11 ms·

As everyone keeps posting about SA and saying omicron is relatively harmless, here’s the only scientific study I’ve found on the topic, in the BMJ: “After adju

As everyone keeps posting about SA and saying omicron is relatively harmless, here’s the only scientific study I’ve found on the topic, in the BMJ: “After adjusting for vaccination status, the risk of hospital admission for newly diagnosed adults is 29% lower than in the first wave,” https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n3104 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n3104 With a doubling time of two days, this reduction in the probability of hospitalisation seems irrelevant in preventing the overwhelming of health systems. As others have pointed out, experts on Twitter seem very very worried and I’m more inclined to go with them (and the exponential function) than with my antivaxxer friend’s posts on Facebook. Here in the U.K. it already looks to me like London’s hospitals are going to be overwhelmed; I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown.

blindmute 5y ago
Nobody cares man. Lock yourself down if you're so panicked and leave the rest of us alone.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
We aren’t “already in a lockdown” for reasons including (but not limited to) the multi £billion cost, the harm to mental and physical health, civil liberties, the fact that people are responding to guidance, the fact that we have more than 100 million jabs issued, the fact that the modelling has been repeatedly wrong etc. If lockdowns were a free lunch then sure, let’s have them all the time! We have not seen a long term exponential growth anywhere in the world yet. Until that happens we are hiding from the bogeyman based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect (speaking from a UK perspective).
- edanm 5y ago
  Has the modeling been wrong? Or have all the measures you wrote about above worked and prevented the "worst case scenarios" of the models?
  - zpeti 5y ago
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/12/19/tackled-sage-covid-modeller-twitter-quite-revelation/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/12/19/tackled-sage-...
  - alvah 5y ago
    The modelling has been wrong. Early on someone ran Sweden's numbers through Neil Ferguson's model's business-as-usual scenario, and the model's estimates of cases and deaths were much higher than observed reality (by around an order of magnitude IIRC).
    - noahtallen 5y ago
      I’m a bit confused by this example. Are you saying that the model showed higher cases in a non-lockdown analysis compared to fewer cases in the real world with lockdowns? If so, wouldn’t that be expected? If not, what does “business-as-usual” mean?
      - thinkingemote 5y ago
        In this example, Sweden had no lockdown.
        noahtallen 5y ago
        Cool, thanks for elaborating.
    - Gibbon1 5y ago
      I've been finding it somewhat telling that people that make the argument you are making presume that no one else has any agency. And won't take precautions without the government forcing them to.
    - _djo_ 5y ago
      That's false, Imperial College's modelling of Sweden actually matched real-world deaths fairly closely. For instance, it assessed Swedish deaths to 31 March 2020 as being 240 [140-440] with zero interventions, or 160 [110-240] with slight interventions. It estimated deaths up to 28 March 2020 as 89 [61-120]. Actual deaths to 28 March 2020 were 92. What someone else did was to take the Imperial College model and run it against a bunch of populations without properly adjusting the parameters to account for factors like population density, age, etc. They had no real idea how the model worked, but then claimed that it was wrong. I think it's clear the most of the COVID-19 epidemiology models created around the world were accurate enough in their goal, which was to test the relative effectiveness of interventions and give broad predictions of relative impact. None were perfect, but then no model like this whether epidemiological, economic, or similar is ever going to be 100% accurate.
- maxehmookau 5y ago
  I don't disagree with most of what you say, however I do want to point out that "mental health" is something that commentators and politicians on the right have only recently actually started to care about, especially in the UK. Mental health services in the UK have seen decades of real-terms cuts by parliaments of all colours. Getting mental health support on the NHS is next-to-impossible in a meaningful timeframe so watching anybody in parliament say "lockdown bad. mental health important." is outrageous. Say you're anti-lockdown if you are (not you, OP), but don't for a second let Conservative MPs make you believe that they actually care about the nation's mental health.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    It's a bit different when you decades long dynamics of whether you can see a counselor on the NHS, vs when you can literally see drug use, alcholism, domestic abuse numbers rise in the last 2 years. That's concrete numbers. Some theoretical "conservatives don't support mental health" is more of a political point. From my perspective the UK has had an insane rise in self diagnosed mental illness, and its not the lack of funding that's the issue, it's the supply side. If every single person wants to see a counsellor about their mental issues (which basically everyone has), you don't have enough professionals (or money) to deal with it.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  > based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect it's absolutely not about modelling, it's about real-world stats in this case. you can just see the numbers. but as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation. It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier. I think we're not in a lockdown because the Tory backbenchers don't want to be, and Boris Johnson cares more about his political career than science, the NHS, or saving lives. That doesn't surprise me much, but what does surprise me is the sheer number of intelligent people seemingly ignoring the evidence.