Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado | Hacker News Reader

Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

covid19.colorado.gov

263 pointsshrubble668 comments

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, has a nice substack from perspective of an epidemiologist. Two notable recent Omicron posts on that substack:

The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...

The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good...

Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.

Plus, to preemptively address any assumptions that Dr Jetelina may have an optimistic bias, compare her "There is good news" article from 5th January, which is based on what we now know, with her article from 26th November when Omicron (initially called "Nu") was first detected: "New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529" https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-concernin...

At the time, little was known about this new variant except that it was extremely different from all that we had seen before, which would very likely result in escape from prior immunity, and may even lead to more severe disease (or not?). The only definitive silver lining that she found at the time was that 1) the variant could be quickly detected with PCR thanks to its S-gene deletion, 2) it was detected early thanks to South Africa, and 3) vaccines could be quickly adapted if necessary, thanks to mRNA vaccine technology. However, in all other regards, the variant was still very concerning.

In other words, do take her cautious optimism seriously. She's not a wishful thinker. Rather, she is a specialist in the field who works with the data as it becomes available and knows how to interpret it

Yeah I've consistently found her writing to be good. She's one of the primary sources I use for keeping up to date with what's going on with covid.

There are S-gene silent Omicron subvariants in France (not sure if it is the same as the more concerning variant recently)

" We can easily see that in many graphs, but my favorite is below from New York City, showing a clear distinction in hospitalizations among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated people"

I don't see this as much here in Ontario. Among the vaccinated as of today there is a 10.10/100k hospitalization status vs 16/100k for the unvaccinated (and 11.9 for one-dose). The hospitalization rate among the vaccinated is climbing quickly. Yes, there's still a gap, but yikes.

ICU is better, though, with a 0.76/100k rate for the vaccinated vs 4.74/100k for the unvaccinated.

This may have to do with different hospitalization and testing criterion, I don't know. But hospitalization here is in full exponential growth and not just among the unvaccinated.

Obviously being vaccinated is still far preferable. I have had 3 doses (1 AstraZeneca and 2 Pfizer) FWIW.

Simpson's Paradox applies here: once you slice by age, the data tells a different story. Even when vaccines are highly effective, the confounding factor that gets lost when you aggregate across ages is that the most vulnerable (the elderly) are also the most vaccinated.

I highly recommend anybody concerned about hospitalization among the vaccinated read this post. It's about Delta hospitalizations in Israel 2021, but we should expect the same effect from Omicron and across countries: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

You have to normalize by age.

Unvaccinated people in Canada are overwhelmingly very very young, in Quebec most of them are too young to be vaccinated.

That's why they don't get hospitalized as much :)

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

I want to lookup data on the average age of unvaxed patients currently in the ICU but so far have not found any.

This data from NYC has been supplanted and updated for all of NYS: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-breakthrough-data

This still shows a greater than 10x difference in outcomes. Additionally, the "unvacccinated" population includes people naturally vaccinated by virtue of having a previous case.

It could very well evolve into a form that is mild enough and different enough from the vaccine spike that brings the unvaccinated and vaccinated hospitalization rates to convergence. Respiratory illnesses in general harm the elderly and immunocompromised disproportionately. But if that becomes the end game where COVID is still circulating, vaccines are no longer as effective at preventing serious illness, because the general severity has gone down, that is also a good outcome as it is what we have always lived with.

Colds and flus have always killed 10s of thousands a year. COVID killed many more because it was particularly severe. Just as the flu of 1918 is still with us today in a less harmful form (H1N1) This virus has a global reservoir and will never run its course entirely before mutating again most likely. Just like colds and flus before it.

> "COVID killed many more because it was particularly severe."

no. covid is novel, not appreciably more severe, and that's where mortality rates are coming from. it's following the dynamics of the many cold and flu viruses that came before it. we just happen to be at the beginning of the dynamics rather than at relative steady-state (e.g., 'endemic'), which is where most other viruses are at.

this inability to reason cogently about steady-state vs. dynamic aspects of systems is absolutely rampant across media, politics, and casual conversation, and must be a named fallacy at this point, though i don't know that name offhand.

"Additionally, the "unvacccinated" population includes people naturally vaccinated by virtue of having a previous case."

Only if it's recent. How recent isn't clear yet. Somewhere in the > 90 days, < 1 year range, it seems.[1] As of last summer, about 1% of COVID cases were known re-infections.[1] Most repeat cases seem to involve two different variants.[2] Whether people who had previous variants are showing up infected with the omicron variant doesn't appear to be published yet.

[1] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/why-covid-19-vaccines-offe...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8604456/

This virus has a global reservoir and will never run its course entirely before mutating again most likely. Just like colds and flus before it.

Maybe not. A much broader vaccine is coming along well.[1] That's from the US Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, and it just passed phase I (safety) clinical testing. That one is supposed to protect against all COVID & SARS variants.

There are 93 more COVID vaccines in development at the moment. Some are pills. Some are nasal sprays. Something is going to work. What we have now is the minimum viable product, and even that is pretty good. Early on, there was concern that a 50% effective vaccine was all that would result. Which is about where the original Sputnik vaccine, and the original SinoVac, are. Instead, we got 95% effective vaccines in round 1.

[1] https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-create...

The Ontario science table dashboard has the hospitalization ratio for unvaccinated to vaccinated still at 5:1. Where are you getting that these rates have become nearly equal?

edit: sorry had that written backwards

Link, for those who are looking for the (science table) source: https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/

> Ontario science table dashboard has the hospitalization ratio for vaccinated to unvaccinated still at 5:1. Where are you getting that these rates have become nearly equal?

If the rates are the same, and 5/6 people are vaccinated, we would expect 5/6 people admitted to the hospital to be vaccinated. In fact, 5/6 people are vaccinated in the 12-40 age cohort, with older (and more vulnerable) populations having at least 9/10 people vaccinated and quickly going to 19+/20. Therefore, vaccines prevent hospitalizations, as the average of all adults is greater than 5/6.

ontario still conflates anyone hospitalized for anything testing positive for covid, with anyone hospitalized from covid; this alone could explain the discrepancy between a hospital bed and icu. lies damned lies and statistics...

It’s not that simple: yes, if someone gets in a car crash it’s probably not COVID but there are many cases where someone had a manageable condition that was disrupted by COVID — not 100% fault but not 0%, and a big problem for hospital capacity.

Comparing the rates only makes sense if one believes the risk is distributed equally among the two populations. However, the most vulnerable are the most likely to be vaccinated, and the least vulnerable are the most likely to be unvaccinated, so the vaccine could still be very effective even if the rates of hospitalization are equal, or even worse for the vaccinated population.

Alberta does a nice job breaking vaxxed VS Unvaxxed down by age group:

https://imgur.com/a/Actj5Tf

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

My guess is that this speaks more to the cheapness of hospitals in Canada and the greater likelihood to go to a hospital with a lesser case of COVID. For instance, you quote a 7.6% rate of the vaccinated moving from the hospital to the ICU and a 29.6% rate of the unvaccinated moving from the hospital to the ICU. Meanwhile, the US blended average seems to be around 30% (eyeballing the data.) That could be because the unvaccinated are an overwhelming percentage of the admitted (it's the same rate), or it could be because there is a higher bar to go to the hospital at all for either class.

Mind sharing the data you're looking at from Ontario?

Yes, surprisingly few outlets show this, but it would have been crucial in showing vaccines work.

Thanks for this, just in those two blog posts she answered many lingering questions I had about how omicron has been changing things. the SEOd google results are always a flood of incomplete or speculative information when I try to find answers to covid questions so this is a dream come true.

If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.

I've also found this blog to be useful: https://thezvi.substack.com

Calling zvi's blog "useful" is an understatement, he's practically a lesser deity of covid-19 modeling.

I'm not a big fan of this new trend of some random Twitter personality suddenly becoming the go-to source of information on COVID.

Granted, it seems true that she's actually an epidemiologist, though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school. As far as I know she doesn't have unusual access to information, or a hands on role, she's drawing from public sources and doing analysis.

