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believe it or not, this bet is only 70% atm
Basically explaining how immune escape may mean Omicron can outpace Delta without having as high R0 - ie:
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1465364317931393025
Here’s a thead of a seemingly competent bloke trying to do the maths:
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The US reported only 23,950 new cases yesterday and the 7dma continues to fall. It’s too much to just be holiday reporting at this point, cases are definitely falling.
April 2020:
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Yeah, it’s not just the weekend though. I get that Omicron is almost certainly going to cause another spike when it finally explodes here, probably in 2 months or so, but for now, cases appear to at least be declining. The 7dma is the lowest it has been since November 13th. That’s more then a weekend, and more then thanksgiving.
Nah we won’t know until later this week. Need to catch up on weekend and thanksgiving. Seven day average is nowhere near 23k (was like 100k a week ago or w/e), so we know we still have catch up. US data is so fucked im not even gonna look until Friday.
The 7dma isn’t 23k, you’re right, it’s 80k. But that’s off of a peak of 95k. Even accounting for some thanksgiving dumps it looks like it’s going down to me, but we can look again on Friday.
That’s my point. Cases the day before thanksgiving were like 112k and today is 23k. It isn’t plausible cases have fallen anywhere near that much so we know there’s a lot more normalizing to come. I’m skeptical they are going down but idk, our data is so bad now and worse around holidays so really just a shrug idk.
Then we get the likely post holiday spike then Christmas then w/e this new variant turns out to be so I’m still pretty pessimistic for winter. State and Fed behavior seems to indicate they think another wave coming.
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Oh wow, I didn’t realize what the pre-Thanksgiving number was. I’m with you. We still have some catching up to do. We have never seen cases drop that quickly anywhere ever.
As somebody that sits and watches biology (fermentation) in real time I strongly advise to wait. Data anomalies happen. When something weird happens in the short term without explanation, wait a couple of hours (or days for Covid stats) Patience, grasshopper.
Dude, Thanksgiving was less than a week ago. The reduction in 7DMA is almost entirely due to extremely low cases reported on Thursday and Friday and, to a much smaller extent, Saturday and Sunday. That backlog isn’t going to start clearing until weekdays start getting reported.
EDIT: Here’s are new cases for the last 7 days compared to the corresponding day from the prior week:
Cases are up every day until Thanksgiving. You can also see that there’s normally a weekend backlog that gets cleared on Mondays and Tuesdays (reported Tuesday and Wednesday). In a sense it’s too soon to tell, but are we really thinking that people were just too busy traveling and having indoor gatherings in large groups to contract COVID? Cases were already growing, and the holiday would have made them grow faster, not slow down.
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But the US should quickly invest in other tools as well, experts said, including testing, genomic sequencing and surveillance, better communication, and a strong focus on global vaccine equity to prevent the emergence of new variants.
All of that would prepare America better to deal with a variant that many experts suspect is probably already inside the country, even if undetected so far.
Sequencing positive tests is also important to understand which variants are circulating. The US lags behind many countries in genomic sequencing, and there are vast differences between states.
“We’re not doing nearly enough genomic sequencing in this country still,” Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at New York University and Bellevue Hospital, told the Guardian. “I’m sure we have Omicron here in the US; we just haven’t detected it yet.”
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Moderna boss predicts current vaccines may be less effective against Omicron
The chief executive of the US drugmaker Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be less effective against Omicron than they have been against the Delta version, sending global stock markets sharply lower.
Stéphane Bancel said while it would take two weeks to get data on how the existing vaccines perform against the new Covid variant – and whether it causes severe disease – it will take several months to tweak the current vaccines to tackle Omicron.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level … we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Bancel told the Financial Times.
He suggested that pharma companies would struggle between targeting Omicron and the existing Covid variants, warning it would be risky to shift Moderna’s entire production capacity to an Omicron-specific jab.
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Oxford remaining cautious but more upbeat:
There’s also this update from FT’s data journalist (so far not brilliant, but not apocalyptic):
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1465659957546782725
They have updated hospital admissions from yesterday though. Last week went from +580 to +647 which will steepen his curve. Still think that “0 days” might have to be revised backwards in time.
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omicron omicron someone just invited me over their variant
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The graphs need to be interpreted with care though, especially the hospitalization one. As you can sort of see on the right side of those graphs, the beta wave didn’t really ever end, it just trailed off to a low level, then got drowned out by Delta. Similar for Beta vs OG. Delta did run out of steam in SA though, and case numbers were down to the lowest levels of the entire pandemic. So in the earlier cases, there were people getting diagnosed and getting hospitalized with other variants during the “wave.” That’s still true to some extent for Omicron, but less so.
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I don’t even know wtf is going on here. LA Country Sheriff having a normal one.
I heard he’s going to use Theranos.