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    > as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation. From the actual Imperial paper[1]: In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB That's next a graph labelled from Mar 2020 to Oct 2020, and the portion of the graph that is above zero appears to run from mid April to August. That isn't the only glaringly obvious mistake in the paper either. Still, I digress. You wrote: > It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier. From the Macmillan Trust's recent report, The Forgotten 'C'? The impact of Covid-19 on cancer care: > Given the current recovery trajectories and worrying indications of the rise in Covid-19 cases across the UK,we consider these to be ‘best case’ scenarios. We believe if cancer referrals and screening do not return to pre-pandemic levels, the backlog could grow by almost 4,000 missing diagnoses every month, reaching over 100,000 by October next year. > Macmillan fears that for some people their chance of survival will be reduced and that untimely cancer diagnoses could result in significant loss of life > More than 650,000 people with cancer in the UK (22%) have experienced disruption to their cancer treatment or care > For around 150,000 people this included delayed, rescheduled or cancelled treatment.5 Of these, more than half (57%) told us they were worried that delays to their treatment could affect their chance of survival. If we're talking about preventable deaths and, like the Imperial paper, you don't wish to look at the figures, then I suggest you take a look at some of the personal stories included in the report, like Simon's: > it still took two and a half months to get my scan done, and then only as I’d ranted and complained. I then had a phone call towards the end of May, to tell me ‘I’m sorry Mr Green, you were right, the brain tumour has come back, and it’s now inoperable’. I was devastated. > Because of the Covid crisis no one could attend the hospital with me, and I had to deal with this news alone, I was speechless. > I should never have had that MRI cancelled. If they’d found it in March and operated straight away, could I have been around in 10, 20 or 40 years’ time? I’ll never know that. Maybe, just maybe, the backbenchers and, hence, Boris Johnson (due to their pressure) cares more about lives than their political careers, had you considered that? [1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... [2] https://www.macmillan.org.uk/assets/forgotten-c-impact-of-covid-19-on-cancer-care.pdf https://www.macmillan.org.uk/assets/forgotten-c-impact-of-co... Edit: formatting
saiya-jin 5y ago
> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown. Not argumenting with rest, but this has rather simple explanation - people are fed up with literally everything covid-related. 1.5 years of existential dread coming from all directions will drain and numb most. Politicians are still voted into their position. Locking everybody at home for a long time, repeatedly, without any real solution in sight (the best vaccines work a bit for 6 months and then they're practically gone). That's a hard sell in democracy. I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more.
- evgen 5y ago
  > I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more. If you are going to go this path then you also need to say that the unvaccinated do not receive covid treatment beyond meds they can take home and stay out of hospitals. The primary concern has not been just how many will die, but the effects of those who do not die upon the rest of the medical system. We must be allowed to deny care to those who choose to put themselves and others at risk to keep medical resources available for everyone else.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    Yeah, good idea. And while you're at it, since 50% of severe cases worldwide are obese people, let's deny care to those as well. And for diabetes too, I mean it's their own fault right? /sarcasm
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    As sad as it is, prioritization is nothing new in healthcare, you don't have unlimited financial and human resources and amount of health issues far outnumber available care. My cousin died few weeks after being born due to heart defect that was operable, but waiting list was too long and no amount of pleading from parents and grandparents changed her position in that list. Every single old person is a swarm of more or less critical issues that are much better treated among young population. There is a billion of those elders at least. But to state it officially is a political suicide, nobody in elected democracy will do that. Unofficially, its been happening in hospitals since they were created, but for other reasons. One solution might be to actually ramp down covid care, so that rest of healthcare can work as before. This would probably save more lives overall than even the strictest lockdowns. And have some system for covid treatment which prioritizes vaccinated/immunosuppressed at least a bit without stating it in plain sight.
vixen99 5y ago
To my mind, the following is more of a cause for concern long term: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.... 'Striking Antibody Evasion Manifested by the Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2'. We have a situation in which there is mass escape of virus able to resist specifically-induced antibodies. What might be the long-term result of this, given natural selection and virus survival of the fittest?
- tim333 5y ago
  We're probably heading for a common cold like situation.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Just like with the previous coronavirus pandemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
tim333 5y ago
I haven't read the bmj study but a lot of this stuff is pretty bad in terms of predicting anything. I did read the Imperial one and it was awful as in based on almost no data. The best real world guide is looking at places like South Africa and hospitalisation has been pretty modest. Some SA data https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/1472623893831729156 https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/14726238938317291... Excess mortality almost unchanged https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1471137212502847490 https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1471137212502847490
oneoff786 5y ago
You may feel differently if you didn’t classify any dissenting opinion as siding with the anti vaxxers on Facebook. Disease does not spread exponentially after an initial period. It never does. It obviously and observably has not done so with the past two years of covid data. It rapidly caps off as it reaches the edges of the social graph.
chronofar 5y ago
> experts on Twitter seem very very worried and I’m more inclined to go with them (and the exponential function) than with my antivaxxer friend’s posts on Facebook. I wouldn’t give a lot of heed to either of those groups, they’re both avenues where nuance is discarded in favor of fervor for the sake of memes. You’ve chosen panic, as I suspect your party of choice has, as your fervor of choice, but that doesn’t mean everyone sees the same fire you do requiring the largest of firehoses whose dousing will cause all sorts of collateral damage. There is more at play than pure epidemiology, though that is for sure a factor for consideration.
meepmorp 5y ago
> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown. In no small part, because of a couple weeks of daily revelations about how utterly brazen the Government was in flouting the lockdown restrictions. You can't really cancel Christmas after pictures surface of you having a fucking garden party at number 10 at the height of the lockdown. BoJo's saving his skin, and he's fine letting the bodies hit the floor.

