19 ms·
Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern
- dnautics 5y ago>Using this approach, this variant has been detected at faster rates than previous surges in infection, suggesting that this variant may have a growth advantage. Really? I wonder how much of this is "it's very easy to spot in the pcr" and we don't have to Redeploy tests..
- dnautics 5y agoShould clarify: I'm not discounting the possibility that this variant spreads quickly, but given the known fact that it detects very easily, some sort of statistical modeling of how to correct for that (or a disclaimer that we are comparing apples to oranges) would be nice before making a pronouncement about rapidity
- acqbu 5y agoWill people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live with it? It will continue to mutate and spread for years to come. Putting life on pause should've never been an option because of the toxic precedent it created.
- isodev 5y agoImagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?
- lettergram 5y agoYou mean like we learned to live with the far more deadly (at least initially) influenza? As your body increasingly comes in contact with it you’ll build a solid immunity. Similar to the other mRNA viruses such as RSV (dangerous to babies, but almost no one else).
- Daishiman 5y agoInfluenza didn't kill 5+ million people in two years.
- tjr225 5y agoUhhhh it killed somewhere around 17-50 million people. I guess you’re technically correct lmao. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
- sdfdf4434r34r 5y agoYou're off by a factor of 10, it killed 50 million in 1918-1920, 1-4 million in 1957-1958, 1-4 million again in 1968-1969, 700k in 1977, 100-200k in 2009.
- lettergram 5y agoThat’s also not population adjusted.
- roywiggins 5y agoIt took a couple years for the 1918 pandemic to sputter out. We didn't learn to live with it, our immune systems learned to fight it off, and it retreated from being an acutely dangerous threat to being merely a chronic one. The cost was millions of lives, because it was the only option- there were no vaccines or antivirals. But we have both of those now. The steady-state for COVID-19 will hopefully look something like seasonal flu, but it will take time.
- somewhereoutth 5y agoIf Covid had occurred in 1918, it would likely have had a much higher CFR than H1N1 - no supplemental oxygen available at that time.
- dboreham 5y agoThe 1889 pandemic may be a closer equivalent.
- acqbu 5y agoWhen far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.
- spookthesunset 5y agoA heck of a lot of people really don't want to move on from all this. Life is way too short to be wasted living the way some of society seems to think is necessary "in order to take this serious". Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago"some of you may have to die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
- _dain_ 5y agoliterally yes. in the words of my corrupt and buffoonish prime minister: let the bodies pile high. the wisest thing he ever said, even though he won't admit to it. (and really the piles won't be that high. they'll be of low-to-medium height, consisting mostly of the old and fat.)
- somewhereoutth 5y agoAh mostly the old and fat! That's ok then. People dying is all fine and good until it happens to you or someone you care about.
- _dain_ 5y agoyes
- bedhead 5y agoCan you point to a single policy that has demonstrated (in an intellectually honest way) ANY efficacy in slowing covid? One?? Vax passports, cloth masks, N95 masks, face shields, closing schools, cohorts, WFH, clean/dirty pen jars (my fave), plexiglass, 6 feet, travel bans... The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. There's literally nothing to do other than stay home if sick and get vaxxed if you want, the rest is all theater and much of it has horrible tradeoffs.
- brazzy 5y ago>The grim reality is that there hasn't been a single policy that's been shown to have made any difference at all. NONE. BULLSHIT. How delusional can you be? There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. Infection numbers and their development over time varied wildly between countries, clearly correlated with such measures, long before vaccines were available.
- spookthesunset 5y ago> There is plenty of evidence that masks and contact reduction in various forms have a massive effect on how quickly the virus spreads. If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? If these measures worked to any worthwhile degree their effect on any data should be absolutely profound. Thus far, you'd have a hard time picking florida out from oregon or california. If you need PhD level math to prove that all these NPI'S work... it means they weren't worth the extremely toxic and corrosive effectives they've had on our communities. Any fool off the street should be able to look at the raw data and see the impact, which currently you can't do.
- brazzy 5y ago>If this is true, why is it when showing a chart of data it is almost impossible to pick when any of these measures went into effect? Quite exactly the opposite is actually true: it's always very clear from such charts that the measures are very effective. Some examples: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/from-risk-resilience-equity-approach-covid-19/covid-19f2-eng.jpg https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/corporate... https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2020/nejm_2020.383.issue-8/nejmc2025203/20200814/images/img_xlarge/nejmc2025203_f1.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/state-timeline Doesn't take "PhD level math" either, just some basic understanding how the effects are delayed by incubation period, testing and reporting, and how an exponential function changes shape as the exponent changes
- spookthesunset 5y agoImagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?