Which, is fine. But what makes me nervous about this trend is that she's now like almost a household name. She's built a personal brand around this image as being the up to the minute source of information, and the audience she's developed has a certain profile. They're basically looking for someone to tell them how bad everything is and how scary everything looks, backing it up with details so her audience can feel smart when they relay all this info to their friends.

The minute that COVID isn't actually something to worry about her audience is gone and she goes back to being a random obscure civilian.

Which is an incentive structure that makes me pretty sure I know what she'll be posting tomorrow, and a week from now, and so on.

I realize the mainstream news media isn't any better. But still, it's an odd new development that people are mostly seeking out the level of fear/concern they want in their news rather than the other way around.

> though not unusually notable as an assistant professor at a mainstream state school.

We really, really need to get away from this academic obsession with prestige. If she does solid analysis and communicates it effectively, with a record that looks increasingly good as time passes, she's already ahead of the curve. Meanwhile many other highly-credentialed, prestigious experts have been wrong over and over and over again in this pandemic.

Academic/scientific institutions are polluted by the credentialisim/prestige focus. It's the ugliest aspect of the whole space.

If it matters almost the same thing has been happening in my country (Romania), only that around these parts of the world we have FB as a replacement for Twitter.

I personally regard it as a coping mechanism for the people that follow these newly created Covid personalities, the bad thing is that in most of the cases the mainstream media copy-pastes those posts/messages and presents them as the truth, even though there are many devils hidden in the statistical details most of the time.

From her "scary" post:

> In certain jurisdictions, though, we’ve met or exceeded last winter’s hospitalization peak. We can see this in many states in the Northeast, including New York.

When presented with a new source, I tend to judge people based on their perspectives on things I know about. This one is a case study in being misleading, while not technically lying. New York state has only "met" last winter's hospitalization peak if you look at trend lines. If you look at hospitalizations per day, we clearly haven't. Also, of course, "last winter's peak" was not really any sort of stress for the hospital system at all (compare to the spring 2020 wave, which was), and it happened at a time when things were much more restricted than they are now:

https://covid-19.direct/state/36

The statement is more correct for NYC data, where hospitals have exceeded last winter's peak on a trend-line and per-day basis:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-totals.pag...

...but it's still misleading, because again, this is a fraction of previous waves in NYC, but also, a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing. Government officials are pleading people to stop going to the hospital for trivial things:

https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1478353835793997827

I don't know if she is intentionally trying to mislead, or just doesn't have a good handle on the data, but this is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of a person's other claims.

> But it's still misleading, because a lot of these hospitalizations are going to ERs for testing.

I don't think this is correct. Going to the ER is not the same as being admitted to the hospital. From everything I've read, ER visits are not counted as hospitalizations anywhere.

Yes, they are. They count anyone admitted to a hospital in NYC, at any time, for any duration:

https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/ced762b25...

> Hospitalization counts reflect the total number of people with COVID-19 ever admitted to a hospital, not the number of people currently admitted.

If you go to the ER and make it to a treatment area, you're admitted. These are bright-line distinctions. Nobody is making judgment calls on the data ("did this person really get admitted, or is it just someone in the ER for an hour? Let me look at the chart!") at this level of analysis.

Just a thought after reading the good news - ok this is great for the US and the west where there is decent vaccination.

What the hell is going to happen with the omicron spread in countries with hardly any vaccination? I mean if it really is like measles, this could be terrible.

Countries like South Africa? Steep increase in cases and now a steep fall in cases. Some increased deaths, but nothing like delta or alpha. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...

Average age is in South Africa is 28 vs US 38 and SA still has higher excess mortality: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Not an expert but comparing countries is hard, especially now that there are other factors such as how many people are vaccinated, boosted etc. I don’t think it’s obvious from one country how another will fare.

What are the "scary aspects" of that article? That Omicron is highly transmissible forcing people to take time off work?

It's been getting to the point or already is that you can't get treatment. Plenty of urgent care centers are simply closing down for now. Hospitals won't even treat covid.

I'd call that pretty scary

Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished.

Or am I missing something?

You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.

I have omicron right now (4-5 months after 2nd jab, so pretty much no effect from that) and it's just like a common cold (certainly wouldn't call it "battling omicron"). I have zero problems with getting this each year.

Congratulations.

Both my wife and I (double vaxxed for 5 months, not boosted yet although were just about to do so) caught Omicron-flavoured Covid in the lead-up to Christmas and it wiped us out each for 2-3 days each, with a combination of fatigue, aches, fever, and violent coughing. Certainly worse than any cold or flu we've had up until that point.

I still have a pretty nasty cough and a throat inflammation.

Aren't anecdotes fun?

Hmmm... mild symptoms after being vaccinated. It's almost like the vaccine worked or something. How weird.

Granted this still needs peer review...but you may want to look into this:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1

I hope your recovery goes well and you truly have zero issues.

You say "over and over" but Omicron is the first variant that actually evades immunity (both natural and vaccine-induced) in a meaningful way. What we don't know is the level of immunity that an Omicron infection will provide. It could actually confer immunity to both itself and previous variants, which would effectively end the pandemic.

> Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway.

Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms.

Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.

Are the unvaccinated catching it over and over again? That seems to me a vanishingly rare occurrence, admittedly within a rapidly shrinking set of people. It would be interesting to get some figures for this, hopefully without being lynched for asking the question.

Yep, especially Omicron.

> This is the first evidence to show us that the rate of reinfection with Omicron is high—3 times higher than Delta. In other words, infection-induced immunity is not doing a great job at stopping Omicron.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...

"battling Omicron"

Can you give us some indication of how severe your symptoms are? Mostly we're hearing that if you've been vaccinated and/or you've had covid in the past that omicron is relatively mild.

> You're missing the fact you can catch it over and over. My wife is currently battling Omicron after we both had covid at the start of last year. Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway. With an infected population this massive mutations happen fast enough to cause a new wave before the old one burns out.

I think at this point, the likely endgame is endemic virus with tolerable consequences. Humanity probably isn't capable of the level of cooperation required to drive this virus to extinction (I'm guessing that would take a massive, coordinated, well-complied with vaccination campaign undertaken over just a couple months).

As far as I know previous immunity still protects against serious disease, even with the variants, so hopefully we'll see less deaths and hospital admissions.

Correct. I know several people who are vaccinated yet caught Covid twice. The principle thing to keep in mind,

- vaccination is a risk reducer on severity of infection. Nobody said immunity; nobody said prevention.

- and on that point not getting into the hospital is important. From a management standpoint, we've got to insure demand for hospital resources does not dwarf those same resources. That's the key management function here.

Here's a thought experiment. Compare the reddit "the button" with Covid staying with us. Even with only 1 person at a time trying to hit the button it stayed alive for 3 months. And that's with people trying to keep it alive, 24x7 - just enough people to keep it going. Enough people being interested in getting a low time and staying with it.

With covid, it's just automatic, but you just need 1 foolish move between 2 people, and there's no server making sure only one person gets it at a time, it's totally a distributed network. And the timeout, instead of being 60 seconds, it's 2 maybe 3 weeks (perhaps a lot longer - we don't REALLY know).

The thought experiment here is that if we TRY to keep something alive that's actually kinda hard to and it lasts 3 months, how is covid EVER going to end?

The epidemic ends when the unusually high threat of serious illness or death ends, though, right?

If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.

Do you know what was the test that distinguished omicron from delta? Asking because my local county health department seems lacking in that technology.

I will say beforehand that I'm heavily pro-vaccination and reducing risks regarding covid. Do we know at this point what are the hospitalization rates of omicron compared to the flu? p.s. I hope your wife gets better soon.

You can also catch the cold over and over.

1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.

Do we know if a previous omicron infection helps confer immunity to future omicron infections?

But even after mutations, the next time you catch it, symptoms will likely be a lot less severe than the first. At that point, we can stop tracking it and write it off as a variant of the common cold.

I would buy this on a t-shirt, 'Fully vaccinated and boosted three weeks ago, caught it anyway.'

Does anyone else still believe the shots prevent infection or transmission?

