Omicron, Boosters, and Asymptomatic Spread

I’m just spitballing from the population level statistic, which isn’t terribly rigorous, but assuming that everyone who repeatedly engages in risky behavior will get it isn’t going to pan out either, empirically. Some of them are going to catch a short transient or asymptomatic case that may not get caught by testing and that may function as an omicron-specific booster that adds further protection for all subsequent interactions.

Just had a bit of a chuckle.

While reading a bunch of (to me) entertaining content posted by a few folks clearly in the 99th+ percentile of precautions talking about posting dangerous COVID misinformation, Dr. Oz came on my television to let me know that Joe Biden was taking away our freedom under the guise of a media created fake pandemic.

This is no way to become a United States Senator, clearly.

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Anecdotal. But it’s clear that significant exposure does not lead to infection 100% of the time or even close.

Mrs Rugby spent two days with me when I was definitely infectious. Then 4 days with her younger cousin. Shes been testing negative throughout (albeit with rapid antigen tests)

The 75% lower infection risk (or whatever the figure) for vaxxed is over a population. It will be a sum of lots of different exposure lengths and outcomes. I guess theoretically it could be non uniform across the different exposure lengths (it could be 80% for short exposures and 50% for major exposure eg) but its seems its not zero at the extreme either.

Your wife’s experience is the exact same as mine. And I tested negative on several rapid tests and one pcr test.

Based on what I’ve heard anecdotally, seems about 50/50, you either get it or you don’t, for boosted with significant, ongoing exposure. Many stories where one spouse gets it but not the other.

Double vaxxed but not boosted, OTOH, seems like a very high percentage of them are getting it.

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I’m not sure, since we don’t have data, but I think it’s a pretty good starting point. I think it’s a much better hypothesis than thinking asymptomatic cases are unaffected or increased, but I suppose that since vaccines protect more against death than against hospitalization and more against hospitalization than symptomatic cases that the true number of reduced asymptomatic cases would be a little under 75%. Say 65% or so fewer. Edited to add: To re-emphasize, everything we’ve seen quantifying asymptomatic cases is that such cases are a fairly small minority of cases - your source had 16% as a new scary number, but obviously that means that 84% of total cases are symptomatic. Being a little less effective against asymptomatic cases makes a small to negligible impact on the impact that vaccination has on the total case load.

I don’t think you have any data on the relative contagiousness of people who were never symptomatic, only that people who were not yet but would become symptomatic are most contagious before symptoms appear. If you do, feel free to share it. But, being more contagious pre-symptoms lines up with the behavior of most respiratory viruses. Given that covid is like most other respiratory viruses in this way, we’d also expect that people who never develop symptoms are substantially less contagious than people who do, especially if they are vaccinated and thereby flush the virus faster than the unvaccinated, all else being equal.

The greatest risk is with pre-symptomatic spreaders, not a- (as in never-) symptomatic spreaders. Of course you can’t always know if you are or may be pre-symptomatic, but also, if you were never symptomatic, the chances that you spread anything are way, way down compared to someone who developed symptoms (even without a test performed), because the chances that you were never really infected are much higher.

It’s not one or the other, and that’s not how people work. People may be willing to have a maskless Christmas with ~10 vaxxed and boosted immediate family members but not willing to eat out in a restaurant. People might go to a Broadway show they’d spent hundreds on in advance and had been hoping to see for years but not a movie they could catch at home in a month. It doesn’t appear anyone here is willing to avoid getting the CRON at all costs, but instead they weigh the value of different activities and their alternatives, the degree to which they can protect themselves while undertaking them, and the degree to which they can isolate afterwards should they get sick and make an emotional call. People are going to draw lines differently, and it’s reasonable to do so. Being fully vaxxed and boosted, and having a fully vaxxed family (or no close family) and a job that’s WFH and with ample sick leave can certainly give one reason to take more risk than I’m willing to take, because the downside is much less than mine. So I generally try to talk about how people can maximize their safety within the context of doing something rather than telling them not to do it.

