If you click on the viral test link, antigen tests are ok. That rapid test option will be fine for you.
It’s somewhat unreasonable to expect people to get PCR tests the day before. Not saying they wouldn’t do it, but it’s unlikely.
How long until we have some real data on covid vaccines vs omgicron and if the symptoms are less severe than covid?
Prolly at least another week is what I’ve heard.
Been really impressed by the ability to predict clinical outcomes based at least somewhat on changes in sequences of a virus. That, to my understanding, is unprecedented.
I tried but it keeps bugging out on me on mobile. Not around a desktop.
https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1467928970092068864?s=21
Has anyone heard of an Omicron death?
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I’ve been dragging my feet on the booster. Just going to get it at Walgreens, since they’ve been giving me coupons for my other shots. They don’t have availability until 4+ days out. I’m waiting until the window opens up for a day that’s not Fri/Sat at a location near me. I don’t think it’s worth driving an hour to get it a few days earlier. The wait may be partially due to them requiring people to get the same manufacturer they got their previous shots with.
No, there are none known. Also, the UK has 336 known cases of whom zero are in hospital.
Against that, hospitalizations are rising fast in the hardest-hit areas of South Africa. But we don’t really know what the underlying caseload is there.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty.
I’m pretty skeptical of the lower severity takes based on the evidence to date. I think this is closer to incrementally bad over delta/vaxxes (especially boosted) are still going to prevent illness pretty good rather than that this is SARS-21 doomsday’s camp. I don’t really see any evidence yet that this is just a less severe variant.
We will see. All still pretty speculative at this point.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1467270468558372868
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Zvi Moshowitz has a post up on Omicron, he’s an ex-M:TG pro and has subsequently worked at sportsbooks, so he’s good with numbers but has no medical qualifications. I’ve met him once and he’s an odd guy, autistic I think, but very smart.
I think this is a good summary of what we know so far. I found this part interesting, has this factor been mentioned here yet?
Here is a summary of patient profiles from Gauteng. In general, the patients are healthier than one would expect, even accounting for age. I found this especially interesting:
In summary, the first impression on examination of the 166 patients admitted since the Omicron variant made an appearance, together with the snapshot of the clinical profile of 42 patients currently in the COVID wards at the SBAH/TDH complex, is that the majority of hospital admissions are for diagnoses unrelated to COVID-19. The SARS-CoV-2 positivity is an incidental finding in these patients and is largely driven by hospital policy requiring testing of all patients requiring admission to the hospital.
Think about what this implies. If a majority of the cases that have Covid-19 were admitted to the hospital for unrelated reasons, then either Covid is somehow causing all these ‘unrelated reasons’ without making the patients sick with Covid in an obvious way, or the chance of hospitalization in the window when you have Covid less than doubles. You’re more likely to be admitted to the hospital and happen to have Covid, then for Covid to send you to the hospital.
If it’s true that COVID in hospitalized patients is often an incidental finding, that seems like extremely good news and would bring South Africa into line with what we’re seeing with no hospitalizations in the UK and no known Omicron deaths worldwide yet.
Edit: Also positivity rate in Gauteng is now over 20%, so we know they must be missing a ton of cases. This makes it hard to interpret the severity of the rise in people receiving oxygen and ICU admissions.
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GL. We will pray you survive the next four days. ;)
A couple possible biases here
Omicron infecting more of the previously immunized (Covid or vac acquired). These folks may test positive but have some protection against severe outcomes.
Delta and predecessors have already culled much of the most susceptible.
This thing attacks a pretty widespread receptor, perhaps this variant does its most damage someplace else in the body (gut tract?). Folks still get sick but not severe respiratory distress (pure speculation on my part on this one).
All possibilities from what I can tell/have read.
Also if it is a little less severe but also more transmissibile that is comforting as a vaxxed person but not gonna be great for public health in the near term. The conventional epi view of omicron so far certainly isn’t this is good news.
CDC should be blasting this stuff every day on every TV channel
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The CDC doesn’t have this data.
that’s the problem
but more broadly, it doesn’t even have to be US data, just blast this shit 24/7
The only people that care what the CDC says are already octuple vaxxed.
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From Michael Lewis’s book, the CDC takes the view that it’s not their job to do the messaging. They are just supposed to dispense wisdom from their ivory tower.