Coloradan here:

I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.

My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.

My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.

The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.

The data is now this:

People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)

See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-mil...

FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.

>Surely this is the end of the pandemic?

Yes, welcome to the endemic. Covid is here to stay, it doesn't matter if 100% of the world were vaccinated tommrow, covid would not go away. It doesn't matter if you get the vaccination or not, in your life time you WILL get covid (just like the flu, no one escapes it, you typically get the flu about every decade or so regardless of shots).

We need to just accept this and move back to "old normal".

I think that may be a completely rational perspective from within the United States... however, from the perspective of countries with effective containment strategies, that sounds prematurely defeatist, and also ignores the vast good that comes from containing spread for mutagenic purposes.

What effective containment strategies? Pretty much every country's strategies have completely collapsed due to Omicron.

Australia currently has a wildly exponential growth of cases and twice the number of daily cases/capita compared to Sweden, to take two countries at each end of the "containment" spectrum. And that's despite Australia being in the middle of summer, despite Australia being isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and despite Australia having more restrictions than Sweden right now.

It's all hubris. We have way less control over the spread than we like to think.

> the vast good that comes from containing spread for mutagenic purposes.

We're never getting a T-cell escape mutant that dramatically increases the risk of hospitalization/death in the vaccinated/recovered.

There's really very little to worry about variants if your vaxxed and boosted.

Experts still don't have any idea how intrinsically virulent Omicron is, and it may be every bit as intrinsically virulent as Delta was (there's lots of issues with the TMPRSS2 studies in mice, while the dominant effect is that Omicron is an escape mutant and is reinfecting and infecting the vaccinated).

The lower hospitalization rate of the Omicron wave can be explained entirely by human immunity. The properties of the virus are likely much less important than the headlines indicate, which suggests the the slow process of the human race building up immunity is going to grind on and future waves will be less and less effectively virulent (although it seems like human emotions are really attracted to the idea that the virus is changing to become less virulent and that seems to be driving emotional acceptance that the pandemic is winding down).

It will be very interesting to see how containment countries adapt to the future, where global eradication simply isn't possible. Perhaps there will be a sterilizing vaccine that makes it worth it in the end.

My heart goes out to those impacted by containment strategies. I was talking with someone from NZ or AU (I forget), who hasn't been able to go home an see his wife in two Christmases.

I, too, think that Omicron is the beginning of the transition back to "normal" with Covid becoming endemic. Everyone is going to be exposed to Omicron if they haven't already.

I expect that for the next year or two, boosters will be recommended as a yearly "flu shot" to give you a decent chance of being minimally affected if exposed. Omicron will continue to be the dominate strain, finding hosts in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. The difference will be that we will have a myriad tools at our disposal to prevent serious illness and treat it when it does happen.

So can we just do away with the show your passports nonsense then? Think of the tax that adds up every establishment.

Yes, your local jurisdiction can. Many of us have never had such a requirement.

You have a rather crucial misunderstanding. There are lots of endemic viruses; that is part of why we vaccinate new humans against so many of them.

Most of those viruses are actually very deadly, and most of those vaccines actually make you not-get-it-at-all.

The only comparable virus is the flu, and the vaccine is equally shitty [0] as the covid vaccines are.

Death rates for young and (currently healthy) people are very very low (lower than traffic deaths in my country, much lower than suicides), and they are the most affected by the lockdowns. By reopening and focusing on risk groups we could finally start living normally again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Effectivenes...

Not ones that mutate this efficiently. Flu is the only example and we typically only manage to get high percentages of the vulnerable with it. This is what we want with these types of virus otherwise you risk Mariks scenario. (See the poultry industry issues)

Old normal will not return until our hospitals are also back to normal

Our daughter had a fever for four days over the holidays. We literally could not even get into see a pediatrician or an urgent care. There was nothing available.

If a minor cold is enough to cripple our healthcare system, you have to wonder if maybe there is some other reason our hospitals aren't able(or willing) to go back to normal.

I spend thousands of dollars on health INSURANCE every year. If I go to the ER it still costs me over $2k. The last time I went to the ER, I didn't even see a doctor ONCE.

Can't say that 'it is the end' yet - but given that pandemics end when there is no more 'room' for the virus to move through naive hosts (places to infect). The fact that Omicron is SO contagious means it will effectively find any pockets of 'fuel' in the adult human population in the coming weeks and months. Everyone will be exposed.

It is probably more accurate to say it is the likely start of the transition between 'pandemic' and 'endemic' phase. We say endemic as it LOOKS like the gap between coronavirus immunity length to viral instability (number of changes) is longer than for influenza. (T-cell response still very strong, original SARS patients almost 2 decades later have cross immunity to SARS-Cov-2, Omicron immunity effective against delta, etc) That said - it is VERY unlikely to be eradicable at this point due to its ability to infect so many different species and circulate and breed in the wild (more so than even influenza).

So new variants down the line in the coming years/decades is more likely (not different than swine flu, bird flu, etc pandemic risks in the recent past). But, if longer term immunity holds up - none of these will have anywhere near the impact given the absence of billions of naive hosts to burn through.

So if we call the transition from pandemic to endemic the end (likely, yes) - then probably.

It's been over ever since the vaccines became widely available. After vaccination many of us went back to normal and haven't looked back. Huge bureaucracies just take a long time to change course and some simply refuse to recognize that it's endemic for whatever reasons.

> A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals.

> An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time

In no way has "rapid spread of infection disease across multiple continents" ended. The past few weeks should make that a bit more clear. Being vaccinated reduces the negative effects of infection, and may also reduce infectiousness and spread, but it didn't end the pandemic.

But does it matter? If omicron becomes the "new flu" (or "the new cold") for the young and healthy, and with vaccines even for old and weak, do we have to call it a "pandemic" anymore?

I mean... did we have a "cold pandemic" or a "flu pandemic" before 2020? I'm pretty sure most of the planet had a cold every winter, and we just lived with it. Same with the flu... risk-groups died, and noone bothered the young with it, we just called it "normal life".

it’s nice to believe, but a lot of our ability to return to normal requires these bureaucracies to be on board. it doesn’t matter that you individually are comfortable sending your kid to school, that school’s not going to be open if the consensus and bureaucracies are against you.

somehow we failed to coordinate the back-to-normal in my region when the vaccines arrived. this seems like the next best opportunity to admit that we’re ready to lift restrictions, so here’s hoping we can keep the majority on board this time.

I'm not sure if we can say it's "over". People were saying the same thing after the Delta waves started subsiding and behold … Omicron.

But now we’ll be able to reach herd immunity. Very mild and highly transmissible. This is the best possible outcome.

And Omicron is an order of magnitude less virulent on hospitalization/deaths per infection basis.

The pandemic is never going to be "over" on a case basis, and the virus is never going away, spread will never be zero, variants will always keep happening for decades.

Omicron is telling you that its going to be time soon to start thinking about this virus more like a normal cold/flu virus based on its impact.

It's hard to imagine a more transmissible covid variant for a layman such as myself. I wonder if microbiologists are able to model the maximum theoretical transmission Sars covid is capable of.

It doesn’t appear to be competing with COVID as much as supplementing it.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...

Omicron is infecting fully vaccinated people and those with previous infection. In the early cases detected in SA, many had already had COVID and/or Delta.

It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.

If it’s largely immune to the vaccine and doesn’t produce antibodies against COVID/Delta, we might as well label it a new disease instead of a variant.

Luckily it seems to be incredibly mild. I wonder if we had such robust data on the common cold of it would look similar to Omicron.

> It would be amazing if an Omicron infection produced antibodies that fought off COVID & Delta, as that could rapidly bring relief to the pandemic, but I haven’t seen that suggested anywhere yet.

There has been a study that suggests Omicron infection provides protection against previous variants. This correlates with data from the UK that suggests Omicron is displacing Delta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc (link to study in description).

You're thinking about it all wrong. Omicron and Delta are the same virus, and there's not particularly any good data that Omicron is less intrinsically virulent than Delta.

