South Africa's Huge Omicron Wave Appears To Be Subsiding Just as Quickly As it Grew (washingtonpost.com) 99
South Africa's huge wave of omicron cases appears to be subsiding just as quickly as it grew in the weeks after the country first announced to the world that a new coronavirus variant had been identified. From a report: South Africa's top infectious-disease scientist, who has been leading the country's pandemic response, said Wednesday that the country had rapidly passed the peak of new omicron cases and, judging by preliminary evidence, he expected "every other country, or almost every other, to follow the same trajectory."
"If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, omicron's is more like we were scaling the North Face of Everest," Salim Abdool Karim said in an interview, referring to the near-vertical increase in infections that South Africa recorded in the first weeks of December. "Now we're going down, right back down, the South Face -- and that is the way we think it may work with a variant like omicron, and perhaps even more broadly what we'll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic," he said. Just a week ago, South Africa was seeing skyrocketing positivity rates and massive lines for testing. But during the first days of this week, there has been a turnaround in rates and stress on testing facilities. In addressing the surge of infections, South Africa had decided not to impose a lockdown or other major restrictions, although many countries, including the United States, imposed restrictions on travelers originating in South Africa and neighboring countries.
"If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, omicron's is more like we were scaling the North Face of Everest," Salim Abdool Karim said in an interview, referring to the near-vertical increase in infections that South Africa recorded in the first weeks of December. "Now we're going down, right back down, the South Face -- and that is the way we think it may work with a variant like omicron, and perhaps even more broadly what we'll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic," he said. Just a week ago, South Africa was seeing skyrocketing positivity rates and massive lines for testing. But during the first days of this week, there has been a turnaround in rates and stress on testing facilities. In addressing the surge of infections, South Africa had decided not to impose a lockdown or other major restrictions, although many countries, including the United States, imposed restrictions on travelers originating in South Africa and neighboring countries.
The media will not like this, if true. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The media will not like this, if true. (Score:1, Troll)
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We already know people who are vaccinated won't get so sick you end up in the hospital.
But they can still spread the virus to others, so limiting possible exposure opportunities does help.
Re: The media will not like this, if true. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The parent said > limiting possible exposure opportunities does help
You said > ... so the logic makes no sense
How do any of the points you brought up contradict what the parent said ?
Re: The media will not like this, if true. (Score:4, Insightful)
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> If you can't go to a new year's party, why are schools still planning in person 100% normal operation on the 4th?
Supposing a main point is to reduce cases by X amount, and maybe especially hospitalizations, then it can make sense to reduce some activities more than others.
Here, for now, they kept schools 100% but reimposed masks and cut gatherings from 20 people to 10 (among other things).
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Oh, I mean secondary and post secondary schools. If you can't go to a new year's party, why are schools still planning in person 100% normal operation on the 4th?
School is going to be the exposures to more or less the same group of people every day.
Holiday parties are often going to have exposures to a lot of people you aren't normally exposed to, then you go back to normal life and spread whatever you caught to your normal group of people.
Both scenarios have risk, but the risk in the "everyone goes to big parties" scenario is going to be multiple orders of magnitude higher.
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> If you can't go to a new year's party, why are schools still planning in person 100% normal operation on the 4th?
Missing a party is very inconsequential compared to missing school ?
Re: The media will not like this, if true. (Score:3)
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>I guess my point is that at this point in the game everyone is vaccinated, we have the QR codes and everyone is pretty mindful. (i.e stay home if sick).
Seems like a new point but ok. Unless people have a 3rd 'booster' the protection of being double vaccinated wanes a lot after 6 months and 2 shots offer even less protection for omicron. So things have changed a lot. Also a lot of people don't stay home. Where do you live ?
>So if there is a need for more arbitrary lock downs that aren't following the
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Meanwhile, in the US, about two-thirds of the population has completed it's initial vaccination (either one dose J&J or two-dose MRNA vaccines). Of that, about 30% also have a booster - so about 20% of
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Simply acquiring COVID isn't a problem. Let alone the public health disaster that the people in charge claim it is.
Primarily we should be looking at "deaths from COVID".
And we should keep a weather eye on "Deaths with COVID" in case there's an actual pattern that emerges.
And being vaccinated doesn't mean they won't get seriously ill.
It simply lowers your chances.
And since your chances are a fraction of a percent already...
Re: The media will not like this, if true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Primarily we should be looking at "deaths from COVID". ... And being vaccinated doesn't mean they won't get seriously ill. It simply lowers your chances.
