccines are still pretty effective even against omicron if relatively recent or a booster has happened.
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california.
We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.
It’s not “banned” it’s just not approved yet. The US is making plans to buy tons of it in advance. Banned has a very specific connotation that is wildly out of place.
If we're only looking at deaths, only for vaccinated people - then yes.
If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
We could have saved so many more lives. I remember midway through the first year (pre-vaccine) people arguing against mandates and masks and lockdowns, while severely underestimating the damage. One exchange I had here was from a person allowing that maybe they'd reconsider if we ever reached US deaths at something like 350,000, as if that were an astronomical figure.
And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. In contrast to that, the kind of numbers I believe we would have seen or experienced... makes all our fighting about masks and mandates and lockdowns seem pretty irrelevant. I doubt we can even fathom the difference.
Hospitalizations and deaths lag behind cases, mortality shoots up above some case load threshold (hence attempts to flatten the curve), etc. Feels like most people skipped their 2020 homework.
Aside from that, most countries are not even on pace to triple vax their population by end of winter, so letting it rip is a not an option. The countries currently led by populists will lock down just like the rest, only later and with more deaths.
Food for thought: Has China changed their pandemic strategy? Why not?
we don't know yet that omicron won't help more than it hurts if catching it helps with future infections, say delta comes around to those who aren't yet vaccinated
Prediction - nerds will drum up any FUD related to omicron to postpone return to the office. I am seeing it in my company already - in the today's tech virtual townhall "omicron is going to hit hard, so why go back to the office in Jan" was the most upvoted comment in the stream.
This is pretty good news imo. A mild version of Covid is in a way like a vaccine. Maybe this is how COVID fizzles out.
* all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
"Less severe" as in less hospitalizations and death. The long-term effects of comorbidities are still being hashed out. A fair amount of the literature surrounding pulmonary megakaryocytes, platelets, and covid, is pretty alarming.
Is it just me or does it make perfect sense that the selection pressure would push the virus to do this? After all, it’s competing against other variants, as well as counter measures by other human beings.
I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred.
Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns.
Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?
Quote: The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.
Is the "less severe" part just from a roll of the dice? I wonder what's the likelihood of something more severe / extremely severe appearing in the next few years. Be it a variant of Covid, or something new altogether.
That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
I wonder if there is comparative research on the mutations of SarsCov2 compared to other betacoronaviruses. Is it mutating similarly, or do the vaccines /self-isolation and distancing cause a different mutation pattern
I am going to go against the grain here and ask someone more knowledgeable than myself if the large number of changes in this variant is typical in virus evolution? Because as an outsider, it appears to me that studying the history of past pandemics would present a road map as to what must be modified to attenuate the damage potential in a virus. I suppose my question really is, why are we chancing GOF research, if not to use in this situation?
The data on severity is still difficult to transfer across countries. What seems reasonably certain is that vaccinations and previous infections do protect reasonably well against hospitalization and death. It is still not clear how the unvaccinated and not infected will fare.
And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
The 'big flaw' in the SA observations lie in in the fact that they have huge seropositivity rates, I believe well over >50% of the population has had COVID, many of them contracted multiple strains. And - they've had quite a lot of people die already from it.
So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.
Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part.
Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like we're stuck with the original vaccines.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/28/moderna-says-an-omicron-vari...
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e1637976-5c3f-11ec-90d0-c...
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
Yes and this means governments can quickly adapt to new variants by reformulating the vaccine, dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations, or dumping it, and buying new stock from big pharma.
Since developing nations will always have far lower vaccination rates than first world countries, the virus will continue to mutate and proliferate outside of America and Europe, ensuring new opportunities for revving the vaccine.
That's a sustainable business model for the first world.
[+] [-] liber8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|4 years ago|reply
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/BANCEL%20STEPHANE...
[+] [-] blub|4 years ago|reply
And I suspect that countries which want to implement mandatory vaccination like Austria and perhaps Germany will force people to get the now worthless first and nearly worthless second doses of the original vaccine, because anything else won't be available.
[+] [-] tekknik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bognition|4 years ago|reply
First: "The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020."
and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 percent protection against being hospitalized with omicron, the study found, describing that level of protection as “very good.”"
Yes the vaccine does improve outcomes BUT the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated people is still lower with Omicron than previous variants.
[+] [-] kansface|4 years ago|reply
Comparing to an earlier wave is hopelessly confounded on prior infections in the intervening time and similarly, on the most susceptible having already been killed off.
