17 ms·

The panic surrounding Omicron is absurd. Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all. https://i.imgur.com/TgRm

• yosito 5y ago
  I saw some charts out of South Africa today showing that deaths are starting to rise with a three week delay. I'm optimistic that Omicron is less severe, but it's also possible that it's just taking a little longer than expected to start killing people.
  • barbs 5y ago
    Do you have a link for those charts?
    • tjr225 5y ago
      Don’t worry about it; he saw them.
    • nostrademons 5y ago
      Pretty good one here: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-update-dec-22 https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
    • HPsquared 5y ago
      https://www.samrc.ac.za/reports/report-weekly-deaths-south-africa https://www.samrc.ac.za/reports/report-weekly-deaths-south-a... Pretty interesting how it clearly shows both "deaths" and "excess deaths". Here's a good one for Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
    • yosito 5y ago
      I can't find the ones I saw before, but the OWID charts show that deaths in South Africa are still rising, and Omicron case counts just started rising 3 weeks ago, so I'm still holding my breath. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2021-11-06..latest&uniformYAxis=0&Metric=Cases+and+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~ZAF https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
  • globalise83 5y ago
    They might be, but the fact that the case rate is now falling means that whatever increase is seen in deaths will be very short-lived. That is something to be thankful for, since Delta has been killing large numbers of people worldwide over a very long period of time.
    • yosito 5y ago
      But we don't know why the case rate is falling so fast. It could be that people tend to isolate when everyone around them is suddenly having symptoms.
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    Yeah deaths have been creeping up for the last week, hospitalizations for the last two and a half weeks. Hospitalizations are actually now at about 1/3 of the Delta peak. This is all roughly consistent with the timeline for previous strains (hospitalizations lag cases by about 10 days, deaths lag hospitalizations by about 2 weeks). The specific growth rates are a bit lower than what would be expected based on how quickly cases went up, though. I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.
• fiter 5y ago
  Since deaths lag cases, have you seen a graph that has peaks labeled on the time axis?
  • nostromo 5y ago
    I added the original source so you can explore in more detail. You can see that in previous spikes there was a short delay, but in general they rose in tandem. All evidence points to Omicron as far less lethal than Delta.
    • herodoturtle 5y ago
      Thanks for your assorted useful comments and links.
    • divbzero 5y ago
      The chart towards the bottom of this page [1] provides another source. Like others my initial reaction was “deaths lag” but upon closer inspection the data is more nuanced: While deaths do lag, in previous waves deaths had risen substantially by the time cases peaked, but with omicron in South Africa cases have already peaked but deaths have barely risen. This could be partly because the omicron wave has peaked faster (~3 weeks) than previous waves (~1 month or more), partly because the population has more immunity, and partly because omicron is less severe? I’m not sure yet. All in all, I’m optimistic but will wait another week or two to be convinced. [1]: https://covid19.who.int/region/afro/country/za https://covid19.who.int/region/afro/country/za
• endisneigh 5y ago
  I concur. It’s amazing how well anti vaxxers have taken over the narrative. Literally all data has shown that omicron is a non-issue for triple vaxxed individuals, with a baseline being the standard flu. If someone has data showing that triple vaxxed people are dying at rates similar to March 2020 I’d love to see.
  • kadoban 5y ago
    Triple vaxxed are safe, therefore antivaxxers have won? That does not seem to make any sense. What am I missing?
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      Yes, because there are still restrictions as a result of them, even though most people in the USA have been vaccinated. In other words policies that affect the super majority are being formed due to the actions of a small group.
      • jedberg 5y ago
        Only 20% of Americans are triple vaxxed.
        • endisneigh 5y ago
          Yeah, about 60% double and 70% single. Anyone can get more vaccines for free. Not sure why people support restrictions at this point. If someone doesn’t want to be vaccinated that’s fair enough, but let the rest of us be free.
          • jedberg 5y ago
            I’m curious how you think your freedoms are being curtailed at this point? What do you want to do that you can’t?
  • slowhand09 5y ago
• jmnicolas 5y ago
• volkse 5y ago
  It has been discussed many times before - the issue with the SA data is that 80% of the population have been exposed to the virus (either had it or have been vaccinated) so the deaths not budging there can be very misleading for countries with lower vaccination rates.
  • tanseydavid 5y ago
    Can anyone point to an official worldwide number of deaths attributable to Omicron?
    • exdsq 5y ago
      Take this with a heap of salt but I looked for this figure yesterday and found it to be 12 in several sources, but hard to find the official figures. Share them if you do find them!
    • stillicidious 5y ago
      Such a number would be difficult to interpret, or entirely meaningless, without understanding the classification methods and policies of each constituent region. This also holds true of overall death statistics. Finally with local statistics, you still have political dramatics like https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1473480933579923456 https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1473480933579923456
  • cpncrunch 5y ago
    Similar situation in Denmark as well. Huge number of omicron infections, but deaths haven't budged and number of covid patients in hospitals are actually decreasing.
    • tome 5y ago
      This comment links to Reuters, which says "Denmark reports its largest number of coronavirus-related deaths since the start of the pandemic: 57". Where are you getting your data? https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/denmark/ https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654645
• earthbee 5y ago
  It typically takes three weeks to go from being a case to dead, given how quickly it was rising it was very hard to get a good sense of how many people were likely to die before it was already infecting huge numbers of people. That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    Most people who died were not vaccinated
    • ds206 5y ago
      Most people that died were 60+ years old
      • endisneigh 5y ago
        Yes, who were not vaccinated as it didn’t exist for much of the pandemic.
      • fortran77 5y ago
        And obese! https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n623 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n623
        • nsxwolf 5y ago
          Most people are obese.
