Even with your POV he can’t really calculate cases that way from hospitalizations
Shouldn’t be that surprising given their colonial history with the west. Toss that on top of a lack of education and the poor infrastructure for storing, distributing, and administering vaccines within the country and you have a big shit sandwich to deal with.
‘Stealth’ Omicron sub-variant detected in 57 countries, says WHO
The highly transmissible Omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus now accounts for nearly all of the coronavirus infections globally.
In its weekly epidemiological update today, the World Health Organization said that the Omicron variant, which accounts for over 93% of all coronavirus specimens collected in the past month, counts several sub-lineages: BA.1, BA.1.1, BA.2 and BA.3.
BA.1 and BA.1.1 - the first versions identified - still account for over 96% of all the sequenced Omicron cases submitted to the public virus tracking database GISAID, but in parts of Europe and Asia, BA.2, sometimes known as a “stealth” subvariant, is starting to outcompete BA.1.
“BA.2- designated sequences have been submitted to GISAID from 57 countries to date,” WHO said on Tuesday. It added that in some countries, the sub-variant now accounted for more than half of all sequenced Omicron cases.
The UN health agency said little was known yet about the differences between the sub-variants but several studies have suggested that BA.2 is more infectious than the original sub-lineage.
WHO expert Maria Van Kerkhove told reporters that information about BA.2 was very limited, but that some initial data indicated it had “a slight increase in growth rate over BA.1.”
Omicron is generally known to cause less severe disease than previous Covid variants like Delta, and Van Kerkhove said there so far was “no indication that there is a change in severity” in the BA.2 sub-variant.
I think it’s India, The Phillipines and obviously Denmark rocking north of 50% BA.2 atm.
Do you believe that you advocate actions in line with a pessimistic outlook that assigns greater probability to worst-case scenarios?
Is it reasonable for someone to act based on the assumption that COVID acts like other respiratory diseases until proven otherwise and that each variant acts similar to previous variants until proven otherwise? I think the answer to this is yes and that people with scientific backgrounds are inclined to act this way.
What should be the default assumption? Are cases eliminated at the same rate that bad outcomes are for other diseases? If so, should that be the assumption for COVID?
(In case you think I am singling you out, this is an open invitation to those who think they are on the other side of you to chime in.)
I don’t really see where people are arguing with you on these points. I see people arguing with you over the path you take to get to the same points. Or am I misreading an argument that I admit I don’t follow 100% and sometimes skim over?
I get the sense, and I could be wrong, that you seem to feel that anyone who has a higher risk tolerance than you is either not understanding the risk or effectively being as dangerous as someone who doesn’t care at all and thinks covid is just the flu.
I do believe that we should assume that covid fomite transmission is the same as fomite transmission for other respiratory diseases and we shouldn’t engage in any extraordinary mitigation measures until proven wrong. Everything I’ve read seems to say this isn’t a cause for concern.
What we should do is work with NATO countries, China, etc and use all our militaries to help with the logistics of vaccinating the third world. But that’s a non starter, sadly.
Another record-breaking day for new cases in the Czech Republic.
I guess the positive for me is that the number of cases in my school has declined. There are also way fewer teachers out with covid. Now I have mostly full (or close to full) classes which wasn’t the case the last couple of weeks. The latest surges also appear to be occurring further away from Prague.
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https://twitter.com/neurofourier/status/1488630483437113352?s=21
https://twitter.com/neurofourier/status/1488657675277803523?s=21
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The courts in the CR have abolished the requirement to prove infectivity via vaccine or previous illness to enter places like restaurants or bars. According to the ruling, such a restriction can only be passed if the virus affects the country and everybody is suspected of being infected. The Ministry of Health has seven days to respond but I doubt they will.
No one knows for sure what the upcoming pandemic amendment to the law will include but I suspect it will overrule this if possible
Meanwhile even the “cautious” areas just “wen no masks”.
We really are trying to make 500K deaths a year the new normal.
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That number is much higher than the one on Our World in Data. Wonder why the difference exists.
With deaths lagging cases, a lot of those deaths would still be delta, right?
The study found that the infection first appears in the throat and that infectious virus peaks about five days into infection, by which point the nose has a much higher viral load than the throat. The study also suggested that lateral flow tests are a reassuringly reliable indicator of whether infectious virus is present. Swabbing the nose and throat makes it more likely to detect infections during the first few days, the work suggests.
Intriguingly, some of those who did not meet the threshold for being infected also had very low levels of virus detectable in their noses and throats, suggesting that they may have experienced a very short-lived infection that was seen off by immune activity in the lining of the nose and throat.
The study also revealed that of the 18 people who became infected, all had similar viral loads regardless of whether they developed symptoms, underlining the role of asymptomatic transmission.
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Interesting, but how the hell did that get past ethical review? Human challenge trial on 39 unvaxxed makes me super uneasy.
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The study was carried out using a strain of the virus before the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants emerged.
Maybe it wasn’t a VOI or a VOC - hope they got paid decent money though, eh!
A little more from Reuters…
A trial that deliberately infected people with Covid was found to be safe in healthy young adults, one of the companies running the study said.
The project – run by Open Orphan with Imperial College London , the UK government vaccine taskforce and hVIVO – was the world’s first human challenge trial in which volunteers were deliberately exposed to Covid.
Reuters reports the details:
The data supports the safety of this model which could theoretically provide a “plug and play” platform for testing therapies and vaccines using the original Covid-19 strain as well as variants of the virus, Open Orphan, which carried out the study, said in a statement.
The trial infected 36 healthy male and female volunteers aged 18- to 29 years with the original Sars-CoV-2 strain of the virus and closely monitored them in a controlled quarantined setting. They will be followed up for 12 months after discharge from the quarantine facility.
No serious adverse events occurred, and the human challenge study model was shown to be safe and well tolerated in healthy young adults, the company said.
In other news…
Covid level stops falling in the UK
Covid infections have stopped falling in the UK , with levels holding steady or climbing, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
“As a mom of two kids under five, I’m extremely excited. But as an epidemiologist and public health member, I have a ton of questions,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an infectious disease epidemiologist with UTHealth School of Public Health in Dallas.
Chief among them: “Did they move the sidebars?” She noted that researchers could change what they are examining in the trial — looking at T cell responses or cases and hospitalizations, for instance, instead of neutralizing antibodies.
If regulators are looking at real-world numbers on cases and hospitalizations among the vaccinated and unvaccinated children, she asked, “Do they have enough data?” The clinical trial wasn’t designed to examine these questions, she noted, and there might not be enough participants in the trial to understand the vaccines’ efficacy in those settings.
Should be pointed out the FDA will almost certainly explore all of this. Their hearings on vaxxes have been very thorough so far and far from rubber stamp events.
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Looks like it goes to the end of January so it would seem to mostly Omicron in the back half? It’s the NYT data.
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