9 ms·

How severe are Omicron Infections?

48 points by News-Dog 5y ago

somewhereoutth 5y ago
Hospital data from London: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhsRegion&areaName=London https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=... Admissions are rising markedly, compared to flat for the rest of the UK. Omicron is surging in London, again (as yet) flat elsewhere.
- turnerc 5y ago
  Please note the data above includes people admitted with an incidental COVID infection and went to hospital for another reason.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  This is not Omicron. As far as I'm aware, main infections in the UK are currently from Delta. Edit: @downvoters. How do you know hospital cases are currently Omicron? As far as i know there is a delay between new cases and hospitalized cases of multiple days. And the difference isn't shown in the article. A hospitalized case of delta is averaged at ~ 8,5 days of hospitalization. So we have to wait at least another week.
  - leoedin 5y ago
    London is primarily Omicron at this point - it was 50% of infections 4 days ago and spreading much quicker.
  - metafunctor 5y ago
    The latest data released on Friday by the U.K. Health Security Agency indicates that 54% of positive tests in England taken on Tuesday and Wednesday were of Omicron, and more than 80% of cases in London.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    As of 12/17, Omicron seems to be around 50% of new cases in UK, measured by proxy with S-gene target failure: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042100/20211217_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
  - turnerc 5y ago
    Per [1] As of 18th December, a majority of cases testing with the SGTF (indicator for Omicron) reached over 50% on the 14th December. It's clearer to see in Figure 2. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042235/20211219_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      I have a strong feeling that current hospital cases are mostly delta ( there is a delay between both normally, since delta averages 8,5 days in hospitalization) Even when new cases could be Omicron. Either way, we will know soon.
  - drited 5y ago
    Things have changed fast. In London, 86.4% of COVID-19 cases with known S-gene status have s-gene target failure[1] which is a marker of Omicron (albeit with pending sequencing confirmation for certainty[2]) [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042235/20211219_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [2] https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-omicron-(b.1.1.529)-sars-cov-2-variant-of-concern https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-o...
    - tomjen3 5y ago
      But that is the number of cases, not the number in the hospital. Since hospitalization lags, we cannot assume hospitalization based on case numbers.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Delta hospitalization is averaged at 8,5 days. You're talking about new cases and not currently hospitalized cases, which is what I'm interested in for Omicron. To know the difference, we should at least wait another week after Omicron takes over new cases in statistics.
      - drited 5y ago
        My comment was in response to the statement you made before your edit which was >>main infections in the UK are currently from Delta.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  I find the data presentation on that site to be quite disappointing. The age brackets 0-5, 6-17, 65-84, 85+, …and 18-64.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    For the relative admission rates that's not a problem, but for the absolute numbers... yeah a bar chart isn't a good choice there.
parkingrift 5y ago
Seems the evidence bar for bad news is quite low, but the bar for good news is unbelievably high. Is there a good source for variant circulation? As a layperson how can I find what percentage of cases in a given area are from omicron vs delta?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  If good news happens, you don't need to do anything. If bad things happen, you need to do something fast. I don't think this is unreasonable.
  - TheGigaChad 5y ago
    Idiot.
  - redisman 5y ago
    That’s what the news business would like you to think. How much action are you taking from the 100+ bad news stories bombarding you every day?
    - tomjen3 5y ago
      Covid. Covid lockdowns. New variants. These are all things that we have to act on, as individuals. They are all bad news. Then you have the rest of the 99.999% that you don't need to know, but you do need to know the very few stories. And for that you have to go through all the other ones.
    - culi 5y ago
      Sure, that's generally true. But in the case of a global pandemic, I think the comment is valid
      - redisman 5y ago
        Not really. Consuming your daily drip of numbers from the news is hardly any more actionable than checking your local public health officials guidance every quarter
DantesKite 5y ago
Someone made an interesting point that Omicron might become the most virulent disease ever. So I like how the bar has shifted, because everybody is so fed up with the disruptions to their daily life. Understandably so. But most virulent disease every is still pretty bad. Just from a logistical standpoint. For me, the real problem is what comes after Omicron. HIV is a completely different disease with a different etiology but it never went away. Treatments just got better with time. I suspect the pandemic will force a lot of adaptations and legislation. I’m most excited about rapid testing at home though. I feel like that’ll do a lot to stifle the pandemic.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Ease of spread is only notable if it causes bad health outcomes. Policy should only be made in response to actual outcomes, not case counts or other inaccurate proxies. Historians will look very poorly on the authoritarian type policies being implemented that are, in fact, ignoring the science (actual data, second order effects), not following it.