- bonzini 5y agoYou just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs) You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
- spookthesunset 5y agoSuch an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out. Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
- mahkeiro 5y agoHow are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
- _dain_ 5y agosorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q. but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'. I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived. eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do. do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
- School-Cotton 5y agoNo because burning buildings kill 100% of the people in them whereas COVID-19 kills fewer than 1% of people infected with it. Obviously we would react differently to completely different things. What is even the point of this analogy?
- cat_plus_plus 5y agoI see that you are not from California
- hh3k0 5y ago> Will people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live it? You see, that's the crux of the matter: Not everyone can live with it. Literally. So far, it killed more than 5 million people globally. There is also the issue with possibly lasting brain damage (even occuring in cases that weren't severe enough for hospitalization) and life-wrecking long covid. Compassionate people have a problem ignoring all that.
- webdoodle 5y agoHeart disease has killed more people in the same time period, but the MSM hasn't stopped running Coke and Pepsi ads.
- acqbu 5y agoCompassionate people should have a problem with being enslaved, mentally and physically, by a disease that, according to your stats has killed 0.06% of the world population - albeit, it's debatable how many people died as a direct result of it.
- CyanBird 5y agoI know 5 people personally that have died of this virus, forgive me if I take offense at your hand waving of it
- spookthesunset 5y agoThat doesn't mean any of these NPI's work, are ethical, or are worth their immense cost to society. It is entirely possible to "take this serious" but feel that society is causing itself far more harm with all these measures than it would have by doing absolutely nothing at all. None of these thing were in any playbook prior to march of 2020. And here we are almost a month from 2022 still working from this unwritten, untested playbook and still we have no clue if any of it works. About the only thing we know works is vaccines and all these cool treatments we've figured out.
- 5y ago
- nycdatasci 5y ago"In recent weeks, infections have increased steeply, coinciding with the detection of B.1.1.529 variant. The first known confirmed B.1.1.529 infection was from a specimen collected on 9 November 2021. This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning. Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other VOCs. The number of cases of this variant appears to be increasing in almost all provinces in South Africa"
- anonymouse008 5y agoThe mainstream vaccine narrative has needed additional supporting evidence to state with confidence that vaccinations after previous infection should be a requirement… it’s only natural a new variant should occur with the exact fit needed.
- kranke155 5y agoYou realise this is mostly the case in the US? In the EU - previous infection and recovery gives you a COVID Pass - some countries are doing a single shot after infection at most to count you as vaccinated (Spain I believe does this) which is consistent with the data we have It’s mostly the US that has an insane vacine policy.
- mikeInAlaska 5y ago> It’s mostly the US that has an insane vacine policy. 3) PROFIT !!
- ska 5y ago> In the EU - previous infection and recovery gives you a COVID Pass Is that consistent? I had heard it's based on antibody test - you get a limited time pass.
- tastroder 5y agoIn Germany antibody tests aren't used for that determination. 6 months from PCR positive counts as "recovered" in the German scheme, afterwards you need a single mRNA shot on top to count as fully vaccinated.
- 0xcafecafe 5y agoWhy Omicron and not Nu?
- stefan_ 5y agoOr, you know, Xi..
- varelse 5y agoThat would probably get renamed the pooh variant.
- mercy_dude 5y agoThat’s the original variant I am afraid.
- BbzzbB 5y agoHa, didn't know there was a Xi between "N" and "O" in the Greek alphabet. I don't wonder why they skipped it.
- jsnell 5y agoJust guessing: Nu is too close to Mu. Xi is pronounced too inconsistently to be useful internationally.
- bigodbiel 5y agoAnd a certain someone named that!
- 323 5y agoImagine the confusion between "Nu variant" and "new variant", when the next variant appears. Also, Nu is basically ungoogleble. Bonus points: Nu is the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet, and today is Friday 26 (2*13).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nope96 5y agoHow was "Omicron" chosen as the name of this variant?
- jenny91 5y agoThey're just going through the greek alphabet, I believe
- manojlds 5y agoAnd skipped Xi
- dmt0 5y agoXi was the original variant
- omginternets 5y agoI almost corrected you before realizing how brilliant you are. Well played.
- bserge 5y agoI like to think "Futurama". Soon Omicron Persei 8 will subjugate the humans!
- throwaway4good 5y agoThey use the greek alphabet to avoid stigmatising or politicizing the origins the various variants. They also pick names that are easy to remember and pronounce as opposed to the more technical names (ie. B.1.1.529).