Omicron infects those who are unboosted, and likely reinfects a lot of the population that is >6 months recovered from prior single infection.

It is all about the fact that Omicron infects people who already have T-cells and aren't immunologically naive. The way out of the pandemic is our memory B-cells and T-cells.

The gov and media are never going to straight up tell us the pandemic is over. We have to take our way of life back and let big bro silently move on to something else.

>Or am I missing something?

The possibility that a new variant arises that substantially evades both Delta and Omicron immunity.

But it will probably turn endemic after this. There won't be any virgin hosts anymore.

As far as I can tell, there ends up being no practical difference between "the pandemic is over" and "this virus will be in circulation forever". People use one phrase or the other to emphasize different concerns.

I think people don't think of "the pandemic" as a state of having virus around us, but as a bigger political picture of lockdowns, mandates, vaccine passports, travel limits, mandatory testing, masks and all that.

If omicron means we'll all get it in the next few months, and (for the 99.x% survivors) that means that covid is "just another cold/flu", we can stop with the "pandemic" (political), and live as we did before 2020. Old people will need vaccines and boosters and all that (as they did for the flu before 2020), and young people can finally live a normal life again.

Yes, COVID is finished in much the same way the Spanish flu is finished. Derivatives of it come up and smack us every winter but life goes on.

It at least is the end of managing the pandemic. Whether you want to or not, there is no locking down against this version.

I really hope so. The hospitalizations usually lag behind case detection AFAIK, so there might still be some damage to watch out for.

People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving. It's been almost two months. It's time to stop hoping for doom and gloom and accept that it's over.

> People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving

People have been saying that since 2020, but if you're talking about the current variant, omicron wasn't even given the omicron designation until the day after Thanksgiving.

It is quite offensive to suggest that anyone is “hoping for doom and gloom.”

I guess it depends on a few things:

- how long the immunity gained from having recovered from Omicron lasts

- how well that immunity protects against other current (and future) variants of covid

- what kind of new strains of covid appears in next several months / years that may replace Omicron

- how many people we are able to get vaccinated globally

- advances in new and better vaccines becoming available (complete with antiviral pills etc)

And probably quite a few other factors that weren't on top of my layman head...

Also:

- how much/long the media keeps the fear drum pounding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI5E8z89c9U

Media fear drum has no effect on whether my local hospital is overwhelmed. Everybody can make their own decisions, as long as hospitals are good.

> Surely this is the end of the pandemic?

Depends on if politicians believe they can lift restrictions without negatively reflecting their career or not. There's a lot of Twitter mobs out there promoting "extreme caution" that will tank your political career if you aren't catering enough to their caution-comfort-level.

I don’t know. Anecdotal but I know a lot of people who had prior strains (many even vaccinated) who have gotten it. The numbers are so high that natural immunity from previous strains/vaccines seems to be very low.

If delta or OG Covid didn’t do much about omicron, I don’t think we can assume omicron will do much about some future variant.

The pandemic will truly end when therapeutics are mature. My liberal relatives become visibly upset when just the concept of therapeutics is brought up. Thanks liberal dogma/media…

I read article from Israel. It wrote: "severe covid cases are low, but flu season just started". Pandemic will finish at spring, and hopefully will not start next winter.

Of course it'll start again the next winter... as will the cold season and flu season.

The only question here is, will there be lockdowns, mandates, masks and vaccine passports, or will we finally give up, focus on the risk groups, and let the young and healthy live their normal lives.

Depends on hospitals. If the health care system starts getting overwhelmed, expect restrictions. If not, then probably not.

What you're missing is that we're eventually (arguably right now) going to be referring to colds and other weak mutations of COVID as "COVID" still, and by virtue of still calling it COVID and still having these COVID dashboards, it's never ending. There is no end, it is a new normal for millions. Too many people's brains short circuited, too many people got anchored to March 2020.

There is no way to know when it will end.

What does 100% prevalence mean? 100% of people are at least silent carriers?

It means that among recent PCR test confirmed cases, 100% of patients were infected with the Omicron variant rather than Delta or some older variant. The number of asymptomatic carriers is unknown and probably large, but can't possibly be anywhere near 100% of the populace.

Yes it is now endemic.

Omicron evades the "natural immunity" that people were getting a hard on for. That explains a lot (not all) of the massive fitness it has - it can infect people that previously had Covid infections again.

Immunity is a spectrum, not a binary condition. Infection by previous variants appears to still provide a significant level of durable cellular immunity against Omicron.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1

Does it only evade natural immunity and not that imparted by vaccines?

The actual elephant in the room is that covid is never truly going away without an actual vaccine / cure.

It's not the end if governments keep playing covid theater games.

In Europe they definitely will with increased surveillance and digital IDs that have proven to do nothing to stop covid (as initially portrayed), but that won't stop govs from pushing them onwards and dehumanising any group who doesn't want to comply with their coercive measures.

It's an interesting time for people who really value freedom and human rights.

It’s just politicians trying to save face at this point. Trillions of dollars lost and total debasement of western currencies was all to arrive at the natural solution to a virus that was destined to become endemic from the very start: let it play out.

Two administrations, one from both parties. Same fed chair. Same people at the CDC and WHO. It’s not partisan. It’s institutional failure.

I'm not sure what you mean. Vaccine was a success, it saved millions of lives. What's becoming endemic is a less deadly variant, otherwise we would be back to square 0, confinement and developing a new vaccine. So, instead of calling it a failure I would call it success with a lucky ending, if everything continues like this of course.

More like corporate capture imo.

Just giving my 2 cents. Got boosted 3 weeks ago. Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast. I did wear a ffp2 mask with nearly every social contact and if we didnt wear mask we would test ourself. I am sure I got it from the streets from people passing by. That said I am in the french alps and it was vacation time here.

And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare

I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation

I'll give my two cents then. People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important.

I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day).

I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms.

I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice.

[0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.

> People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important.

Thanks, I hate it. :-)

Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused.

Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one.

But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias!

For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave.

* Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.

For anyone wondering: FFP2 is equivalent to an N95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFP_standards#FFP2_mask

Similar story - boosted mid Nov. Travelled over Christmas. Have been wearing K95 masks as properly as I can as often as I can when out in public. No real symptoms to speak of, but took a PCR just to be sure. Bing! Positive.

Not sure from where I got it, but the contagiousness of Omicron is impressive.

Your anecdote makes me wonder if the Omicron variant is largely spreading through aerosols and eyes. See (commentary from May 2021): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5....

> Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast.

So you’re the least ill you’ve ever been from anything but it’s also “a beast”?

The beast part was more for how contagious it is. As a malady it is fine with me but I am still having an eye on long covid…hoping for the best.

Why are you hoping for Covid to become endemic?

At this point that is the best case. COVID zero is a pipe dream, there are just too many vaccine refusers and too many people refusing to do anything to avoid spreading the virus. If COVID follows the typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous, we can get back to normal life -- the question is how long that will take.

Honestly I hope that one day it is gone for good but until then an endemic situation would be somehow better than a pandemic one. I didnt say that clearly and hoping for a, also, bad situation is not the best thing to whish for but after 2 years of pandemic I am whishing for something less bad….

It's more of an acceptance of reality than a hope, I think.

Maybe it's time to start taking the wear 2 masks advice seriously.

As I understand it, wearing two masks was only recommended for those wearing surgical or cloth. If your wear an N95 or equivalent you only need the one.

Better to go with N100 mask or heavy duty respirator if you truly wanted to ramp up protection. https://www.grainger.com/product/6AD97?ef_id=Cj0KCQiAw9qOBhC...

omicron has solidly taken over Vancouver BC. Anecdotal evidence: in the past two years (except this past week) I have only known 1 person who got covid. In the past week I know over 20 people who have got covid.

I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.

>I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns.

Me too, I think at this point further lockdowns would be akin to trying to stop a freight train with your shins: futile and extremely painful.

It appears to be infeasible to stop omicron through non-extreme lockdown measures. What I'm not yet clear on is:

- to what extent does recovering from Omicron prevent Delta?

- how long does that immunity last?