  - weaksauce 5y ago
    > Policy should only be made in response to actual outcomes the problem with that kind of lagging reaction to policy is that if you wait for the results of the variant you may have a situation where you are unable to contain or curtail the virus enough to not overwhelm the hospital systems. deaths and hospitalizations are a very lagging indicator of the effects
    - adam_arthur 5y ago
      It's been weeks since the variant started to spread. If outcomes were noticeably worse than Delta, it would be evident by now. It being milder or the same is better supported by the evidence. You can think of any hypothetical worst case and make irrational policy on the basis. Maybe next year's flu strain will cause any who catch it to die one year from infection?
      - 5y ago
yung_steezy 5y ago
The issue is transmissibility rather than severity. Say it was 50% less severe but 25% more infectious that would cause hospital infrastructure to fail because the absolute number of hospitalisations go up as more people are infected.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- culi 5y ago
  Also the fact that the severity of omicron varies from country to country. In the US it is likely to be much more severe than in South Africa https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/12/17/1065315661/omicron-may-be-less-severe-in-south-africa-that-may-not-be-the-case-for-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/12/17/1065315...
- proc0 5y ago
  We solved a complex bio-engineering immunity problem in record time, but we cannot solve a simple logistic problem of whatever special treatment hospitals are doing.
- tim333 5y ago
  Depends where the thing peaks. In SA cases seem to have peaked already with fairly modest hospitalisations.
Gatsky 5y ago
My take on this is that if you live in a country where there was widespread use of less effective vaccines, where resources are limited for booster doses, and there is very limited access to treatments which we now know reduce disease severity after infection (sotrovimab probably still works for Omicron infections and paxlovid almost certainly does), then Omicron is going to be bad. Unfortunately a lot of the world which isn't Europe and North America seems to fit into this category.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
culi 5y ago
It's important to note the severity of omicron seems to vary a lot from country to country. Omicron in South Africa seems to be much less severe than in other countries. Also if you do wanna take the hot take of omicron spreading and displacing other variants, then it's still very important to get the booster shot. The vaccine has a much bigger effect on those variants than on omicron. In Norway at a party of 120 fully vaccinated people, 80 of them got infected with omicron. So no matter what, it's still important to get your boosters!
- chrismcb 5y ago
  Why do you say it is still important to get your boosters?
  - monopoledance 5y ago
    Trolling.
  - javagram 5y ago
    https://news.yahoo.com/booster-shots-neutralize-omicron-israeli-164932121.html https://news.yahoo.com/booster-shots-neutralize-omicron-isra... Early lab tests suggest the antibodies generated by the immune system after the booster shot are able to target and eliminate Omicron particles. “ Those who did not receive the booster shots, had no neutralization ability against Omicron. Researchers said the booster increased this about a hundred fold.”
  - culi 5y ago
    Because it strongly limits the spread of other variants and only weakly limits the spread of omicron. Which means if you were cheering for omicron in the rat race, getting the booster would actually give it a competitive advantage
jgalt212 5y ago
> Similarly, a 16 December report from Imperial College London found no evidence of diminished hospitalizations from Omicron infections compared with Delta in England, although this was again based on relatively few cases. I trust almost nothing that comes out of Imperial College these days. The architect and the salesman of the first lockdown (to Boris and then Trump) clearly did not believe in them enough to apply them to himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)#Resignation_from_SAGE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)...
tim333 5y ago
Not very severe going by South African data. There's a thing here arguing the case fatality rate has been 19x lower than delta https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/1472623879071936512 https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/14726238790719365... There's a graph here of cases vs deaths for the 4 waves in SA showing pretty much no sign of deaths shooting up in this one while they shot up in waves 1,2 and 3. For those saying - ah the South Africans were immune, why didn't that work in wave 3 but did in wave 4 if not for the virus being different? https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1472664060445569026 https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1472664060... The "16 December report from Imperial College London found no evidence of diminished hospitalizations" thing is ridiculous if you look at the paper - they didn't find statistical significance in English data because there was hardly any at that point and didn't even bother looking at African data because why bother. Bit like me saying there is no evidence of Ebola being more dangerous than having a cup of tea because I've done a study in my kitchen and no one has died there.