- throwaway4good 5y agoThese names are for public consumption. The reality is a world of tens of thousands variants that are constantly evolving. The B.1.1.529 is from a computer program that names clusters of variants via a clustering algorithm.
- DeviantDV 5y agoI AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5c78zlyxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5c78zlyxw
- jasonhansel 5y agoInteresting choice to pick "Omicron" instead of "Nu," which news outlets had been expecting them to use. Perhaps this allows them to avoid having to use "Xi" as the name of a Covid variant, which would have been...inconvenient for the WHO.
- void-pointer 5y agoI think they realised that “Nu” was too similar to “New” that if/when the next variant came around, there would be confusion as to what someone means when they speak the words “New variant”
- yosito 5y agoMaybe they wanted to avoid antivax jokes about the Nu normal.
- kranke155 5y agoNu means naked in Portuguese (and Spanish I think?) Maybe they wanted to avoid all the lazy puns. A pretty significant part of the world speaks either of those two languages.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoFuturama fans are going to have fun with this one and the Omicron Persei invasion.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tommiegannert 5y agoIt would probably be reported as Ni or Ny in Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_griego#Letras https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_griego#Letras
- pygy_ 5y agoIn French nu is both "naked"and the name of the greek letter that sounds like the latin N.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- streamofdigits 5y agostill some ways to reach omega (the larger sibling of omicron)
- cblconfederate 5y agoo micron literally means "small o" and o mega literally means "big o", but those computer scientists, when they use "big O notation" they write it with an O. Omega is sad :(
- y7 5y agoTo be fair, big O and little o have different meanings in asymptotic notation, and I guess it doesn't pronounce as well as "big omicron" and "little omicron". (Although Ω and ω are both used as well.)
- dillondoyle 5y agoIs that how it's pronounce? Letter O + micron like size? My first read was ohm eh cron, like the job
- higeorge13 5y agoThey are greek letters. Letter o/O is omicron, ω/Ω is omega (the last letter of the greek alphabet). Omicron = o + mikron = small o Omega = o + mega = big o
- dillondoyle 5y agocool! thanks!
- mFixman 5y agoI always thought "big Ο" was uppercase omicron. That would make it consistent with Θ and Ω.
- Imnimo 5y agoThere's also a "big omega", which gives a lower bound instead of an upper bound. I guess the name is a little redundant, though.
- kalaido 5y agoBooster time guys. Be a good boy!
- g42gregory 5y agoI don’t know what to make of the WHO statements anymore. There has been so much retractions, flip-flops, politically-driven actions, half-truths, etc... I don’t know how assign any meaning, good or bad, to what comes out of that organization.
- ethbr0 5y agoThis is a multinational organization, funded by member states, built around consensus that we're talking about here. It seems unreasonable to expect international organizations to be simultaneously accepted by multiple parties with divergent and conflicting interests... and somehow not be subject to politics.
- _djo_ 5y agoIt’s disturbing how poor the civics knowledge regarding multinational organisations remains in much of the world. The relations between countries in general are dysfunctional, driven by politics and selfish interests, often corrupt, and dependent on power, why are we surprised when those same factors affect shared multinational organisations?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoEven though there are good reasons for it to be the case, I do agree with the OP that it undermines the trust in them. Politics should not override science IMO.
- ethbr0 5y agoGranted, but unfortunately some problems (war, global climate, trade baselines) can only be tackled in a multinational forum, because agreement between multiple parties is required for any truly optimal solution. And the only feasible solutions to creating those forums are points somewhere between "completely political" and "apolitical." So it's constructive to say "I wish the WHO were less political" or "The WHO should appease its members by doing X, so that it could be more neutral in Y," but it's pretty trite to comment that it's political. Yes, and what alternatives are possible?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xyst 5y agoMy current take (not a virologist, doctor): At this point, if you are not immunocompromised and you have the first vaccination and a booster. You should be able to easily recover regardless of the mutation(s). The virus would need to completely diverge from SARS-CoV-2 in order to fully defeat the countermeasures of the current vaccinations.
- hh3k0 5y agoStrikes me as unnecessarily early to make such a claim.
- Animats 5y agoTesting of vaccines against this new variant is already starting.[1] First results in 2 weeks. Pfizer says that if they have to generate a new vaccine for this variant, it will take about 100 days.[2] That's the great thing about this mRNA vaccine technology - given the gene sequence of a virus, a vaccine can be designed. The original Moderna vaccine was designed in two days. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/omicron-variant-prompts-concerns-about-vaccine-efficacy-scientists-race-test-strain-1653637 https://www.newsweek.com/omicron-variant-prompts-concerns-ab... [2] https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/pfizer-release-statement-on-potential-vaccine-escape-variant-as-first-case-emerges-in-europe/ar-AARaE6S https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/pfizer-release-statemen...
