Otatop got the reference - I’ll make it more obvious next time. Kinda proves the ‘Russian racism’ vs Hokie wasn’t trolling, as I too am making anti-Russian references.
Keep up!
Medical professionals are going to use scarce medicine to maximize lives saved and relieve pressure on overcrowded hospitals. Given the income skew on vaccination, Id be hard pressed to argue otherwise even if it saves the lives of some Fox News polluted assholes
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It’s all speculation without the study. It’s still a journalist interpreting and we know they would never get science wrong. Parsing second words is not worth the effort.
If I had to guess “their” antibodies have more cross reactivity with Omicron. Not “omicron specific antibodies” which is a nonsensical statement for reasons stated above.
It’s an interesting news report. Can we leave it at that and wait for better info?
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I think he was making a joke. Read it again.
Welp. I just found out my nephew is pozzed. I saw him 2 days ago. 
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I read this as my strategy of eating a couple weed gummies and relaxing is 76% effective at eliminating vax side effects. Worked for me at least.
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I got high for the first time in a while the other night at a party.
Every exchange with another human cascaded into a never-ending internal monologue over whatever I just uttered:
“Did that even make sense? Am I too high? Is it obvious?”
“Am I doing that thing where I’m making an inside joke on top of an inside joke - thinking everyone else is on the same wavelength? Or am I saying something so painfully obvious it doesn’t even need to be said?”
“Am I trying to be too cool for school? Or am I acting like a complete spaz?”
“Should I even be in this conversation? Why did I initiate this?”
“OMG am I always this socially uncouth, I just don’t realize it unless I’m high?”
“I should really just shut up for a while and pretend I’m grooving to the music.”
etc.
I have no idea how weed relaxes people. Inside my own head is a frightening place. I do everything I can to stay out of it.
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Haha. That’s me every time I go back to weed after a while.
Weed is very much never or everyday.
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Damn I was gonna start going to BJJ.
But when I heard about them accepting unvaxxed people so long as they take an antigen test before entering (actually against the law now), I’m concerned. Plus omicron is dominating in schools.
Also they’re temporarily banning new members to protect competitors lol. You know because allowing unvaxxed members is caring about your competitors.
Ugh.
Omicron sub-lineage designated variant of under investigation in UK
An Omicron variant sub-lineage, known as BA.2, is under investigation by the the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
Current case rates are very low but the health body said further analyses would be undertaken to look into it.
By 10 January 2022, 53 sequences of the BA.2 sub-lineage of Omicron had been identified, the UKHSA said.
CDC has posted a national hospitalization-by-vax-status infographic:
Weirdly, their data shows a sharp decline in hospitalization rates among unvaxxed population in late December. That’s exactly the opposite of what New York data shows. A possibly explanatory footnote:
Continuity correction: ?A continuity correction has been applied to the denominators by capping the percent population vaccination coverage at 95%. To do this, we assumed that at least 5% of each age group would always be unvaccinated in each jurisdiction. Adding this correction ensures that there is always a reasonable denominator for the unvaccinated population that would prevent hospitalization rates from growing unrealistically large due to potential overestimates of vaccination coverage.
New York seems to top-code at 99% instead. So one explanation is that CDC’s data is lower-quality (on average) than NYC, and they top-code more aggressively, so they have been capped for a while. Under those conditions, (real) first shots reduce the measured rate of unvaxxed hospitalizations (numerator goes down because there are fewer unvaxxed people, denominator is locked). By contrast, NYC is below the cap, and (real or mislabeled) first shots squeeze the denominator closer and closer to 1%, and to the extent there are a nontrivial number of mislabeled first shots (ever), you’ll eventually substantially inflate the unvaxxed rate.
Or who knows, maybe Omicron is less severe and less sensitive to vaccination, so the effect is real in the CDC data and disguised in the NYC data. Or the reverse.
I work with a dude whose double-vaxxed and in his mid-20’s, still got hit hard by the ‘rona, high fever for days. Just goes to show how even a ‘mild’ case of this can be pretty gnarly.
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My friend triple pfizer, boosted in Nov. Just got a gnarly case and lost her sense of taste and smell. She says it’s 25% back now. That suuuucks.
I got an email from USPS this morning saying that my four Biden Covid tests will arrive today.
I wasn’t expecting them until February tbh. It’s good to know that there’s one competent person in this administration: Louis DeJoy.
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It appears that nobody thinks it’s likely to be more severe or has more vaccine-escape than original Omicron. But it may be more transmissible. It’s up to like 50% of cases in Denmark, and they are pretty sure it’s not impacting mortality or hospitalization rates… Just spreading faster.
Which is not great, obviously, but not a worst-case scenario.
Booster doses of Covid-19 vaccines increased protection against both the delta and omicron variants in three studies that looked at infections, hospital admissions and deaths in thousands of U.S. patients.
Third doses of messenger RNA vaccines made by Moderna Inc. and the partnership of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE were at least 90% effective in preventing hospitalizations during both the delta and omicron periods, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and clinic visits.
Highly Republican doctor I play poker with opined at the table that the media not reporting on COVID for a month would fix all the problems.
BA.2 ‘Stealth Omicron’ spreading faster than Omicron wouldn’t be worse case scenario as you rightly state, still bad / worse case than we currently face though which is why it’s highly likely to have it’s own Greek letter soon. Likely to affect a greater number of the vaxxed despite the vaccines holding efficacy %'s by the increase in R0 alone. Another round of boosters required?
“Analyses regarding infectiousness and vaccine efficiency etc. are ongoing, including attempts to cultivate BA.2 in order to perform antibody neutralization studies. It is expected that vaccines also have an effect against severe illness upon BA.2 infection”.
I guess we have to the attempts to cultivate before we can do the real studies, to get the real answers.
Well hold on a second. As long as it doesn’t escape natural immunity from original Omicron, it’s not likely to make a huge difference or get its own Greek letter. It’ll just be Omicron+.
Like if it was spreading before Omicron it would cause that much worse hospital overruns and labor/supply issues. But so many people have already had Omicron that if that protects, it shouldn’t matter much in this wave.
And we already needed another round of boosters IMO, not sure this changes that. I expect mostly old people, people with risk factors, and COVID hawks to boost. Everyone else will probably roll with “it’s mild” and just keep catching it.
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Anders Fomsgaard, researcher at Statens Serum Institut (SSI), said he did not yet have a good explanation for the rapid growth of the sub-lineage, adding he was puzzled, but not worried.
“It may be that it is more resistant to the immunity in the population, which allows it to infect more. We do not know yet,” he told broadcaster TV 2, adding that there was a possibility that people infected with BA.1 might not be immune from then catching BA.2 soon after.
“It is a possibility,” he said. “In that case, we must be prepared for it. And then, in fact, we might see two peaks of this epidemic.”
Here’s why it may get a new name…
Researchers note that the BA.2 version of Omicron may have 28 unique mutations compared to BA.1, even as the two Omicron strains share 32 mutations.
Some researchers believe that BA.2 is so distinct from Omicron’s original strain that the World Health Organization should label it a variant of concern—reserved for variants that demonstrate increased transmissibility, among other factors—and give it its own name.
“I think the responsible thing to do is to relate to BA.2 as a completely different variant, outcompeting BA.1,” Shay Fleishon, a researcher affiliated with the Israeli government’s Central Virology Laboratory, wrote on Twitter. “Oh and if someone in the WHO is here—The letter Pi is still waiting. Just saying."