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I never said that.

Would be somewhat surprised if it is a static number and doesnt vary by at least time since dosage.

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Booster wanes after 10 weeks. Double-vaxxed waning we’re already familiar with.

Denmark authorised a 4th dose today.

This paper is not data on the relative contagiousness of people who were never symptomatic. It is modeling what the relative contagiousness might be if you make a bunch of assumptions, and those assumptions are not particularly well-founded. To make their assumption of the number of never-symptomatic individuals, they use numbers from (1) a meta-study that itself looked at studies that never once even attempted to separate pre-symptomatic cases from never-symptomatic cases, (2) another meta-study where they took the number from a subset of cases examined that allegedly had less bias but that the authors pointed out had their own biases (such as a study of blood donors, who wouldn’t be allowed to donate blood if they were showing symptoms), and (3) some modeling rather than measurement work. To make their assumption about the relative infectiousness of never-symptomatic individuals, they used 3 studies, all of which had fuck-all for sample sizes and basically zero statistical power (seriously single digit numbers of people infected by never-symptomatic individuals in one of them). Curiously, the authors ignored an estimate of relative infectiousness from citation #2 that they used to estimate the relative infectiousness of never-symptomatic individuals as 35% of that of individuals who eventually develop symptoms, although that estimate is itself based on consolidating results from a bunch of different modeling studies with widely varying assumptions and results and doesn’t come with a high degree of confidence.

And even with assumptions that seem to be undersupported and rather high (30% of all cases never-symptomatic, and 75% as much relative infectiousness), the portion of cases attributed to transmission from never-symptomatic individuals was just 24%. Not sure why you had to selectively edit that quote from the findings. The text makes it very clear what portion is due to never-symptomatic individuals, and that half is referring to people asymptomatic at the time of transmission, a sum of pre- and never-symptomatic transmission.

Pretty soon I’m going to start believing the conspiracy theories that this was invented to enrich the pharma companies. A second booster and not even one specifically designed for omicron?

Never said that they do not, just that they do so much less.

And fine, you didn’t edit the quote. You chose just the piece that attributed more spread to never-symptomatic spreaders than the article did and omitted the text that gave their actual number for what we were discussing: never-symptomatic spread.

Israel approved a fourth jab on 30th December.

Vaccine wane is a thing.

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This is probably a targeted 4th dose like Israel is doing. There is an Omicron booster coming but just tough to figure out if it is the best strategy yet as we probably can’t just take shots every three months forever as a viable strategy.

What percentage of spread did the authors of that paper model never-symptomatic people being responsible for? 24%, 50%, or some other percentage? Because we were talking about never-symptomatic people specifically.

And as for that quote, dude, it doesn’t even refer to asymptomatic people. It’s talking about the vaccinated, and clearly not spreading at an appreciable rate allows for spreading at a small but nonzero rate. If you look at the context of that thread, I was very clear that vaccinated people could spread if they got infected, they just won’t get infected at nearly the rate of the unvaccinated.

Yeah I just figured my next dose would be omicron targeted. Not sure I’m up for boosters every 2 or 3 months. Now I’m wondering if I should have gotten tested last week when I think I had a mild case. To at least inform my booster strategy.

Omicron boosters aren’t going to be available to the general public until the fall at hte earliest per statements from Moderna. PFizer earlier doesn’t seem particularly likley.

I saw those statements as well. This is odd, because initially it looked like they were going to be ready by March. I assume in their coordination with governments, it was decided that a fall rollout would be better because they want people to have their immunity in the winter. But to not make it available sooner seems very strange, unless that’s part of the agreement they’re signing in these purchase agreements with governments.

Fall? We could be on fucking Rho by then. Looks like I was way too optimistic about how quickly they could change over their manufacturing.

Well that sucks.