4 ms·

My go-to response to fearmongering around omicron is asking for mortality stats compared to Delta.

• nomel 5y ago
  That would require being aware of "immunity" in the population being compared, with order of least to most being something like: unvaccinated without previous infection, previous infection, vaccinated, and vaccinated with breakthrough infection/previous infection with vaccine. If you just looked at something raw like hospitalization/infected, like I see being used, you don't get a meaningful comparison, since much of the population now has some form of immunity compared to delta. The most interesting would be comparing hospitalization/infected for unvaccinated at some older age, like > 50yo.
• sjg007 5y ago
  It's literally too early to answer that question. The proxies at this point are basically linearly related -> case counts, hospitalizations, ICU, death. It took months to answer that for Delta vs the reference... And everyone said Delta was less lethal than the original strain and surprise it is not.