Keep in mind that getting seriously ill from COVID can have long-term, life-changing consequences and shouldn't be dismissed, or downplayed/ignored, simply because someone doesn't die. In addition, the medical expenses from treating COVID may be high -- perhaps even considering insurance, if one has any, Being vaccinated seems to low one's chances of getting seriously ill (and/or dying), and having to be treated for that, a LOT.
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Being vaccinated lowers one's chances on a sliding scale.
Talking about raising one's chances by 90%?
Remember, the baseline for most people below 60 is 99.6% or better.
On the ABSOLUTE scale, this means your chances have been raised to roughly 99.9%.
Better? Yes. But infinitesimally so.
And this is before taking into account some of the possible complications (clotting, cardiac issues) that these vaccines have.
And despite decades of public education malfeasance, people can (generally) still do basic math and
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And this is before taking into account some of the possible complications (clotting, cardiac issues) that these vaccines have.
And despite decades of public education malfeasance, people can (generally) still do basic math and statistics and (with a physician's advice) make their own decisions about their own health.
And while it's a valid concern, simply saying "Long COVID" and throwing in scary scenarios doesn't justify coercion, violation of rights or turning people into second class citizens.
So the possible negative short/long term effects of a vaccination are why we shouldn't be vaccinated, but the possible negative short/long term effects of getting COVID don't count for why we should?
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When will people read what I said?
"If you want to get vaxxed, GO AHEAD. Talk to your physician and get vaxxed."
If someone looks at the the side effects of the vaccine and decide that cardiac damage and/or strokes are something they'd like to avoid...
That's their decision.
"They" will not like this, if true. (Score:2)
Quick, create the next variant!
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Quick, find the next variant.
It will come along. I estimate a couple more similar variants, as covid does what influenzas do, as it eventually winds down next year and becomes similar to the rest of the influenzas that humanity knows and loves.
And *all* the "media" will obsess over whatever new shiny that happens to come along, as always.
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hard to explain (Score:1)
Unless 95% of the population already got infected by omicron.
Previous infection by other variants offer very little protection, therefore cases should go up according to the model.
Re: hard to explain (Score:1)
Or not
As the real data shows
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which is why this thread is called "hard to explain". I can see cases are going down in South Africa. I haven't found any reason why however. Perhaps you could enlighten us?
Re: hard to explain (Score:4, Interesting)
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the hospitalization wave, maybe. The case wave, not at all. And we are talking about the case wave here.
Easy to explain (Score:3, Insightful)
the hospitalization wave, maybe. The case wave, not at all.
With many people having almost no serious symptoms from Omicron, it's easy to imagine there could have been very wide numbers of cases that didn't show up on official case tallies earlier, the ones you see now is Omicron finally going through the richest segments of the populations that have the time and inclination to actually get tested. So the last gasp of the virus.
This is exactly what one would expect from a variant that causes almost no hosp
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This is guesswork, but one idea floated to explain why infections come in waves instead of the S-shaped curve of a self-limited exponential is that "the population" is a conceptual error.
What if graph theory showed that a society was a bunch of cliques with limited interaction? Then a virus could tear through one set of people who breathe around each other, leave most of its victims resistant, and crowd itself out. Case loads would drop while everyone was wondering why. Then there'd be incidental contact wi
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Well it should be pretty easy to confirm. Just take 1000 random people and check. Would be worth it for the rest of the world to know if that's how the Omicron wave ended in South Africa.
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also, if it's what happened, then they missed over 99% of the cases since they only reported a daily 7-day average peak of about 16000. That's nothing.
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Do we have any indication that someone who has already had c19 has been reinfected with Omicron? I was under the impression that re-infection was so rare as to be thought virtually impossible.
Regardless, this mutation may target individuals with very specific characteristics ( low levels of D? C? ), which would explain both the meteoric rise and fall of case #s.
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I've read many sources that have said that Omicron is escaping immunity and infecting both fully vaxed and previously infected people.
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Yes [newsweek.com]
Not just reinfected, but died.
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Yes, yes we do. Also reinfection, even for strains other than Omicron, is not "virtually impossible".
Your conclusion is not supported at all by you
Re-infection (Score:2)
Yes, we do, and we have some numbers about the rate. It's very high.
https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
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The blurb is unclear, but it seems to be referring to vaccines and not prior infections.
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Do we have any indication that someone who has already had c19 has been reinfected with Omicron? I was under the impression that re-infection was so rare as to be thought virtually impossible.