blindmute 5y ago

Nobody cares man. Lock yourself down if you're so panicked and leave the rest of us alone.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

We aren’t “already in a lockdown” for reasons including (but not limited to) the multi £billion cost, the harm to mental and physical health, civil liberties, the fact that people are responding to guidance, the fact that we have more than 100 million jabs issued, the fact that the modelling has been repeatedly wrong etc. If lockdowns were a free lunch then sure, let’s have them all the time! We have not seen a long term exponential growth anywhere in the world yet. Until that happens we are hiding from the bogeyman based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect (speaking from a UK perspective).

edanm 5y ago
Has the modeling been wrong? Or have all the measures you wrote about above worked and prevented the "worst case scenarios" of the models?
- zpeti 5y ago
  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/12/19/tackled-sage-covid-modeller-twitter-quite-revelation/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/12/19/tackled-sage-...
- alvah 5y ago
  The modelling has been wrong. Early on someone ran Sweden's numbers through Neil Ferguson's model's business-as-usual scenario, and the model's estimates of cases and deaths were much higher than observed reality (by around an order of magnitude IIRC).
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    I’m a bit confused by this example. Are you saying that the model showed higher cases in a non-lockdown analysis compared to fewer cases in the real world with lockdowns? If so, wouldn’t that be expected? If not, what does “business-as-usual” mean?
    - thinkingemote 5y ago
      In this example, Sweden had no lockdown.
      - noahtallen 5y ago
        Cool, thanks for elaborating.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    I've been finding it somewhat telling that people that make the argument you are making presume that no one else has any agency. And won't take precautions without the government forcing them to.
  - _djo_ 5y ago
    That's false, Imperial College's modelling of Sweden actually matched real-world deaths fairly closely. For instance, it assessed Swedish deaths to 31 March 2020 as being 240 [140-440] with zero interventions, or 160 [110-240] with slight interventions. It estimated deaths up to 28 March 2020 as 89 [61-120]. Actual deaths to 28 March 2020 were 92. What someone else did was to take the Imperial College model and run it against a bunch of populations without properly adjusting the parameters to account for factors like population density, age, etc. They had no real idea how the model worked, but then claimed that it was wrong. I think it's clear the most of the COVID-19 epidemiology models created around the world were accurate enough in their goal, which was to test the relative effectiveness of interventions and give broad predictions of relative impact. None were perfect, but then no model like this whether epidemiological, economic, or similar is ever going to be 100% accurate.
maxehmookau 5y ago
I don't disagree with most of what you say, however I do want to point out that "mental health" is something that commentators and politicians on the right have only recently actually started to care about, especially in the UK. Mental health services in the UK have seen decades of real-terms cuts by parliaments of all colours. Getting mental health support on the NHS is next-to-impossible in a meaningful timeframe so watching anybody in parliament say "lockdown bad. mental health important." is outrageous. Say you're anti-lockdown if you are (not you, OP), but don't for a second let Conservative MPs make you believe that they actually care about the nation's mental health.
- zpeti 5y ago
  It's a bit different when you decades long dynamics of whether you can see a counselor on the NHS, vs when you can literally see drug use, alcholism, domestic abuse numbers rise in the last 2 years. That's concrete numbers. Some theoretical "conservatives don't support mental health" is more of a political point. From my perspective the UK has had an insane rise in self diagnosed mental illness, and its not the lack of funding that's the issue, it's the supply side. If every single person wants to see a counsellor about their mental issues (which basically everyone has), you don't have enough professionals (or money) to deal with it.