We probably are going to have to live with this, but I'm not sure many countries have caught up to the healthcare staffing implications of that.

It seems to give partial protection to Delta like 50% reduction in infections.

Different aspects of immunity seem to last different times. Antibodies fade over six months or so but T Cell immunity can last decades in general. Though obviously Omicron hasn't been around that long to check on.

> to what extent does recovering from Omicron prevent Delta?'

If Omicron is reaching 100% prevalence in so many locations, I wonder if Delta will not be as much of a threat anymore? It seems like there haven't been any infections with older variants for a long time now.

Last night on NPR there was a scientist cautioning people who think this means the end because it'll burn itself out.

His point was that nobody predicted delta, and nobody predicted omicron. There's no telling how serious the next variant will be (and arguably there's much greater chance of a variant given how many people are getting infected.)

Wasn't the point of Dr. Strangelove a warning against excessive worrying about a theoretical future viz a viz the mine shaft gap?

+1, I work in a small, fully remote company, and up until the past 2 weeks, I know of only one colleague who had been infected. 5 people were out last week because of COVID. 5 people who live in different states.

Those 20 people are fine, right?

Anecdotally from the people I know who've got covid since omicron was identified, none have had to go to hospital (all are double vaccinated, some had booster), but it can still be a rough few days/week while ill and some are still coughing/feeling overly tired a few weeks later

Also in Vancouver and similar numbers. I know at least 10 people who currently have COVID, including myself and my partner.

It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream".

I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.

yes, all mild cough which resolved in a day or two

13 people in my immediate circle got it in the last 7 days. A few had 2 days of fever, a few a slight cough, a few sore throats. Everybody is fine now.

I still know no one in Germany who ever had covid, only one person in the US and one in South Africa (who also died from it), so I’m not sure about that.

Yes, it’s called a filter bubble. Covid was extremely easy to avoid pre-Omicron even without vaccines if you don’t go to nightclubs and don’t work in an office and have no kids.

died from omikron ?

The CDC publishes a weekly chart showing the proportions of circulating variants for the US as a whole. The Delta variant had previously driven most other variants near extinction, and now Omicron is doing the same to Delta.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...

Our savior Omicron. The ultimate vaccinator. Nature finally had mercy on us.

Too bad they skipped a letter in naming it; it would've been some good PR for China.

https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html

i wonder what countries like China and New Zealand who are taking a zero COVID approach are going to do. COVID is endemic in the rest of the world except for those places where it doesn't exist at all? I don't see that working.

New Zealand isn't doing Covid Zero any more since October.

Are they still doing zero Covid now?

Omicron isn't significantly more contagious than Delta for the unvaccinated, however. It's just that the vaccinated can spread omicron, so anyone who wasn't vaccinated and managed to dodge infection for this long is now in nightmare-level difficulty when it comes to remaining uninfected.

Omicron appears to be significantly more contagious than Delta for everyone including the unvaccinated.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

Many of the first infected in SA previously had Delta. I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that contracting Omicron gives you natural immunity to Delta.

Here are some links saying you can get both:

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/omicron-delta-en...

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1543522/can-you-...

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25678686...

You can get infected with both, but there is still a significant level of cellular immunity across all common variants.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.06.471446v1

For someone not well versed in virology, can you please explain what that means?

How do you get infected with significant levels of cellular immunity? And does that mean the infection is less severe?

if natural immunity derived from omicron doesn't protect you against Delta then why is there no more Delta in Colorado (as per TFA)?

Variants disaggregated by locality within US:

https://outbreak.info/

That's a potentially misleading visualization. Delta can be steady rolling even if its share falls from 100% to 5%, as it apparently has, if the denominator has increased by the same factor.

There are 15k covid RNA in every ml of sewage coming out of boston right now. Figure 200l a day of sewage per person and that is a lot of covid. I would hold off on eating oysters for a bit.

https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

Most people are relying on arbitrary testing to figure out how many people are infected. I think this totally under reporting number of infections because the whole population is not tested on a regular basis. To get an accurate picture of people are infected, you have to look at whole populations.

One whole population group to study to get a better understanding of how bad this wave is is to look at the cruise line industry. Everyone has to get tested, and thus you are studying a whole population. According to a recent CDC report [1], between Nov 30 - Dec 14 of 2021, 162 cases were reported on cruise ships. Then the next two weeks 5013 cases were reported. This is roughly a 30x increase!

If you look at the NY Times infections chart[2], in the same time period, their 7 day average only went up like 3x. This is grossly under reporting of infections.

The sewage chart looks at a whole population and it is easy to see the increase in infection is more in the 30x scale than it is the 3x scale.

Be safe out there everybody. If you look at whole population groups, Covid is way more infectious than what a lot of news media outlets and their data would tell you.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/30/us-cdc-says-people-should-av... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

This sewage report is about a whole population and it is clear to see infections many more times higher than what a lot of news agencies are reporting.

I’d be surprised if coronavirus can infect non-mammals. I don’t think there’s been any scientific evidence of this. For the reports of contaminated fish and what not, it’s suspected the contamination happened on the supply chain (e.g. someone at a fish packing plant coughed on food.)

That's not how viruses work.

Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.

It's how norovirus works, and sometimes hepatitis too:

https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-int...

Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.

> I would hold off on eating oysters for a bit.

why? RNA detected != active virus. e.g. in room temperature, virus can survive the maximum of 5 days (on plastic 3 days, cardboard 24h). It's an impossible vector of transmission.

I think that bit was meant as a joke

Lobster consumption aside, those graphs show an insane increase compared to previous waves.

Don't forget about long covid. My covid infection was mostly gone in 3 days; yet 7 days after that I'm in the ER for peripheral neuropathy. Several days later I am still here with perhaps permanent loss of function. There are a few other youngsters like me with covid complications on the neurology floor, most with less than 2 comorbidities. Oh yea, the ER was packed, 6h to triage.

Sorry to hear about your peripheral neuropathy. Check out some of the treatments for dysautonomia. There are some cutting edge treatments that have been developed over the past few years, they just haven't become mainstream knowledge or trickled down to the medical schools yet.

The two most effective approaches are using neuroplasticity exercises to retrain the limbic system (cheap, but time consuming - an hour a day for 6 months): https://ansrewire.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/

Or doing microcurrent neurofeedback (costs ~$150 a session, do one session a week for a couple months): https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/

Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.

Were you vaccinated when you caught it? Hope your body recovers over time friend.

Wasn't there some kind of anticoagulant therapy that helped persons with long covid? it was posted here yesterday I think

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357428572_Combined_...

Everyone in my house had COVID in September and now we all have it again. Vaccinated, boosted, prior infection - none of it matters when it comes to avoiding the virus. I think we’re at the point where the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.

i don't know why the parent was modded down. It seems to me the governments are beginning to change the narrative to "the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.".

In Colorado. Anecdotal, 6 ppl I know here all have covid. 3 of them had their boosters 2 weeks before hand. 1 unvaccinated. Was like a bad cold for all of them.

also in colorado. currently have O. the + tests from our (previously very cautious) friend groups are coming in rapidly. i was boosted in mid-novemeber. _physical_ symptoms feel like a bad cold (cough, congested head, sinus headaches) though i'm afebrile. the mental symptoms are definitely different/stronger. sleeplessness. auditory hallucinations. i'd say mental fog but i can't say that's not related to the sleeplessness.

I'm now 10 days clear of the last obvious symptoms - but I've been having major trouble focusing since the end of the Holiday and not sure if due to covid or not.

If it’s milder than Delta - then that’s good right?

Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?

Scary thing is. Milder disease is a constant factor improvement in hospitalization. But faster spreading (higher R value) is an exponential worsening in hospitalization.

It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.

The CDC has estimated the overall hospitalization rate since the start of the pandemic at about 5%. Now with vaccines and other improved outpatient therapies the hospitalization rate is dropping.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

The Omicron variant R0 value appears to be somewhere in the 7 - 10 range.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

> It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.

Sure, but those aren’t the only choices. Over the last 30 days the daily case average has increased by 500%. During that same time the daily average hospitalized has risen 100%.