- hh3k0 5y agoDid you reply to the wrong comment?
- ericdodges 5y agoDelta has been in the wild for some time and boosters for it are still being tested. I’d take such claims with a grain of salt. If this variant has significant immune evasion from prior infection or vaccination, 100 days is a lot of time to wreak havoc. There are also myriad logistical problems if we have to boost everyone again that will drag things out.
- 5y ago
- crate_barre 5y agoI gotta say, COVID releases new features faster than a lot of teams do.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoWhich is funny because I've heard that feature branching isn't the cool way to go about things now.
- samus 5y agoCovid is very effective at merging, so branching is not an issue at all. Low accuracy just means more bugs^H^H^H^H features!
- robbintt 5y agoCovid uses trunk based development.
- contingencies 5y agoThat's funny I could swear it was a massively parallel, globally distributed, fitness-based genetic evolution with a singular survival goal.
- cblconfederate 5y agocounterintuitively, the larger it becomes, the more features it releases. This genius solved the scaling problem
- funtimes323 5y agoWell when you pump and dump things like Delta you got to keep pumping/dumping. I mean - what else is going to get everyone cattle herded into the concentration camps. Australia is the country with balls to arrest its own citizens for the crime of testing positive and stuffing them into concentration camps. Only fascists wear masks. Only fascists are vaxxers. Only fascists inflict violence on people with 'vaccines' that have killed hundreds of thousands of people from heart attacks. GET FUCKED VAXXERS! I HOPE YOU ALL FUCKING DIE!
- ethbr0 5y agoHere's the link on CoVariants (aka 21K): https://covariants.org/variants/21K https://covariants.org/variants/21K Gives a better breakdown of what we're actually talking about.
- crate_barre 5y agoAlso known as B.1.1.529 Variant21K appears to have arisen in November 2021, possibly in South Africa. Early sequences are predominantly from South Africa, though also detected in Botswana and Hong Kong. 21K is primarily of concern due to the large number of mutations it has in the Spike gene. Many of these variants are in the receptor binding domain and N-terminal domain, and thus may play key roles in ACE2 binding and antibody recognition. This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction. I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us. How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with all this so fast. Would be cool if someone could ELI5.
- jacquesm 5y agoGiven a population of almost 8 billion and a six months head start you are now looking at a reservoir of many millions of people infected at any given time. Each of these will provide 1 to 100 billion new virions, and each of those is an opportunity for the virus to undergo a mutation, which RNA viruses are particularly receptive to because they lack the same level of error correction that DNA based viruses enjoy. Edit: fixed bit about error correction, thanks somewhereoutth!
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
- malepoon 5y agoTwitter thread from a vaccine developer: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464222680731820043.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464222680731820043.html A lot of speculation still, but it's not all bad so far.
- sour-taste 5y agoWhat an atrocious ad filled useless site. Original thread here: https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1464222680731820043 https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/146422268073182004...
- malepoon 5y agoThanks. At some point Twitter itself didn't let you read threads without logging in, but it looks like they changed that...
- nostromo 5y agoThis image really puts it in context: https://images.app.goo.gl/13amCWF8aJ8q2eZAA https://images.app.goo.gl/13amCWF8aJ8q2eZAA The red portion of the graph on the far right is the new variant.
- tigershark 5y agoIt started from an extremely low base. And extrapolating that curve is completely wrong as you can see from today numbers. 2.8k compared to yesterday 2.4K. It’s obviously still early to know anything conclusive but the relatively small increase today is a very good sign. We’ll know something more next week.
- dillondoyle 5y agohttps://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png
- sharken 5y ago
- ouid 5y agoThat's a lot more mutations than we would expect to see from a naturally emerging strain, yeah?
- jacquesm 5y agoNo. 10,000,000 times 50,000,000,000 (rough stab at # of virions per infection, range 1 to 100 B), is 500,000,000,000,000,000 opportunities for mutations so far. You can take it to the bank that the number of mutations is far, far higher than the number that makes it to the press because the strains that end up dominating have already undergone a lot of competitive pressure by the time we notice them, so there will be a lot more strains that we will simply never know about. Fun fact: the total mass of all virions produced by infected hosts to date is likely less than 10 kg.
- Kliment 5y agoOne thing to be aware of with RNA viruses - they mutate all the time and almost all mutations are nonviable (unable to infect cells or unable to replicate) and die off immediately. The fact there are so few variants (and there hasn't been a new dominant variant since October 2020 ) illustrates how fragile its mechanisms are.