Maybe they did what I'm suggesting and its mostly just bad reporting?
edit from the summary :-/ :
Vaccine effectiveness:
[+] [-] croes|4 years ago|reply
So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.
[+] [-] jiggawatts|4 years ago|reply
Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally.
If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more. Exponentially.
Let me do some simple maths assuming that it spreads "just" twice as quickly as Delta.[1] Lets assume that at some point, Omicron will be the primary strain, and there are 29% less patients in hospital because of it. Assume the doubling-time of Delta is 1 month. (It's better or worse than this depending on circumstances, but start here.) The doubling time of Omicron is then 2 weeks.
So with Delta you have: 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/30d) which solves to about 15 days to get back to a full hospital.
With Omicron the equation is 1.0 == .71 * 2^(t/14d) which means it'll be back to a full hospital in just 7 days. Then the hospitals will be at 200% capacity in 21 days, 300% capacity at 29 days, and 1000% of capacity in just 53 days.
Of course, the full mathematical model is more complicated, typically something like SEIHRD, but the point is that a mere 29% reduction in mortality is next to nothing compared to an exponential increase in infectiousness. It would have to be more like 90% less dangerous for that to matter at all in the long run.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/masonbissada/2021/12/03/scienti...
[+] [-] snarf21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjwalter|4 years ago|reply
Why "BUT"? Shouldn't the second part be, uh, a good thing?
[+] [-] bigodbiel|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.18.21266496v... [2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...
[+] [-] chinathrow|4 years ago|reply
In this very specific demographic. Other countries will have different outcomes, as seen with the current state of the pandemic (looking at Europe, for example).
[+] [-] trutannus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldstatsstudent|4 years ago|reply
If we convert the measure used in finding 2 (relative risk of reinfection) to finding 1's (relative protection), then the study found that natural immunity from Delta variant gives 60% protection against Omicron; roughly double the vaccine's protection.
Unfortunately, no stat was given for natural immunity's protection against hospitalization.
From finding 1: individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 33% protection against infection, relative to the unvaccinated
From finding 2: People who were infected with COVID-19 in South Africa’s third (Delta) wave face a 40% relative risk of reinfection with Omicron
Am I reading this right? Wonder why they used different metrics?
0: https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas...
[+] [-] boringg|4 years ago|reply
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 this variant might be much more effective at spreading and hopefully less severe in its disease - are we not just making a massive breeding ground for the variant after this one that could potentially be as quick spreading but with a greater severity of disease?
[+] [-] parasense|4 years ago|reply
I would imagine all viral contagions would eventually go that route. Because a virus cannot propagate if the host organism goes extinct, or for whatever reason the host organism is itself not fit for survival, or diminished in any way.... anything that might impact virus propagation.
I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...
[+] [-] not2b|4 years ago|reply
If the patient is contagious before developing symptoms, the virus can spread very effectively even if many patients die.
[+] [-] justinator|4 years ago|reply
Well, how much of our own actual DNA is nothing but virus DNA that got stuck in there for nigh eternity?
Answer: 8%.[0]
[0] https://www.cshl.edu/the-non-human-living-inside-of-you/
[+] [-] jamesrcole|4 years ago|reply
A factor that comes into play is the following. Diseases tend to be less dangerous to children. When a new disease emerges, no-one has immunity to it, so there's plenty of adults who may get it more severely. But, after a certain point, the people being born are exposed to that disease when they are young, where it won't affect them as badly.
This can look like the disease getting milder, but it's just that after a while most people will experience it when young when they will get milder effects from it. And after that point they'll have some immunity for it.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of viral hosts. The stronger viral variants literally die off in the hosts they kill, and can't keep spreading, whereas the viral variants that didn't kill their hosts before spreading their genes can keep replicating.
The majority of people with COVID do not die before spreading it to other people. That selection pressure isn't there for COVID, therefore there is nothing really stopping it from mutating into stronger variants. If it starts killing people like Ebola does, then the selection pressure for weaker variants might exist because a lot of hosts will die. Even in that case, it isn't a given that a highly fatal virus would mutate to become weaker. It could very well wipe out entire species and die off itself like the majority of species in the history of the Earth, or it could become endemic in a different species afterwards and live on.
All of this selection happens over evolutionary timelines, which span over many human lifetimes. If the virus becomes weaker, it could take many human lifetimes to reach that point.