And the test positivity rate has increased to almost 30%, which implies an almost comical undercount in actual cases.

The contagiousness and severity are diverging in an extraordinary way. We’re likely undercounting cases by 1/5 or 1/10th.

An R value of .8 would quickly go extinct.

Maybe but “exponential growth” is a conspiracy theory promoted by epidemiologists. In reality, growth follows the S-curve, so a milder, faster spreading disease will also saturate the population (flatten the S-curve) much sooner, so overall the impact will be much less.

Anecdotally, the hospital my partner works at has been frantically converting almost all of their floors to covid floors due to the influx of patients. But, few require ICU/ventilator.

So yes it's bad/dangerous in that hospitals may fill to overflowing and struggle to treat covid or non-covid patients, but not bad in that Omicron is directly killing more people than Delta et al.

Here's a good take on it:

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-...

> Professor Andrew Hayward, of University College London, earlier told Sky News that it is unlikely there will be a variant more severe than Omicron.

He said: "This one will be hard to outcompete... given how successful it is."

Professor Hayward added that for a "variant to stick", it needs to have "some advantage over the existing variant and that advantage needs to be really in terms of increased transmissibility or escape from immunity".

He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."

> He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."

I thought the virus doesn't care about becoming more or less sever since its transmission capability is all that matters to it and symptoms are hidden (thus increasing transmission between individuals) in the first days of infection and that's what evolution is driving him to be: more transmissible.

The fact symptoms appear sooner than delta seems to be a step backward for the virus in terms of efficacy and it's compensated by being way way way more virulent.

What am I getting wrong here ?

Also:

Omicron could as well have been more severe (and the jury is still out on long covid anyway). If there's another variant less virulent but compensated by hiding symptoms longer... then this would take over omicron and this variant could as well be more severe.

Is that totally out of the realm of possibilities ?

My regular joe thinking tells me that we can only be sure of the direction it's going to take when spring comes. 2021 had 5 vocs, it's only the first days of January.

I remember 6 months ago some researchers also said that Delta was so contagious that it is very unlikely that even more contagious variant arises. Oh well, sometimes unlikely events happen.

One thing that gives me pause here; at one time people were saying that _Delta_ would be very hard to outcompete, given how infectious it is.

Something as infectious as Omicron but with better immune escape would presumably do very well, even once the Omicron waves pass.

This doesn't make any sense, unless the variants directly compete against each other. But what we've seen with Omicron is that it can infect someone who just had Delta. So if there's a mutation that can infect someone that had Omicron, but is more severe that mutation can flourish, even if it is less transmissible than Omicron. It just flourishes in parallel.

So far in the UK hospitalisations are increasing, but not dramatically so. There's also brouhaha about how London (where the wave is the worst) is at its peak, or already on the way down.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

[bear in mind, the hospitalisation number is not quite what it seems. It is "people in hospital who happen to have Covid", not "people who got Covid so bad they need to be hospitalised". So if you have asymptomatic Covid and a broken leg, you count for this purpose. Still, you do require the whole Covid-safe theatre, medical staff in PPE so it's also not like "meh doesn't matter"]

According to your link there's definitely a bump in hospital admissions. Only time will tell how high that bump goes. Let's play it safe and reserve judgement just a little longer...

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...

Hm, that's [that 'bear in mind'] correct: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/about-data#daily-and...

Just wanted to check that since (at at least one London hospital) they're on different wards (as in, even discounting that obviously you don't want 'broken leg with covid' on a general 'broken bones' ward with neg/query patients) so seems odd to me they'd report data like that vs. those needing treatment for it.

The "peak" in London last week (if it really was the peak) had 1 in 10 people infected. Those are huge numbers, even if most people don't need hospitalisation.

This guy is a uk health professional who go through the numbers in a easy to understand way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfZ62aWf6pk

It very much looks like Omnicron is an upper respiratory infection vs previous variants that are lower respiratory infections.

No...@ that's good right

Fewer % hospitalizations, but you have a much larger population getting it in a shorter amount of time.

When hospitals get oveerwhelmed you're going to get a knock down effect on non-covid issues where medical attention is needed but cannot be provided.

More cases means usually faster ability to spread, which again usually indicates that the virus is getting milder, so to answer you first q: yes.At this point covid realistically cannot be eradicated, i would say even if you achieve 80%+ vaccination rate worldwide(which we won't).To answer your second question i doubt we'll have more hospitalizations than delta.And to also state the obvious: by the time we get a 'jab' against omicron, we'll have another variant out there, whether identified & named or not.

Its milder than Delta but way more transmissible. The more people get this, more will be the chances of a new variant which can be more deadly/transmissible.

It’s possible, but most coronaviruses do not seem to have followed this in the past, nor flu-based viruses. More deadly variants usually don’t win it from less deadly in a selection process.

However it is important as the WHO recommends to do way more to export vaccines to countries that need it. Not just developed countries to prevent the chance of new variants.

If this is all so likely and rapid, why does this not happen constantly every single year? Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak when it seems like with so many humans we should see some super virus come up constantly.

I don't think this logic is correct. Viruses can not become infinitely transmissible/deadly; clearly there is an upper ceiling. Second, people gain immunity after infection. We'd expect the first variant that infects most people to win, effectively closing the door behind it.

But we're seeing evidence that Omicron provides some immunity from the more dangerous strains like Delta.

If we're worried about Omicron mutating to become more deadly, why aren't we worried about the other human coronaviruses doing the same? 229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1 that have been around for ages?

There's nothing magic about Omicron, its just a repsiratory virus thats relatively new to humans so there's not so much population immunity. And looks like we're rapidly getting exposed to it, so its about to lose its advantage.

It's still largely the same severity of the original Wuhan variant tho. It's the people getting immunity that's lowered mortality.

Hospitalizations are down 70%, yet in South Africa only 26% of the population is vaccinated, this goes to show that Omicron is less severe than the original variant.

The reason for this is Omicron replicates mainly in the upper respiratory areas and does not invade vital organs. This is also why its so contagious.

December 27th was the first day I personally knew a Canadian that had caught COVID. Today, I know of three independent outbreaks among my friends and even more at work.

The Alberta active case rate looks like a vertical line [1], and that's even after recently switching mostly to take-home test kits that don't get reported in these numbers. In my group of friends, 6/7 tested with take-home kits.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/147886170257374003...

Question: what does "100% prevalence" mean in this context? sorry, it's not clear.

all cases are omicron - at least, all sequenced samples came back as omicron

yeah, kind of confusing. “omicron at 100% prevalence, Colorado” is easily mistaken as “100% of the population of Colorado has/had omicron”.

They take samples, randomly sequence some, and use those to estimate the proportion of different variants. Apparently 100% of them were omicron in the week of 12/26/2021

Is this the part in Plague Inc where the virus infects everyone and then mutates into a 99% chance of death monster?

You can see a similar chart for the entire country (or other countries) here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?count...

I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.

Here in the UK there seems to be some sort of cold that is ticking all the same symptom boxes as Omicron (sore throat, headache, nasal congestion, cough) but “isn’t Codiv”. My whole family had it before Christmas. I would describe it a rotten cold, we all sat on the sofa for like 5 days but weren’t bed bound, tested negative with LFTs the whole time (each did one at least every other day for a week). We isolated anyway.

We know a lot of people who have had this experience in the last month. Most people seem to have had this cold or Covid recently.

Now, I am suspicious that something is going on here. I have a suspicion that the LFTs are not testing positive for relatively mild Omicron. The LFTs procedure here, which we followed, has been to only swab the nose (they changed it maybe over the summer?) but I have seen many anecdotal reports over the last week of people who tested negative (LFT) with just a nasal swab but positive if they swabbed their throats. This potentially ties in with reports that Omicron mostly affects the throat whereas Delta affects the back of the nose. I have seen no official studies.

It would not surprise me if we find out in a few weeks/months that nasal LFTs have a very high false negative rate with Omicron.

Edit:

Just found this about a small study suggesting exactly what I am suspicious of:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-o...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v...

