COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

On a scale of 1 for doing body shots of hydroxychloroquine at a Joe Rogan performance to 10 for uploading your consciousness to an air-gapped datacenter in low Earth orbit, I give this “lockdown” a 5.

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It does not.

Test doesn’t even come back until like 3 days later even

I wouldn’t say never. If something much more visible were to be released (say, bleeding from the eyes, or Captain Tripp like symptoms) I can see us getting back to something like that. But anything that’s asymptomatic like Omicron seems to be, there is no chance.

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I think we need to save any formal lockdowns for what may come next. I’d love a more euro style restriction on the unvaxxed.

I don’t mind schools doing a couple of weeks of at home, but I also don’t mind if they just power through at this point.

Going to be a lot more twists and turns coming.

For sure there is. My room has a bunch out already. We have a vax mandate going into effect next week for employees and customers. You know what coincides with that? Lifting the mask mandate. Cause that makes sense. Frustrating as hell that any attempts to mitigate this are completely half assed.

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My parents just spent $250 for a box of 25 at home tests, which is a pretty good deal in USA#99. Must be nice to live in a 1st world country where these important public health tools are subsidized.

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And ketamine is in short supply all of a sudden. One of my favorite sedating meds. So happy to be out of the ER in a few days.

That’s a fantastic deal. They could easily flip that into 1K if they were so inclined.

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In other Atlantic writers I hate

https://twitter.com/KindAndUnblind/status/1470389931679883268

Cliffs on what she did? Not motivated enough to look it up.

made a bunch of super optimistic predictions that were always wrong, told people not to wear masks and get boosters, declared the pandemic over a few times in various locations

also it’s linked for anyone who’s a little curious

Ok, you got me. I checked it out. Looked at that thread for one min. She seems like an order of magnitude dumber than Oster.

I’m at the point now where I’m wondering if suppressing Omicron beyond what is necessary to prevent overloading of hospitals is even a good idea. Preliminary data appears to demonstrate what you’d expect, which is that the Omicron wave is suppressing Delta infections. Per my earlier posts it looks like Delta is a specialist at attacking lung tissue and Omicron has specialized in the other direction, towards living in the respiratory tract. If you think about respiratory viruses in general, the phrase “common cold” is concealing the fact that what we have there is like 200 viruses - from several totally different families - which have all come up with the same answer for how to spread: infect the nose and throat, make the host cough and sneeze and have runny noses. It’s convergent evolution in action. There are many, many fewer pathogenic viruses which prefer living in the lungs. Infecting the nose and throat is just better, from the virus’s point of view.

As a result, what I think is most likely from further mutation in Omicron is further specialization in this direction. I think by far the biggest danger for another super-deadly wave of the pandemic is the emergence of a Delta variant with strong immune-escape capabilities. As a thought experiment, if we could have everyone in the world get Omicron spread out over the next year but it meant that all other lineages would go extinct, I’d take that deal. Omicron endemicity is obviously inevitable in any case, and exterminating reservoirs of Delta is of great importance. Of course I’m glossing over a lot of real-world problems and uncertainties here but you get the theoretical point.

Edit: That might be a bit too cavalier given how much of the world is still unvaxxed, but again, I’m making a theoretical rather than prescriptive point.

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my man the national guard has been called in multiple locations to support hospitals form collapsing. Hospitals are already overloaded in a ton of areas.

I see where you are going, and hope that we get the good path out of our current lassez faire approach to the health care system, but I’m very cautious about rooting for an endemic omicron endgame (although it is probably inevitable to some extent) given the transmissibility and other complicating factors.

If vax protection from Omicron starts waning after three months, as one example, this is going to be a massive and ongoing long-term death grinder/societal headache even if it is on the optimistic end of severity (although if omicron does kill delta, we could at least move to an omicron targeted booster).

Isn’t it just going to mutate again into some other flavor of dominant strain that takes over rapidly just like the others have done, and we spin the “will it kill everyone” wheel once more? Seems like projecting any characteristic of current day’s COVID variant to weeks/months/years into the future is silly goose stuff.

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Earnest efforts to suppress Omicron will at best delay this in my view though. Of course there’s Paxlovid capacity to come online and people (including children) to vax and etc etc, but an immune-evading Delta would be such incredibly bad news that it looms large in my threat considerations, not to mention that Delta is just immediately worse in the unvaxxed.

Counterfactuals aside, a near-uncontrolled Omicron wave is also what is clearly going to happen in the real world, so we might as well put a positive spin on it.

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I fear you are correct. I don’t think there is a good chance for lockdown when the badass variant comes, just perhaps a little bit more chance.

That’s happening continuously with the other four coronaviruses that are endemic but no one cares because everyone has immunity against them because we’ve all gotten them before (and when we were babies our mothers had gotten them). So the endgame with covid 19 is that when more or less everyone has some sort of immunity it’ll fade into the background and turn into another endemic, human-infecting coronavirus. Not because the virus necessarily changed or became less deadly, but because we’re no longer immunologically naïve to it. If it mutates to a less-deadly and more infectious form, that’ll be great but it probably isn’t necessary to reach the endemic endgame stage.

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Yeah, if any large pandemic that has the ability to spread quickly and remain fairly undercover early but kills like 8-10% ever comes about we are absolutely fucked as a species. We wont do what it takes to stop possible extinction if it means having to work together. Ie, climate change

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