Not counting my girlfriend, I have seen one N95/KN95/KF94 on someone else’s face in person since Thanksgiving.
I don’t think that UP posters are a representative population.
We’re all in that top 5-10% of precaution taking broadly speaking. The percentage of the population that is similar to us <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< the percentage of the population saying, “Omicron is mild. The time to catch COVID is NOW! It’s time to end this thing with our Omicron acquired immunity!”
Which is sure to be followed by, “Oh, is Omicron acquired immunity against other variants not a thing? Well, who could have seen that coming? We made the right choice! Unlucky break, but you’ve got to LIVE YOUR LIFE!”
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Way fewer than 1% of people are wearing N95’s right now in public. That’s from a sample size of my own that’s gotta be somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people (however many people you see in stores in 1.5 months). That’s not in bumblefuck Arkansas, either. I live in a county that went 62% Biden to 36% Trump.
If you want to go any mask, my best guesstimate (maybe once a week I count masks and no masks when I go out to try to gauge people’s precaution levels) is that it went from about 25% masked pre-Thanksgiving to about 40% masked now.
There may be a few million of us nationwide, but we really are a drop in the bucket. Even if we completely remove ourselves from the chain of transmission, people are having like COVID parties now trying to catch it. I can’t imagine we help matters more than they hurt.
We definitely have more people isolating from pozzing, although the % of people isolating after pozzing is probably lower than it was a few months ago. We also probably have more people isolating from being exposed than ever, but again a much lower % than before.
That’s a good point, though.
It doesn’t have to confer immunity, even though there’s very likely some sort of immunity involved.
Let’s assume a few things:
- R0 of delta is 5
- R0 of omicron is 7 or more
- The time period for each infection is the same
In this scenario, omicron infects 7 people for every time period while delta infects 5. Seems small right? Well multiple that out 7-49-343 vs 5-25-125 and you can quickly see how fast this difference is. Hopefully it’s easy to see how the 5 will become a rounding error very quickly. Even if there was zero immunity conferred you’d expect omicron to dominate.
In reality, there likely is some crossover. How much is something I don’t know how to answer right now.
In reality the assumptions here favor omicron even more, it seems like the time period of it’s infection is smaller than delta’s, so it’s infecting 7x at a faster time than delta is doing 5x.
There’s definitely some reduction in mobility, more masking, etc but don’t have a good number to quantify it. Doesn’t seem like it was enough dampen Omicron meaningfully, but doubt there was zero effect.
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Some experts theorize that’s what the end game is likely to be, endemic (not technically endemic but flu like epidemic) COVID where different strains come and go and how well our waves go depend on how well we match vax against prevailing variants. Just too early to know, have to see how this plays out.
Seems like most people using those masks are also staying the fuck at home, but, like, when I’ve gone for a once weekly takeout lunch, there are always plenty of people in the restaurants just eating there. Most workers are in surgical masks or cloth masks.
The country definitely hasn’t n95d en masse, but I definitely see way way more kn95 and n95 than I did a month ago. Our schools both recommended upgraded masks and went back to smaller cohorts (which already saved us a quarantine week). My office went remote again fully for four weeks. I don’t think behavioral changes drove the wave peaking, but would guess they reduced the peak by some amount
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Yeah I mean Omicron changed the situation substantially for me personally. I went from doing a lot of stuff without a mask or with a cloth mask after my booster or in close proximity to my second shot, to KN95s to N95s due to Omicron.
I just don’t see substantial changes in public when I go out, and I see more changes towards less precautions than more. “Omicron is mild,” is the message that won the day.
So far the only big changes towards preventing transmissions I’ve noticed are local businesses closing for a few days because their entire staff is pozzed at once.
That’s fine for percentages, but the absolute number of Delta infections are also going down.
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“ NYU Langone study finds that COVID-19 can damage brain cells, but whether the damage is permanent remains to be seen. Learn more.”
In other news, anti-Vaxxer brains are severely more damaged since forever.
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Oh I see what you are saying. Omicron did seem to smoke delta everywhere regardless of precaution levels though. Agree there’s no way to really know until omicron recedes and we see what precautions stay in place.
Mr Biden declared in a July speech that the US could celebrate “independence” from the Covid-19 pandemic. That may sit next to George W Bush’s Iraq War “mission accomplished” banner in the hall of premature presidential victory declarations. While the White House will get credit for enacting a massive pandemic relief bill in May, its inability to prepare for the challenges presented by the Delta and Omicron variants have turned what seemed like looming success into a long, hard slog.
Trip to Germany is off. So no worries about testing poz and getting stuck.
Mask use in Pekin IL is pretty low. The plant I worked at today was high but the grocery store was close to nada.
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It’s also important to note that Delta peaked after Omicron was identified but before lots of people caught it in the US.
Yeah, maybe, I just don’t have a view on whether these precautions would be enough to short circuit a delta wave or just reduce the peak if that makes sense. I do get what you are saying now, I missed the delta piece the first time.
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The centrifuge vendor company came back and said my client could only have 1 person at the work site. So me as the consultant got dropped from the trip.
One more person wearing an N95 is basically zero risk. But hey the company did something and prevented at least one American from coming into Germany.
Which you would expect so long as you assume they either can’t co-exist as separate infections or that people who are ill with omicron aren’t going out enough to spread delta well.
There’s also likely protection beyond that, but conferring immunity is hard to say at this point (it’s also a fuzzy term).