Michael Mina explains it this way:

> Rapid tests do work with omicron. "But why are some people staying negative in the first days they have symptoms??" This is expected. Symptoms don't = contagious virus This is literally a reflection of the fact that vaccines are doing their job!

https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14720244576403947...

There's a nice diagram with additional information there, and further discussion on other possible factors contributing to the results we're seeing.

The official guidence is that LFT are only to be used if you DO NOT have symptoms. If you have symptoms you should instead be getting a PCR (lab) test.

Official guidence:

> There are different tests you can get to check if you have coronavirus (COVID-19). The test you need depends on why you're getting tested.

> The 2 main tests are:

> PCR tests – mainly for people with symptoms, they're sent to a lab to be checked

> rapid lateral flow tests – only for people who do not have symptoms, they give a quick result using a device similar to a pregnancy test

> Both tests are free.

Source: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/testing/g...

One of my friends tested positive for covid yesterday (via PCR test). He suspected he might have covid so he had been doing LFTs in the days leading up but kept coming up negative. Out of interest he did an LFT after he got his positive PCR and, surprise surprise, negative.

Obviously this is very anecdotal and speculative, but like you said, I wonder if LFTs don't pick up this strain of the virus as well as previous, and if that is what is causing the numbers to be so high since I would imagine it is how most people test.

There's a recent study(0) that suggests that saliva tests are more reliable than nasal swabs for detection of Omicron variants, whereas the inverse was true for the Delta variant.

(0) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v...

Same experience and suspicions here with December being miserable for the household but no positive LFTs (around 3 each) or PCR (one each). Wife still has a sore throat every night, weeks later, and mine lasted weeks too, which is unlike any cold we've had previously.

I had this and so did my friend and we live across the country. The same symptoms at different times. It was as you describe and my cough was terrible, unlike previous colds or chest infections. I coughed for about 40 hours straight and didn't sleep. I tested myself multiple times.

I found it strange that I am boosted, masked, and sanitized, plus I am isolated as I am an unpaid carer for a family member with poor health and I managed to catch the bloody cold!

It seemed suspect to me as well but of course, anecdotal.

Just stating the obvious (but not necessarily true): could be that before covid you never really never thought about others sniffles/coughing, but now after covid, everyone who behave "sick" becomes noticeable. I certainly noticed this in myself.

Went to a new years party in California and a dozen of us got stuffy noses and a small cough. Test came back negative. Haven't had a cold in so long I had almost forgotten what they were.

Before getting the results I had assumed this was the mutation everyone would get as we leave the pandemic with a natural immunity to this weak strain.

I stay inside most of the time and don't really go out or travel or anything. Only time I leave the house is to walk the dog.

It does seem like that past month or so I've been hearing constant sniffling, coughing, and sneezing as I walk around the neighborhood.

This was said in some Covid HN threads 1.5+ years ago when Covid began. We know now it was mostly people noticing stuff they didn’t notice before. Likely the same case here

Can anyone point me to a reliable source that explains in layman's terms why one cancels out the other and it's not possible to have both (say) delta and omicron at once.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)

Exponential growth. Lets say that there is one delta infection and one omicron infection in the population. Each delta infection causes two more people to be infected, while each omicron infection causes three more people to be infected.

The growth of a single delta infection: 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64

Versus a single omicron infection: 1 -> 3 -> 9 -> 27 -> 81 -> 243 -> 729

Omicron started out as 50% of the cases and over 6 reinfection cycles became 90% of the cases. Delta just can't keep up. These are made up numbers but that is the general idea.

Nod - that explains why omicron grew so quickly but why, in doing so, does delta not persist?

> could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)

You overestimate our abilities to make viruses that do what we want, let alone to make viruses that do what we want and won't evolve into viruses that do what we don't want after being released into the wild.

This is also basically saying "can't we make a transmissible vaccine", and as much as I like vaccine mandates, I think there would be significant ethical issues with that.

A bit of a sidebar this was basically the plot of The Last Ship. With infrastructure of the world crumbling how do you distribute immunity without the manufacturing infrastructure.

So yeah I'd put it in a 'last ditch Hail Mary to save the world' type of plan...

I feel like I recall at least one worm that somebody released that would infect servers, patch the vulnerability that it used to get in, infect other vulnerable servers, then delete itself.

I think it's because Omicron spreads more quickly and confers some immunity towards Delta. So before Delta has had a chance to infect a given person, they've probably already gotten some immunity from Omicron.

Just a no sources comment: you can get confection of the flu and covid or any variant with any other variant at the same time. It's just over time one variant out competes the others because it's more fit.

Dumb question that's been vaguely nagging at me: If a host can have both at the same time, in what sense are they competing? There are plenty of cells to infect in a particular host aren't there?

IIRC there was a study showing Omicron antibodies are effective against previous variants, but not vice versa.

[edit] I think this is where I heard that. Feel free to judge for yourself how reliable the source is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc

I don't think it matters if omicron is ultimately worse or not, nobody cares anymore. I was out visiting a gym yesterday, in an area with sky rocketing cases, and no one was wearing masks. They talked multiple times about how much they cared about health, without even a hint of irony. I was initially put off, but realized that this is just the world we're in.

In two weeks we'll find out if the calculus of lower death rate x higher case count means anything, but even if it turns out to be a complete disaster with record deaths, I just don't see anyone caring.

Pandemic is done after omicron no matter what. We already largely ignore deaths from climate change (which depending on your calculations can easily be as high globally as covid), we don't even speculate on deaths from environmental pollution. Covid is just another environmental hazard that we will accept like any other.

I have a feeling we are gonna want more things to worry about. Done with the pandemic? Let’s latch on to something to make sure 1) You have no kids 2) We keep increasing the power of the government measures 3) Equality meaning we stoop to the lowest level, not bring up the baseline 4) Keep eroding the standard of living.

Even if we are a space faring civilization, these people will make it uncool to “pollute” space or would be against fusion power if we are able. I can already see progressives against SpaceX.

No optimism for you!

> No optimism for you!

This is a weird observation to make. Optimism is by far the dominant ideology in our society and has been for well over 300 or so years.

Even currently when you browse mainstream media news postings the vast majority of the articles focus on how mild omicron is and how people should get to back to work.

I'll agree that the media makes plenty of money pedaling anxiety but real pessimism is nearly forbidden in everything from mainstream media to academic philosophy (seriously, Schopenhauer is basically it and he's much more of a buddhist than a true pessimist, the majority of German pessimist thinker remain untranslated in English).

Reacting to any observation of concerning data as "against optimism!" speaks more to a prevalence of hard denial than the rise of true pessimism.

Nobody cared ever. At my school every year everyone takes off their masks and wears them improperly all the time. At the beach and mall every year it's still constantly full of hundreds of people with less than 1 meter space in between. At restaurants they don't do anything different than normal except put a mask on while ordering. They could just make something at home instead of being lazy and spreading COVID.

The metrics presentation on the page are very misleading. The use of color is confusing (red generally means bad or getting worse, green means good or getting better). The up/down arrows are seemingly red or blue arbitrarily. Why are the four rows each colored differently? Just a bizarre UI.

If you have to present data to a user, please read a book by Edward Tufte first. His books will change your entire perspective, e.g.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

I can't easily link to the last chart at the bottom of the page, which shows all the variants.

However it does seem to be the case that omicron is taking over in Colorado USA...

The CDC publishes this data as well.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

With all the restrictions over the past two years, have we been selecting for hyper-contagious strains?

yes. would letting the original strains run amok freely have been better? I guess more people would have died, but it would have been over sooner.

Some places have been pretty close to "let it run amok", ie indifference by the population and government, widespread antivax sentiment, etc. I'm talking about places like Bulgaria, Russia, etc. They have seen around 0.75% of the population die.

Letting the original run freely would have likely cost at least 1% of the population, plus the long covid, lack of treatment for other conditions etc.

Death counts are also hard to compare because earlier variants already killed a lot of high-risk people.

