Norway reports omicron cases linked to company party | Hacker News Reader

Norway reports omicron cases linked to company party

washingtonpost.com

4 pointskarencarits5 comments

If Norway would publish the number of attendees at the party and the proportion of people at this party that were doubly vaccinated, 50 people would provide a reasonable number of cases to calculate a vaccine efficacy. Assuming reasonable mixing and homogeneity of exposure. Has anyone seen these numbers?

They were ~120 attending. Today it is reported that 15-20 of the ~60 testing positive for corona are suspected to have the omicron variant [1]. Only vaccinated employees were allowed to attend, and they were all tested beforehand [2]

[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/omikron-utbruddet-i-oslo-vekker-opps...

[2] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/omikron-smitte-i-oslo-etter-j...

If colds were unknown until 2019, and suddenly people got a cold, and then it mutated and many got a cold every year, but instead of getting on with life, we called each cold a new Greek letter, and obsessed over how each person got it, how long would this go on before people lost interest. At this point, what is the difference? I guess there is still lots of political and news value to be extracted. The sooner we move on, the sooner we can end this nonsense.

(Or for people that disagree, what is an appropriate length of time to remain hysterical about covid?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#Cor... is one possibility how one of our current common colds started.

I think the underlying concern has always been about preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed leading to unnecessary deaths. In most countries we don't really attempt to stop influenza from spreading every year but it rarely overwhelms our hospital and ICUs, it does occasionally.

But we know with COVID-19 that it does overwhelm hospitals and ICUs. Lombardy Italy as an example, an area with higher ICU capacity than the average city in Australia, but they didnt have a chance to stop it as it took them by surprise. So the ICUs were overwhelmed, and the death rate climbed to about 14%, so more than 10 times the mortality rate we have seen in Australia. There were people being cared for in tents and in ICUs there were 4 patients to one ICU nurse compared to the usual one on one care - hence survival drops.

Same in India, the rapid rise in cases meant they ran out of simple treatments like life-saving oxygen. So that's the main reason for the massive response to COVID-19.

Secondary reasons could be to try to prevent the impacts of long-covid, some people will never be the same. You could also consider that suppression of the virus protects the medical, nursing, and other staff from the horror of working in such overwhelmed conditions. Doctors in Italy and other places that were overwhelmed had to ration treatment, denying intensive treatment to people who might have lived another 20 years if the hospital was not overwhelmed.

I think most people in Australia would agree we don't want to live in a place that has to pile bodies into refrigerated trucks outside of hospitals because undertakers are overwhelmed.

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