randomsearch 5y ago
> based on modelling which has repeatedly been proven incorrect it's absolutely not about modelling, it's about real-world stats in this case. you can just see the numbers. but as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation. It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier. I think we're not in a lockdown because the Tory backbenchers don't want to be, and Boris Johnson cares more about his political career than science, the NHS, or saving lives. That doesn't surprise me much, but what does surprise me is the sheer number of intelligent people seemingly ignoring the evidence.
- brigandish 5y ago
  > as for modelling, I believe the Imperial group predicted "worst case 300K dead" for the pandemic. The UK is already halfway there by official stats, never mind excess deaths. Certainly it's hard to model complex systems but it's not really plausible to argue that they haven't got it right to a first approximation. From the actual Imperial paper[1]: In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB That's next a graph labelled from Mar 2020 to Oct 2020, and the portion of the graph that is above zero appears to run from mid April to August. That isn't the only glaringly obvious mistake in the paper either. Still, I digress. You wrote: > It's not about arbitrary lockdowns, it's about looking at the evidence in front of you and wonder how "the multi billion cost, the harm to mental health" might compare to an overflowing A&E room and many many preventable deaths just because we didn't lockdown a week earlier. From the Macmillan Trust's recent report, The Forgotten 'C'? The impact of Covid-19 on cancer care: > Given the current recovery trajectories and worrying indications of the rise in Covid-19 cases across the UK,we consider these to be ‘best case’ scenarios. We believe if cancer referrals and screening do not return to pre-pandemic levels, the backlog could grow by almost 4,000 missing diagnoses every month, reaching over 100,000 by October next year. > Macmillan fears that for some people their chance of survival will be reduced and that untimely cancer diagnoses could result in significant loss of life > More than 650,000 people with cancer in the UK (22%) have experienced disruption to their cancer treatment or care > For around 150,000 people this included delayed, rescheduled or cancelled treatment.5 Of these, more than half (57%) told us they were worried that delays to their treatment could affect their chance of survival. If we're talking about preventable deaths and, like the Imperial paper, you don't wish to look at the figures, then I suggest you take a look at some of the personal stories included in the report, like Simon's: > it still took two and a half months to get my scan done, and then only as I’d ranted and complained. I then had a phone call towards the end of May, to tell me ‘I’m sorry Mr Green, you were right, the brain tumour has come back, and it’s now inoperable’. I was devastated. > Because of the Covid crisis no one could attend the hospital with me, and I had to deal with this news alone, I was speechless. > I should never have had that MRI cancelled. If they’d found it in March and operated straight away, could I have been around in 10, 20 or 40 years’ time? I’ll never know that. Maybe, just maybe, the backbenchers and, hence, Boris Johnson (due to their pressure) cares more about lives than their political careers, had you considered that? [1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... [2] https://www.macmillan.org.uk/assets/forgotten-c-impact-of-covid-19-on-cancer-care.pdf https://www.macmillan.org.uk/assets/forgotten-c-impact-of-co... Edit: formatting

saiya-jin 5y ago

> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown. Not argumenting with rest, but this has rather simple explanation - people are fed up with literally everything covid-related. 1.5 years of existential dread coming from all directions will drain and numb most. Politicians are still voted into their position. Locking everybody at home for a long time, repeatedly, without any real solution in sight (the best vaccines work a bit for 6 months and then they're practically gone). That's a hard sell in democracy. I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more.