Neither previous infection nor vaccination that was not recent appear to offer much immunity to Omicron. If it turns out to be the case that Omicron causes much less severe disease, then the real question is the reverse - does infection with Omicron confer good immunity to the other strains of COVID that are circulating? If it does, that could be the end of this pandemic. If it does not, then it just means everyone is going to get a cold this winter, and then the pandemic will continue on as it was.
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Do we have any indication that someone who has already had c19 has been reinfected with Omicron? I was under the impression that re-infection was so rare as to be thought virtually impossible.
That's completely wrong. At best, getting infected offers you a few months protection before the gained immunity fades and leaves you vulnerable again. But the antibodies people generate vary, and for some people, the ones generated aren't very good at preventing re-infection and they can get it again rather quickly.
The mRNA vaccines are presenting your body with the best case scenario to generate antibodies. Watch how effective they are over time, and assume antibodies from infection will be less effective
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That...doesn't make any sense.
The mRNA vaccines copy a very specific protein of c19, not the whole thing. By extension, you'd expect your immune system to develop more robust immunity to an infection than the vaccine alone.
The CDC disagrees with your position about reinfection; https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru... [cdc.gov]
They say a few cases have been reported, so I may have overstated things a bit, but it's still remarkably rare. Which aligns with my statement above about the differences between the vaccine and an
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The vaccines use a very specific protein that's critical to the virus infecting cells. It's also the protein that most of your natural immunity ends up targeting on the real virus. There's lots of good evidence that the vaccines, which include all kinds of tricks to produce a more robust immune response, do provide stronger protection than natural infection.
There's also evidence that vaccination plus natural infection offers even stronger, and probably broader, protection.
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Your body picks a specific point on the virus to target. We don't know exactly how it picks that point, but not everyone picks the same point. The point your body picked might be not great, or it might be highly prone to mutation, so the quality of the antibodies will vary.
The vaccines expose you to an optimal point of the virus so that you'll get a specific immune response that's known to work well.
As for the CDC line, I think you're reading too much into a single sentence. There's nothing to qualify what
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The mRNA vaccines copy a very specific protein of c19, not the whole thing. By extension, you'd expect your immune system to develop more robust immunity to an infection than the vaccine alone.
Not necessarily, and not in practice.
The amount of antibodies developed from the vaccine can be higher, especially if it was a mild infection.
For Omicron specifically, Pfizer, Moderna and AZ vaccines have been shown better than previous infection.
https://www.biorxiv.org/conten... [biorxiv.org]
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> political left....try to push their vaccination and authoritarian agenda
Oh come on. India tried to ignore the virus half a year ago and got pummeled for a few months, piling the dead up in parks because mortuaries were full. If this wave turns out to be a nothing-burger, that's good, but the reverse error in judgement/forecasting is horrid. I'd rather waste a trip to the vax nurse than waste a life. Balance the tradeoffs thoughtfully, like a good nerd should.
Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason why cases are going down is simple.
People figured out that Omicron isn't much of a concern, so they stopped getting tested if they felt only mildly ill.
Also of course, Omicron passes trough people very quickly (under a week) so even though it's very infectious, it doesn't have a long lasting impact on the population.
After this cases of all kinds of Covid should be way down for a good long while, the last gasp of the virus taking the same evolutionary path they all do.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
That they all do?
Smallpox was with us for thousands of years and stayed just as deadly the whole time and is only gone because we put intense effort into the eradication project.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
That is what worries me. All our vaccination efforts may be tilting at windmills. Smallpox and polio are the only two diseases we've eradicated because they only infect humans. Once all humans were vaccinated or infected and recovered, these viruses had nowhere to go and died.
I've read numerous stories of COVID-19 being detected in dogs, cats, hamsters, pigs, bats, monkeys, ferrets, otters, mink, deer, etc. If COVID-19 jumps between species this easily, then vaccinating humans isn't enough. We'd need to vaccinate all those animals as well if we want to eradicate it. Which is virtually impossible. Even if we manage to vaccinate all humans, it will mutate in animals into a strain which can bypass existing vaccines, and jump back into humans.
I'm increasingly doubtful we'll vaccinate our way out of this. And it's not because of the anti-vaxxers.
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I'm increasingly doubtful we'll vaccinate our way out of this.
I don't know why. I would expect it to behave like the multitude of other once-upon-a-time-killer-but-now-mutated influenzas that we currently keep a handle on--via vaccinations.