Would we rather have a widespread epidemic we know less about and can control or a less deadly one we have treatments for, but have limited control over? It's hard to say. It'll be interesting to see what happens with omicron in China where they're trying their hardest to control it.

Imagine if ‘scientists’ named every variant of the cold or flu.

As someone else mentioned and I agree that I hope we are at the end of covid lockdown potential but is that realistic?

Is it pure luck that Omicron is more transmissible but apparently less severe than Delta? What is to stop the next variant being more transmissible than Omicron but 10 times more deadly?

I know news outlets are really bad for clickbait titles, but I read yesterday that a new variant was detected in South France in the last few days? When will the carnival end and what does it mean?

As far as I understand that's not likely because the it would be maladaptive for the virus. If there were a really deadly variant in South Africa, then 1) it wouldn't spread as fast because viruses need live hosts to spread and 2) people would change their behavior before it reached the entire world.

That is, Omicron is mild so people likely didn't change their behavior too much. If you saw a lot of people around you going to the hospital, you would likely stop going out so much. (Some people knew many people going to the hospital during the pandemic; others saw none for years. The infection was very unevenly distributed. On HN I expect most people are remote workers and know few people getting infected.)

It depends whether it confers immunity to other variants, and how long it lasts.

If it’s good at that, it is so transmissible that quickly everyone will get it (the fabled “herd immunity”) and new variants, unless they break the mould, won’t have a large enough population of o sustain themselves in.

Otherwise, maybe we’ll enter into some kind of equilibrium, where there’s enough of not-terrible Omicron to keep everyone “topped up”, equivalent to permanently high vaccination levels.

Or, none of our happens and as you say, the next variant is more transmissible and more deadly, and we’re screwed again.

Re France, new variants pop up all the time, if it’s the same one I read about, there’s no indication that it’s special right now so for now I’d say clickbait.

It's pretty much pure luck that Omicron isn't more severe than Delta, and it's not clear that it's a lot less severe though that'll be clear in the data in another month. I suspect in 20 years this thing will look more like measles in that high levels of vaccination starting in childhood + rapid response on outbreaks will make it a negligible risk at a personal level. Who knows though, anyone promising certainty is probably trying to sell you something.

I thought that a second variant was essentially an independent stochastic process. If I have that right that suggests that, had Omicron not occurred Colorado would currently be Corona-free.

I doubt that is true though. Maybe some of the people who now have Omicron would have gotten Delta later on? I don't see how one variant can truly extinguish another variant otherwise. But I am hoping someone here knows better than me.

How do you see them as independent stochastic processes? Assuming one person can only be infected with 1 variant at a time, then they are not independent, instead they would be negatively correlated since the more people have omikron the less people can get delta. If instead one person can have more than 1 variant at a time, and they are really independent, then your conclusion is incorrect since a 100% prevalance of omikron would not imply a 0% prevalance of other variants.

There's something I don't understand: why can't we be infected with different variants at the same time ? And does it extend to viruses (eg: can't get infected with flu if currently fighting measles) ?

I read someone in Israel got `flurona`, flu + covid (https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-fir...).

Your bodies response to a virus makes it difficult for another virus to take hold, but not impossible. There's a lag in the body's immune response when a virus first is detected, and then another lag while the body builds up the defenders (antibodies and other things). So for someone to have multiple viruses at the same time, largely the exposure has to happen at the same time. The more different the viruses are, the more likely they can be in the body at the same time in a meaningful number. When an immune system is "all revved up", it is very hard for a few thousand virus cells to get exponential growth going needed.

Antibodies (and b-cells and t-cells) for Delta work ok enough against Omicron, and vice-versa. Since Omicron is spreading so fast, it is able to get to more bodies faster than Delta, so Delta has no where to go. Delta did the same to previous variants.

There are multiple factors involved. The extremely high rate of spread of Omicron does a lot to bring it to the top. More subtle is the difference between immunity generated by each. That is, it appears that vaccinations and post infection immunity from Delta are little help against Omicron infections, but post Omicron immunity is highly effective against Delta. This appears to be related primarily to differences in the spike protein.

If having had omicron is reasonably protective against contracting delta in the short term, then this works. For now. Who knows how long any acquired immunity holds up.

Delta did pretty much eliminate prior variants in many parts of the world.

I'd love to see a numbers breakdown estimating the impact Omicron would have on the US if we had a nearly complete (say 90%) vaccination rate. How many infections would we be seeing, how many hospitalizations, how many people in the ICU? How much would this strain our healthcare system? And how would that compare with, say, the flu?

Iceland is 92% vaccinated double and I think 60% of them triple. Half the famn population is in isoliation because of infection. Feel free to check their covid stats in covid.is ( they have an english version ). Most hospitalized are fully vaccinated ( 2 or 3 ) Most serious cases are unvaccinated, HOWEVER. Out of 34 hospitalized with c19 6 were patients in cardiology that got infected in the hospital and had to be tranferred to c19. Authorities have not wanted to comment if any of the serious c19 cases came from people who were already seriously ill, already hospitalized and not vaccinated due to that. Since the ICU numbers are so small, this significance is easily skewed. Much less hospitalizations than the models predicted.

If the studies suggesting that Omicron antibodies help protect against the Delta variant, and Omicron seems much more mild in comparison - looks like we're seeing an actual possibility of an end to the pandemic (at least to the point where we deal with COVID like we do with cold and flu season instead of shutting down the world).

Serious question. If Omicron was the initial variant of Covid 19, would we have seen shut downs and the level of global response we did? Is the thought it's only this level of mildness because of vaccination rates?

My gut is that the answer would be yes because this variant targets children more effectively.

define "targets". Transmissibility or actual harm? Children are at no more risk of harm from this variant than any other AFAIK.

The spread is so fast, all charts now look insane and would be terrifying if not for the mild symptoms.

I wonder if it is possible for a virus to wipe itself out by spreading so quickly that it ends up with very few left to infect, assuming it doesn't mutate enough in time.

> we have plenty of N95’s in supply. We also have KN95s for kids.

Are they buying Chinese masks for the kids? Or is there an American "for kids" N95 standard that creates a name collision with the Chinese KN95 standard?

The child-size masks I have for my three year old are all KF94s from Korea.

https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ lists small-size KN95s from China and an uncertified mask from an N95 manufacturer.

NIOSH (the agency behind the N95 standard) has not approved any type of facemask for children, so any "N95 for kids" mask would be counterfeit.

My province has a nice data presentation too: https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/

People seem to see this as another sign that the pandemic is either getting worse or almost over. I just see it as another reason not to use Tableau.

I am reminded of "Don't Look Up" scene:

It is going to happen. Exactly. 99.78% to be exact.

Oh, great. Okay, so it’s not 100%.

Well, scientists never like to say 100%.

aside: that movie was absolutely terrible and cringey

It’s amazing how China has apparently been almost untouched by the pandemic since end of March 2020.

Omicron has probably saved Florida (andnother southern states) from a horrendous Delta winter wave.

I'm skeptical. The 2020 Winter wave started in October. But cases were decreasing of flat Oct. and Nov. with barely any mitigations in place. There was some sign of an increase in very late nov. and early december. Whether that is an early sign of a wave, a thanksgiving bump, or signs of Omicron spreading, it's hard to tell.

But it Florida and the South had a high degree of immunity to delta even pre omicron.

That article doesn't seem to say anything about "100% prevalence".

I have no idea how to read this website. Could someone break this down for me?

What does 100% prevalence mean? 100% of people are at least silent carriers?

Based on the chart it's 100% of the positive tests being Omnicron.

What are covid hospitalization rates for children currently?

I highly recommend everyone here to watch these two cannels for Covid news and analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching

https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1

The first one is a bit more user-friendly, the second one goes more in-depth into mechanics and research, but neither peddle fear or moralism. There is actually quite a bit of positive news lately:

Omicron uses two different ways to enter cells. This is part of why it's so transmissible, but it's also why it is less severe: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-differ...

Omicron generates some immunity for Delta, so it is likely to displace Delta entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc

Most Omicron hospitalization are accidental so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI

Reply on news.ycombinator.com