Tshwane District Omicron Variant Patient Profile – Early Features
samrc.ac.za
samrc.ac.za
Most places have let restrictions ebb and flow accordingly.
While in my other reply I express my doubt at "change in behavior" being the driver of any sort of economic impact similarities, say it was. In that case, what it would show is that overbearing government removals of freedoms to the extent that you can't even go out in public are not even needed to have that effect in behavior.
But that being said I'm not sure we fully understand why the virus didn't hit Japan as hard. The country does have a stronger mask wearing culture (where people actually fully cover their faces) and a homogenous genetic makeup.
If this is that less lethal variant that we have all been waiting for, what's the call here? Should we be intentionally helping spread it to edge out Delta?
For example, unmasked attendance to large sporting events, etc?
Microfiber N95 is used for making masks that protect you IF is used properly ( real material, disposable, snug fit)
Interesting (though not surprising) that my question above has been downvoted. This is a touchy topic where political alignment sometimes supersedes even the will to reason.
No. Fomite transmission is extremely unlikely.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2021/03/17/ar...
Based on this, I will continue my practice of licking subway handrails instead of religiously “sanitizing” everything like the person preparing to sit next to me just did.
Genuinely curious.
What exactly do you mean by that? Were you left with some permanent symptoms?
> SARS-CoV-2 has been an incidental finding in patients that were admitted to the hospital for another medical, surgical or obstetric reason
It seems either the rise in admissions is purely coincidental, or Omicron is causing atypical symptoms?
There's no guarantees with randomness, though on a decade-long scale we can probably be sure it will fade into the background.
The more lethal it is, the fewer opportunities it would have to spread.
HIV in and of itself does not kill you. It destroys your immune system in a lengthy process that ultimately leads to opportunistic infections that kill you. This process can take several months to several years. Likewise, HIV crossed species to infect humans, it did not evolve it's capabilities directly in humans.
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12768029785826795...
There are other pathogens which we would indeed expect to evolve to become less lethal. On the other hand, there are some which evolve to be more lethal, like Dengue.
Alpha was just as deadly but more transmissible. While Delta was both more transmissible and more deadly for example.
Widespread use of treatments would probably also stop the selection of less lethal strains.
There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. None whatever.
Furthermore, no human virus has ever evolved to become less lethal.
Unfortunately this myth is often used by those who would like us to let Covid keep on killing, in order to protect their cashflows and for ideological and political reasons.
Isn't there though? Say Covid killed within seconds. Then it couldn't spread. The longer the host lives, the more other people it can infect. I would almost say that the opposite of what you wrote is true.
Rabies effectively has a 100% death rate and it can take years for it to kick in. There are cases of people suddenly showing symptoms 5 years after initial exposure, and once that happens, your brain basically rapidly rots and you drop dead.
We have no clue what the long term effects of any covid variants are. We can only speculate.
It's believed that each one of the other coronaviruses which are now endemic "common colds" began as a more lethal pandemic, the last probably being in 1890.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/did-a-coronavi...
Yes, Covid is primarily dangerous when it manages to get deep in the lungs and cause pneumonia. It takes a week or two of being sick before it gets there. That's why you heard early in the pandemic how people were fine, until about day 7 or day 10 and then suddenly went to the hospital. Other coronaviruses can do the same thing. If you ever get a cold for 10 days, your immune system is probably pretty bad and you very well might get pneumonia. But you don't usually get pneumonia from the cold coronaviruses, because your body knows how to fight them off. When the 1890 coronavirus hit, no one had immunity and it was pretty deadly. But we have good immunity to that virus now (so we call it a common cold). As long as you can ramp up an immune response and kill it off before it gets a foothold deep in your lungs.
[1] https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/051620/what-is-the...
Wikipedia theories are as reliable as usual. (Not reliable)
But that may or may not be what caused the black death in medieval Europe, in my view. There's reason to think it might have been a really nasty hemorhagic virus like Ebola. See: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/black-de...
There had been several pandemics of black plague, but at some point it didn't come back. Why?
Maybe there was a bacteriophague virus which caused Yersinia Pestis to be lethal? (Hypothesis) But why would it be gone?
(Noting that we don’t know what happened to the Spanish flu)
Once the supply chains loosen up and they solve that spike protein shortage, Covid can finally open preorders for their Zeta Pro Max variant, provided enough people haven't ordered the vaccine instead until then.
A milder variant might be nice, and on the longer term help resolve the pandemic.
On the short term, however, increased infectiousness may easily outweigh this. It is not hard to see the number of hospitalizations and deaths increasing, simply because of the larger total number of cases. Humanity will then generally try to mitigate this by stricter measures, and altogether we might end up with a rather nasty winter... again.
Translation(?): It's omicron all right, but we didn't test for it because we don't have the equipment. Still, it's reasonable to assume we're dealing with omicron.
This statement alone throws into question, at a minimum, the competence of the author and likely all of the report's data and conclusions.
This is an emerging situation where all data may be useful. At present, the authors have access to some imperfect data due to circumstances beyond their control, and are clearly reporting the data -- complete with appropriate caveats about the limitations of their measurement equipment. This is exactly what competent practitioners should be doing, and to impugn their competence is completely inappropriate.
The SBAH lab is using PCR tests to confirm cases. Some PCR tests detect the "s gene", which omicron lacks. Thus a positive PCR test that lacks the s-gene is quite probably a case of omicron. The SBAH lab's PCR tests doesn't check for the "s gene" so can't be a direct indicator that the particular strain of covid is omicron. However, because the NICD sequencing has shown that almost all covid cases in the area are omicron, it is pretty safe to assume that almost all the cases at SBAH are omicron (as long as you trust NICD's data.) The responsible thing as a scientist is make such assumptions explicit, even when those assumptions are pretty safe. This statement should increase your confidence in the credibility of the scientist issuing it, not call it into question.
Edit: If you don't think the assumption is safe, do you think it is less safe than relying on the lack of an "s gene" to indicate omicron without doing the sequencing? Both are assumptions whose reasonableness depend entirely on assumptions about the current local genetic pool of variations.