- jacquesm 5y agoThe number of viable versions must number in the thousands though, they are just less viable than the previous generation and that's why they'll die out almost immediately, for a new strain to become the dominant one it has to work 'better' than the old one.
- vletal 5y agoOmicron? Was not it Nu like few hours ago? I like the longer name better. Our ministry of finance has already made a typo in a Facebook post calling it Mu (like the sound cows make).
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoThey skipped nu because it sounds too much like mu, and they skipped xi because it sounds like Winnie-the-Poo.
- polskibus 5y agoWait, what happened to epsilon?
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoThat one dates back to July, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Epsilon_variant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Epsilon_variant
- koheripbal 5y agoWait... Why did they really skip xi?
- lovecg 5y agoA conference room at WHO headquarters, November 2021 A: “… Ok so we agree - ‘Nu’ creates all sorts of confusion so we will skip this letter” B: “Sounds good. What do we have next in the alphabet - ‘Xi’. Oh.” Pause. Exchange of glances. A: “So that’s probably no good either right?” B: “Yeah looks like it” A: “Because it will be hard to pronounce?” B: “Right. Yup.” A: “Alright, ‘Omicron’ it is then.” B: “Done.”
- spacelamb 5y agoThe current official W.H.O. rationale, reported by the NYTimes [0]: "Some other variants with Greek letters do not reach those classification levels, and the W.H.O. also skipped two letters just before Omicron — “Nu” and “Xi” — leading to speculation about whether “Xi” was avoided in deference to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. "“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’” Tarik Jasarevic, a W.H.O. spokesman, said on Saturday. “And ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name.” "He added that the agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding “causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”" [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/world/africa/omicron-covid-greek-alphabet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/world/africa/omicron-covi...
- funtimes323 5y agoThis isn't /r/fuckingretarded . Take your branch covidian fascist propaganda bullshit back to reddit. You people are the worst of humankind - you will get what is coming to you.
- dadboddilf2 5y agoget your vaccines folks
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoPronouns, the original type-hinting system.
- Aloha 5y agoWith those of us who are furry, gender can be even more non-obvious. Look up Chakats.
- ashildr 5y agoIt is called variant of *concern* not variant of *panic*. So while it may be wise to stop travelling (European here) it is absolutely useless to speculate about the doom it brings. Doom is what we already do with ineffective measures to fight Delta (German here).
- artursapek 5y agoOh boy here we go again
- shusaku 5y agoI swear I’ve read a hundred articles saying “here’s what we should’ve done to prevent this pandemic”. Let’s see if any lessons have been really learned; a new variant is practice for the next virus that comes on the scene. With the testing tech we have now, proper tracing, quarantines, and travel restrictions, could a variant be bottled up?
- SquibblesRedux 5y agoConsidering data from other non-human species, it seems implausible that we could prevent all possible future pandemics. We may be able to delay or mitigate some, but eventually nature has its way.
- The_rationalist 5y agoAs a reminder COVID is a solved problem for the scientifically literate
- arthurcolle 5y agoWish they had done this after market close
- investinyolo 5y agoCovid is a meme
- tamaharbor 5y agoLike the common cold or the flu, odds are the coronavirus will be with us forever in some form or another. It is unrealistic to create a vaccine for every variant. We should learn how to treat, and allow natural immunity to take over. Take the 0.07% (correction) chance of death. Edit: Stupid math error.
- h0l0cube 5y ago> 0.007% chance of death Not sure if you're being hyperbolic, but the death toll just in the US has surpassed 0.23%
- tamaharbor 5y agoSorry, misplaced decimal point… World covid deaths = 5.7 million World population = 7.9 billion Death toll = 0.07%, rounded up
- DebtDeflation 5y agoNot everyone in the world has had COVID, so you’re using the wrong denominator.
- h0l0cube 5y agoAlso add to that discrepancies between excess deaths and covid death numbers in places like India, which appears to have a difference of about 7-10x the official covid death count https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57888460.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ind...
- koheripbal 5y agoIt's very reasonable to give people yearly updated shots. There are big overlaps in the variants so we wouldn't need one for each variant, not to mention you could combine multiple variants in one shot. Also, your case mortality rate number seems wrong, by orders of magnitude.
- 5y ago
- NoblePublius 5y agoWhat credibility does the WHO have at this point?
- charlieyu1 5y agoHow much was WHO paid to skip the Greek letter Xi and go straight to Omicron
- sjg007 5y agoIf it replicates fast with higher viral kids and spreads easily then it will be more lethal by definition.