48 points by News-Dog 5y ago

Hospital data from London: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhsRegion&areaName=London https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=... Admissions are rising markedly, compared to flat for the rest of the UK. Omicron is surging in London, again (as yet) flat elsewhere.

turnerc 5y ago
Please note the data above includes people admitted with an incidental COVID infection and went to hospital for another reason.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NicoJuicy 5y ago
This is not Omicron. As far as I'm aware, main infections in the UK are currently from Delta. Edit: @downvoters. How do you know hospital cases are currently Omicron? As far as i know there is a delay between new cases and hospitalized cases of multiple days. And the difference isn't shown in the article. A hospitalized case of delta is averaged at ~ 8,5 days of hospitalization. So we have to wait at least another week.
- leoedin 5y ago
  London is primarily Omicron at this point - it was 50% of infections 4 days ago and spreading much quicker.
- metafunctor 5y ago
  The latest data released on Friday by the U.K. Health Security Agency indicates that 54% of positive tests in England taken on Tuesday and Wednesday were of Omicron, and more than 80% of cases in London.
- sterlind 5y ago
  As of 12/17, Omicron seems to be around 50% of new cases in UK, measured by proxy with S-gene target failure: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042100/20211217_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- turnerc 5y ago
  Per [1] As of 18th December, a majority of cases testing with the SGTF (indicator for Omicron) reached over 50% on the 14th December. It's clearer to see in Figure 2. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042235/20211219_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    I have a strong feeling that current hospital cases are mostly delta ( there is a delay between both normally, since delta averages 8,5 days in hospitalization) Even when new cases could be Omicron. Either way, we will know soon.
- drited 5y ago
  Things have changed fast. In London, 86.4% of COVID-19 cases with known S-gene status have s-gene target failure[1] which is a marker of Omicron (albeit with pending sequencing confirmation for certainty[2]) [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1042235/20211219_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [2] https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-omicron-(b.1.1.529)-sars-cov-2-variant-of-concern https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-o...
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    But that is the number of cases, not the number in the hospital. Since hospitalization lags, we cannot assume hospitalization based on case numbers.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Delta hospitalization is averaged at 8,5 days. You're talking about new cases and not currently hospitalized cases, which is what I'm interested in for Omicron. To know the difference, we should at least wait another week after Omicron takes over new cases in statistics.
    - drited 5y ago
      My comment was in response to the statement you made before your edit which was >>main infections in the UK are currently from Delta.
parkingrift 5y ago
I find the data presentation on that site to be quite disappointing. The age brackets 0-5, 6-17, 65-84, 85+, …and 18-64.
- contravariant 5y ago
  For the relative admission rates that's not a problem, but for the absolute numbers... yeah a bar chart isn't a good choice there.

parkingrift 5y ago

Seems the evidence bar for bad news is quite low, but the bar for good news is unbelievably high. Is there a good source for variant circulation? As a layperson how can I find what percentage of cases in a given area are from omicron vs delta?

tehjoker 5y ago
If good news happens, you don't need to do anything. If bad things happen, you need to do something fast. I don't think this is unreasonable.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Idiot.
- redisman 5y ago
  That’s what the news business would like you to think. How much action are you taking from the 100+ bad news stories bombarding you every day?
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    Covid. Covid lockdowns. New variants. These are all things that we have to act on, as individuals. They are all bad news. Then you have the rest of the 99.999% that you don't need to know, but you do need to know the very few stories. And for that you have to go through all the other ones.
  - culi 5y ago
    Sure, that's generally true. But in the case of a global pandemic, I think the comment is valid
    - redisman 5y ago
      Not really. Consuming your daily drip of numbers from the news is hardly any more actionable than checking your local public health officials guidance every quarter

DantesKite 5y ago

Someone made an interesting point that Omicron might become the most virulent disease ever. So I like how the bar has shifted, because everybody is so fed up with the disruptions to their daily life. Understandably so. But most virulent disease every is still pretty bad. Just from a logistical standpoint. For me, the real problem is what comes after Omicron. HIV is a completely different disease with a different etiology but it never went away. Treatments just got better with time. I suspect the pandemic will force a lot of adaptations and legislation. I’m most excited about rapid testing at home though. I feel like that’ll do a lot to stifle the pandemic.