evgen 5y ago
> I'd say protect the weak properly, have the current vaccination restrictions on everybody, but otherwise let the rest get on with their lives. Even if it means some will die. From my perspective its criminal to fuck up children's future even if it would protect their grandparents a bit more. If you are going to go this path then you also need to say that the unvaccinated do not receive covid treatment beyond meds they can take home and stay out of hospitals. The primary concern has not been just how many will die, but the effects of those who do not die upon the rest of the medical system. We must be allowed to deny care to those who choose to put themselves and others at risk to keep medical resources available for everyone else.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Yeah, good idea. And while you're at it, since 50% of severe cases worldwide are obese people, let's deny care to those as well. And for diabetes too, I mean it's their own fault right? /sarcasm
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  As sad as it is, prioritization is nothing new in healthcare, you don't have unlimited financial and human resources and amount of health issues far outnumber available care. My cousin died few weeks after being born due to heart defect that was operable, but waiting list was too long and no amount of pleading from parents and grandparents changed her position in that list. Every single old person is a swarm of more or less critical issues that are much better treated among young population. There is a billion of those elders at least. But to state it officially is a political suicide, nobody in elected democracy will do that. Unofficially, its been happening in hospitals since they were created, but for other reasons. One solution might be to actually ramp down covid care, so that rest of healthcare can work as before. This would probably save more lives overall than even the strictest lockdowns. And have some system for covid treatment which prioritizes vaccinated/immunosuppressed at least a bit without stating it in plain sight.

vixen99 5y ago

To my mind, the following is more of a cause for concern long term: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472719v1.... 'Striking Antibody Evasion Manifested by the Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2'. We have a situation in which there is mass escape of virus able to resist specifically-induced antibodies. What might be the long-term result of this, given natural selection and virus survival of the fittest?

tim333 5y ago
We're probably heading for a common cold like situation.
- nradov 5y ago
  Just like with the previous coronavirus pandemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

tim333 5y ago

I haven't read the bmj study but a lot of this stuff is pretty bad in terms of predicting anything. I did read the Imperial one and it was awful as in based on almost no data. The best real world guide is looking at places like South Africa and hospitalisation has been pretty modest. Some SA data https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/1472623893831729156 https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/14726238938317291... Excess mortality almost unchanged https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1471137212502847490 https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1471137212502847490

oneoff786 5y ago

You may feel differently if you didn’t classify any dissenting opinion as siding with the anti vaxxers on Facebook. Disease does not spread exponentially after an initial period. It never does. It obviously and observably has not done so with the past two years of covid data. It rapidly caps off as it reaches the edges of the social graph.

chronofar 5y ago

> experts on Twitter seem very very worried and I’m more inclined to go with them (and the exponential function) than with my antivaxxer friend’s posts on Facebook. I wouldn’t give a lot of heed to either of those groups, they’re both avenues where nuance is discarded in favor of fervor for the sake of memes. You’ve chosen panic, as I suspect your party of choice has, as your fervor of choice, but that doesn’t mean everyone sees the same fire you do requiring the largest of firehoses whose dousing will cause all sorts of collateral damage. There is more at play than pure epidemiology, though that is for sure a factor for consideration.

meepmorp 5y ago

> I don’t understand why everyone isn’t panicking and we’re not already in a lockdown. In no small part, because of a couple weeks of daily revelations about how utterly brazen the Government was in flouting the lockdown restrictions. You can't really cancel Christmas after pictures surface of you having a fucking garden party at number 10 at the height of the lockdown. BoJo's saving his skin, and he's fine letting the bodies hit the floor.