From the AP's "Viruses can evolve to be more deadly" article[1]:
> “Becoming more transmissible and less lethal are absolutely what’s best for the pathogen,” said Day. “But the problem is that it’s not always possible, and in many instances is never possible, to be more transmissible and also less lethal.”
> Day said there are documented cases of animal viruses that evolved over time to become more lethal, including myxoma virus in rabbits and Marek’s disease in chicken.
> Some viruses provoke severe symptoms in their hosts that make it easier to transmit the virus to others. But those same symptoms can wind up killing the hosts.
> Adalja said one example is Ebola, a deadly virus that spreads through the blood and body fluids of infected people. Another example is norovirus, which causes diarrhea and vomiting, and leads to hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S.
> “The virus, speaking anthropomorphically, just wants to spread and have its genes replicated,” said Adalja. “If the best way for it is to spread by causing severe symptoms it will continue to do that.”
[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-011488089270
[+] [-] sumedh|4 years ago|reply
There is no intelligence making this decisions, its just some random mutations, so we cannot predict what path the virus will take.
[+] [-] oxymoran|4 years ago|reply
29% LOWER THAN OG COVID
In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess if it can become the dominant strain, why are we still peddling fear about omnicron instead of hope?
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
- vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload
- naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective because the body made immunity to the payload alongside the total viral shape
[+] [-] SergeAx|4 years ago|reply
It was never a question of transmission. When we got news from Norway where 120 vaccinated negative tested people came into the restaurant for a couple of hours and at least 60 of them came out with positive omicron test - it became clear that we are fucked. Also, news from South Africa, where two people were quarantined in a hotel their rooms was across the corridor, and virus got from one to another, despite they never get out, just opened the door to take food and make tests.
So it looks like everybody will have this variant in the next year, except maybe people in distant places. The question was how many will get seriously sick and how many of them will die. Looks like numbers will be lower than expected.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneoff786|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|4 years ago|reply
This seems like a pretty big assumption TBH, and something that needs study. Is it better? How much? Why? How long does it last?
[+] [-] redisman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramblerman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchusma|4 years ago|reply
We are at the endgame. These are the last things left to "end the pandemic", and they are all policy decisions: (1) allow peditricians and parents to decide if they want to vaccinate their under 5 year olds. (2) Stop banning Paxlovid (3) Stop any mandates, there just isn't the numbers to justify them. (4) Ensure people have reasonable rights to keep wearing masks or something in public.
[+] [-] oneoff786|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
[+] [-] tunesmith|4 years ago|reply
And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. In contrast to that, the kind of numbers I believe we would have seen or experienced... makes all our fighting about masks and mandates and lockdowns seem pretty irrelevant. I doubt we can even fathom the difference.
[+] [-] def_true_false|4 years ago|reply
Aside from that, most countries are not even on pace to triple vax their population by end of winter, so letting it rip is a not an option. The countries currently led by populists will lock down just like the rest, only later and with more deaths.
Food for thought: Has China changed their pandemic strategy? Why not?
[+] [-] hutzlibu|4 years ago|reply
When was that ever forbidden, except on demonstrations?
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex-korr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shtopointo|4 years ago|reply
* all disclaimers apply: I am not a doctor, you should still take care of yourself if you're immunocompromised / old / diabetic / overweight / unhealthy etc.
[+] [-] rbartelme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred.
Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns.
Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?
[+] [-] richardatlarge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
That’s why the mRNA vaccines aren’t super effective for it.
[+] [-] stef25|4 years ago|reply
That should be the main take-away from this whole thing ... there needs to better healthcare, even in the "strongest" of countries. A comment here a few days ago really drove that point home. Germany, the EU powerhouse with 80 million people is on its knees (lockdowns again, despite good vaccination rates) because it can't handle a few thousand individuals needing ICU beds. That's just unacceptable. Until now we've been pretty lucky but that luck might run out soon.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JudasGoat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabian2k|4 years ago|reply
And the speed of this variant is enormous. We're seeing a doubling time between 2 to 3 days in several countries like Denmark or the UK. That is far faster than any previous variant.
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
So that Omicron is not hugely lethal among a population with 'natural' tolerance and where a good swath of the ill have been killed ... is maybe not so surprising.
Maybe there is a good answer to this but the SA reports I have seen don't seem to directly speak to this issue.
FYI CDC's seroprevelance data for SA [1]
[1] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1465_article