adam_arthur 5y ago
Ease of spread is only notable if it causes bad health outcomes. Policy should only be made in response to actual outcomes, not case counts or other inaccurate proxies. Historians will look very poorly on the authoritarian type policies being implemented that are, in fact, ignoring the science (actual data, second order effects), not following it.
- weaksauce 5y ago
  > Policy should only be made in response to actual outcomes the problem with that kind of lagging reaction to policy is that if you wait for the results of the variant you may have a situation where you are unable to contain or curtail the virus enough to not overwhelm the hospital systems. deaths and hospitalizations are a very lagging indicator of the effects
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    It's been weeks since the variant started to spread. If outcomes were noticeably worse than Delta, it would be evident by now. It being milder or the same is better supported by the evidence. You can think of any hypothetical worst case and make irrational policy on the basis. Maybe next year's flu strain will cause any who catch it to die one year from infection?
    - 5y ago

yung_steezy 5y ago

The issue is transmissibility rather than severity. Say it was 50% less severe but 25% more infectious that would cause hospital infrastructure to fail because the absolute number of hospitalisations go up as more people are infected.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
culi 5y ago
Also the fact that the severity of omicron varies from country to country. In the US it is likely to be much more severe than in South Africa https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/12/17/1065315661/omicron-may-be-less-severe-in-south-africa-that-may-not-be-the-case-for-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/12/17/1065315...
proc0 5y ago
We solved a complex bio-engineering immunity problem in record time, but we cannot solve a simple logistic problem of whatever special treatment hospitals are doing.
tim333 5y ago
Depends where the thing peaks. In SA cases seem to have peaked already with fairly modest hospitalisations.

Gatsky 5y ago

My take on this is that if you live in a country where there was widespread use of less effective vaccines, where resources are limited for booster doses, and there is very limited access to treatments which we now know reduce disease severity after infection (sotrovimab probably still works for Omicron infections and paxlovid almost certainly does), then Omicron is going to be bad. Unfortunately a lot of the world which isn't Europe and North America seems to fit into this category.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

culi 5y ago

It's important to note the severity of omicron seems to vary a lot from country to country. Omicron in South Africa seems to be much less severe than in other countries. Also if you do wanna take the hot take of omicron spreading and displacing other variants, then it's still very important to get the booster shot. The vaccine has a much bigger effect on those variants than on omicron. In Norway at a party of 120 fully vaccinated people, 80 of them got infected with omicron. So no matter what, it's still important to get your boosters!

chrismcb 5y ago
Why do you say it is still important to get your boosters?
- monopoledance 5y ago
  Trolling.
- javagram 5y ago
  https://news.yahoo.com/booster-shots-neutralize-omicron-israeli-164932121.html https://news.yahoo.com/booster-shots-neutralize-omicron-isra... Early lab tests suggest the antibodies generated by the immune system after the booster shot are able to target and eliminate Omicron particles. “ Those who did not receive the booster shots, had no neutralization ability against Omicron. Researchers said the booster increased this about a hundred fold.”
- culi 5y ago
  Because it strongly limits the spread of other variants and only weakly limits the spread of omicron. Which means if you were cheering for omicron in the rat race, getting the booster would actually give it a competitive advantage

jgalt212 5y ago

> Similarly, a 16 December report from Imperial College London found no evidence of diminished hospitalizations from Omicron infections compared with Delta in England, although this was again based on relatively few cases. I trust almost nothing that comes out of Imperial College these days. The architect and the salesman of the first lockdown (to Boris and then Trump) clearly did not believe in them enough to apply them to himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)#Resignation_from_SAGE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)...

tim333 5y ago

Not very severe going by South African data. There's a thing here arguing the case fatality rate has been 19x lower than delta https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/1472623879071936512 https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/14726238790719365... There's a graph here of cases vs deaths for the 4 waves in SA showing pretty much no sign of deaths shooting up in this one while they shot up in waves 1,2 and 3. For those saying - ah the South Africans were immune, why didn't that work in wave 3 but did in wave 4 if not for the virus being different? https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1472664060445569026 https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1472664060... The "16 December report from Imperial College London found no evidence of diminished hospitalizations" thing is ridiculous if you look at the paper - they didn't find statistical significance in English data because there was hardly any at that point and didn't even bother looking at African data because why bother. Bit like me saying there is no evidence of Ebola being more dangerous than having a cup of tea because I've done a study in my kitchen and no one has died there.