COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

The right move is to get tested but given this fact pattern I’d YOLO.

yeah my wife looking into getting us tested now.

As @gman42 said, the outlook is currently for devil you know rather than the devil you don’t. There are basically 3 ways a new variant is scary. One, it is more contagious. Two, it’s more deadly. Three, it escapes the vaccine. These CDC data don’t show much about #2, but if either #1 or #3 were true about any new variant relative to delta, we’d expect to see a rise of that variant relative to delta, whether it is because it is more probable to catch than delta (#1) or it is infecting vaccinated people that are relatively inaccessible to delta (#3). And really, a variant that is more deadly but less contagious is the sort of variant that tends to die out as its hosts die out. That’s bad news for any people who catch one of those, but a variant that is more deadly but not more contagious or prone to vaccine escape isn’t likely to become a global pandemic. We’d expect them to be more like the first SARS: deadly, scary, and then gone.

That we’re still seeing nothing but delta isn’t exactly great news, as absolute case numbers are still high, but it does mean that in places that have delta under control to a certain degree, at least to the point where cases are falling, it’s unlikely that one of the later variants, like mu, is going to change that trend and require even stricter countermeasures. There could be (will be, really) yet more variants, but any new variant is only all that interesting and concerning if it starts increasing relative to delta on that first plot.

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Yep, getting tested tomorrow and continuing on with your life as you’d been living after a negative test is a reasonable thing to do.

I heard the story of a local asshole today. His wife and daughter have tested positive. He clearly is positive but refuses to get tested so he can still go around town and do his normal routine, eating at restaurants etc. My wife heard this from his other daughter who she is friends with and who is outing him around town.

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It seems incredibly likely to me that R0 with no mitigation in vaxxed people is > 1 because there is plenty of reason to think this is true (documented outbreaks in fully vaxxed populations, fast outbreaks in highly vaccinated countries which would be hard to chalk up to just the unvaxxed, back of the envelope math in which it’s hard to make assumptions that result in an answer < 1) and absolutely no reason to think it is < 1 other than wishful thinking.

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I mean if we’re all vaxxed then it’s yolo time because hospitalizations isnt that bad got vaxxed

In any kind of sane society this would be jailable.

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It’s all Delta in the Delta.

Just picked up a four-banger of rapid tests, yolo

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Nice. Those are sold out everywhere here. GL.

In Mississippi it shines like a National guitar.

Yeah how we behave once we drag everyone to fully vaxxed/make venues vax only is a different question from R0.

IMO we should cross the bridge of how that works once we vax kids, get hospitals back to normalcy, and have more data on long COVID.

Free widely available rapid tests would help a lot here, but, alas

EDIT: im bad at writing edited for clarity

Jesus Christ.


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Got this from a client today who has tested positive with (mild) symptoms. First vaxxed-to-vaxxed transmission I’ve heard of personally:

I went to an outdoor wedding with 20 vaccinated people and mandatory onsite testing… we all passed, but less than 24 hours later, the groom’s brother was positive with his own breakthrough case.

One way is literal-presumably a natural Delta infection will prevent most “new” strain infections via immune response.

The second is math wise if Rnew<Rdelta. It doesn’t take much of a spread for Delta to stay >90% or even 99% of the population.

I also errored earlier with the <<1 business, it should have been <<Delta.

Let’s In unvaxxed Rdelta is 6-9 and Rnew is 3 (similar to original Covid). If In the vaxxed RDelta is 1.3 and Rnew is 2, then delta is still going to mathematically dominate.

(And of course hopefully even if Rnew can spread in the vaxxed it won’t have bad morbidity).

See that’s the thing, that person was almost certainly infected before the event. 24 hours isn’t likely to go from exposure to testing positive. <24 is even less likely.

I don’t think he’s saying he tested positive 24 hours after the wedding, the groom’s brother (who was certainly infected before the event) did. And then some days after that he got sick.

Rapid test negative, ghost rider

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