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I distinctly recall news articles about peoples pet cats with Covid back when it first started as well as a Tiger at a zoo with it.
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thanks
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It is actually rare that a virus will become less virulent.
Here are some examples that have been around for a long time, yet, they are extremely deadly:
- Smallpox, until it was eradicated by vaccination.
- Polio, still exists in war torn countries (Afghanistan, Syria), but vaccination eliminated it elsewhere
- Rabies, still deadly for both humans and animals that get it.
So it is not a given that a virus will become more or less virul
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Well, *new* viruses do tend to "become less virulent" over time. That's not because the virus adapts, but rather because we do, and that process typically involves lots of people dying.
At some point you reach an equilibrium where the virus goes extinct, we go extinct, or the virus and our immune systems reach a stalemate at some less-than-extinction level lethality.
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An influenza virus does adapt. That's why it mutates.
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An influenza virus doesn't adapt *to become less virulent* because there's no selective pressure for it to do so. We adapt for viruses to be less likely to kill us, because there is selective pressure.
I reread my post and it's pretty clear that's what I said.
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Fair enoug. I'm pretty clear about my rebuttal.
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The nature of mutations is that they are random. They can make the virus more or less contagious and/or more or less lethal. There is a strong evolutionary pressure for viruses to become more contagious, and a weak pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
There's not a lot of rapidity in human evolution, viral evolution is rapid. It doesn't take a lot of time for a more contagious and less lethal variant to arise (if it's possible), and this appears to be what has happened to bring about omega. Humans jus
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Well, almost a million Americans have relinquished their influence on the genetic lottery.
However, if you read my post you may note that I used the word "adapt", *not* the word "evolve." Surprisingly for an Internet comment, I sometimes choose my words with purpose. You see, we possess something called "the adaptive immune system". [wikipedia.org]
Also, "a weak pressure for a virus to become less lethal" is a pretty big assumption. It's just as reasonable to assume pressure for a virus to become more lethal. Particularly fo
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This is a specific type of virus, an influenza virus. It will mutate in the manner of influenzas, and not necessarily in the manner of other viruses.
Naw there's got to be some scary reason (Score:1)
Maybe it evolved into yet another strain: one that is super contagious, results in no tell-tale symptoms, and isn't picked up on the pcr or antigen tests anymore.
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Re:Naw there's got to be some scary reason (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Naw there's got to be some scary reason (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it evolved into yet another strain: one that is super contagious, results in no tell-tale symptoms, and isn't picked up on the pcr or antigen tests anymore.
So... it's become homeopathic [wikipedia.org]:
In this process, the selected substance is repeatedly diluted until the final product is chemically indistinguishable from the diluent. Often not even a single molecule of the original substance can be expected to remain in the product. Between each dilution homeopaths may hit and/or shake the product, claiming this makes the diluent remember the original substance after its removal.
Remember to shake people to reactivate their immunity ... :-)
Re: Naw there's got to be some scary reason (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure enough people are sufficiently addled already.
Hopium (Score:1)
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Also happens to be summer there.
"Shaped like a politician's forehead" (Score:1)
I'm glad to see famous mountains are the metric du jour instead of football fields and libraries of congresses.
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How many blue whales in a Belgium?
Connection? [bbc.com]
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But that does bring up a good point.... how many libraries of congress is the spike anyway? :p
Authoritarian Response (Score:1)
The Authoritarians will, of course, take steps to "fatten the curve" as they have been doing for the last two years.
So while the pandemic will be over in the "Third World", the Authoritarian Fascist counties (including Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Europe) will seek to prolong -- fatten the curve -- as much as they possibly can.
You mean covid is receding during high summer? (Score:3)
- Covid LOVES winter
- Covid hibernates in mid summer
I know... I know... it's Winter now
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Ah, heads up. It's not winter everywhere. And where it's summer right now, Covid, courtesy Omicron, numbers are going through the roof.
Previous variants did seem to go in to a lull through warmer and drier months, but that can be just because people were enjoying the great outdoors rather than breathing recycled air or some other environmental factor.
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The travel ban worked! (Score:1)
Don't fear covid (Score:2)
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There's a small chance of long term, if not permanent, damage (in my age group). I'm not interested in any such risk, thank you.
You can get it over and over and over. My vaccinated nephew just got it a second time and it borked the wider family's Christmas plans and preparation.
I personally know of three who died from it (albeit pre-vaccine availability), one was a family member.
A younger coworker got it before the vaccines were around, and nine months later, everything
Just as they said (Score:1)