          • fortran77 5y ago
            Well, "overweight" by CDCs definition (BMI > 25 == overweight). But there's a strong link between complications from COVID and Obesity. It's a shame nobody wants to make the obese pay for their externalities -- even the people who'd like to make the unvaccinated "pay" in some way turn a blind eye to this issue.
• kadoban 5y ago
  Hospitalization lags cases, and deaths lag hospitalization. So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure. In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).
• woodruffw 5y ago
  I am cautiously optimistic about the severity of Omicron. But as others have pointed out before: deaths trail infections by 2-4 weeks. Omicron was first reported to the WHO on 11/24 and wasn't categorized as a variant of concern until 11/26. It hasn't even been a month since it was acknowledged much less has become the dominant variant in most places.
  • C19is20 5y ago
    Those dates'll be 24 November and 26 November for non-USA (etc) peoples. Thank goodness bad things didn't happen in the earlier-in-the-year months like 7/6 or 6/7, for example.
  • xjrk 5y ago
    Increase in Gauteng (South Africa) has started already well before 11/24. Even if deaths trail infections by 2-4 weeks we would have already seen nice steeply increasing slope. Another point is that anecdotally hospitalizations in SA were shorter and often people tested positive after being admitted because of something else than COVID.
• standardUser 5y ago
  Deaths have literally just shot up in SA in the last few days. The 7 day average has doubled in two weeks.
  • ds206 5y ago
    Link to data?
    • standardUser 5y ago
      It's in the article in the form of a chart. But if you can't see because of the paywall, you can look up the same data on this page: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/mapping-spread-new-coronavirus/?itid=sn_coronavirus_2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/mapping-s...
    • reducesuffering 5y ago
      https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri... 3 day average is only 48 deaths per day in all of South Africa. We are at the 3 week mark. If Omicron was half as deadly as Delta we'd be seeing a corresponding spike as we saw the initial burst of cases weeks ago. We're not, it's a slight uptick. Another week and we can be quite confident.
  • oneoff786 5y ago
    It’s gone from 20 to 40. With some rounding and cherry picking of dates. This time last year it was over 400.
• esturk 5y ago
  > Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all. > https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1] Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string. On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death chart you can clearly see the graph shifted away from the word "average". By the same reasoning, the death count could still spike albeit not as high.
  • simonw 5y ago
    7-day average graphs are pretty misleading when you have a new variant that grows at the rate that Omicron does. You might have no Omicron at all at the start of the seven day period and majority Omicron by the end of it, at which point the 7-day average really doesn't mean anything useful.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    That graph is also incapable of clearly showing that deaths didn’t budge even if that actually is the case. The stroke on the deaths line is like half the total height indicated when the cases started to surge. Based on that terrible graph deaths could have tripled since cases started to surge.
• vmception 5y ago
  Agreed, if any major US markets reintroduce restrictions, I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out in favor of some hardcore health gambler like De Santis. I played along, now they’re done. edit: the responder assumed something that wasn’t said, and then wrote an essay about something thats not happening and an example from Mississippi. Maybe to save time from having a natural flow of conversation, maybe its what they actually beleive. Either way this is called a strawman argument.
  • dpark 5y ago
    > I’ll move back to one of them just to vote the governor and health director out. Am I correctly understanding that you intend to move to a different region for the sole purpose of voting against restrictions that otherwise would not apply to you? You’re literally trying to be a problematic immigrant. I remember when I was in college a bunch of people did exactly this. They registered for residency in the state solely so they could vote a single issue in a state election. Specifically they registered so they could vote for Mississippi to keep the confederate flag as part of the state flag. So you’re in great company. Honestly, isn’t the whole “state’s rights” thing about telling other people to fuck off and let them manage themselves? And here you are thinking you should meddle in someone else’s self-governance.
    • vmception 5y ago
      It would be where I’m already registered to vote, dont worry Tie any restriction to ICU capacity and only if efforts were made to expand ICU capacity Otherwise that means the state was only pretending to care because it was easier to govern if people werent doing anything If the state actually cares increase the ICU bandwidth or tell us the challenges encountered doing that and how those are being addressed
      • dpark 5y ago
        You specifically mentioned “any major US markets”. Are you admitting to voter fraud now?
• globalise83 5y ago
  Germany has been running at 500 deaths per day from Delta for several weeks (https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/de https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/de). The evidence from the UK is that Omicron overtakes Delta in just a few days (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1043466/20211222_OS_Daily_Omicron_Overview.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...). As the most recent research in the UK suggests (https://www.politico.eu/article/omicron-variant-coronavirus-symptoms-milder-delta-uk-data/ https://www.politico.eu/article/omicron-variant-coronavirus-...), and the data in the parent comment demonstrates in the case of South Africa, Omicron is significantly less harmful. My conclusion is that we should really welcome Omicron as the variant that will vaccinate those holding out against the man-made vaccine without killing and hospitalising too many of them.
  • martin938 5y ago
    • hammock 5y ago
      Irrelevant. As the new strain outcompetes the old, the old dies away forever. For example, Delta became 99%+ of cases in the US.
      • soperj 5y ago
        Omicron evolved from Beta... so not really.
    • brazzy 5y ago
      GP meant that they will just get infected and thereby acquire a degree of immunity, with higher risk of death than the vaccine, but (hopefully) not as high as with previous variants.
    • lolc 5y ago
      1. The quip was that people who don't want to get vaccinated will get immunized through infection. Yes, using "vaccinated" in this context ("the variant that will vaccinate") is not proper usage of the term unless we allow the interpretation that vaccines are milder than the disease and Omicron might be milder than Delta. 2. "obscure, experimental, for older strains": Look, the vaccines are not obscure. Billions had them. Experimental: Sure. Much as not getting vaccinated is. Remember, we haven't seen that virus before. Older Strains: Turns out protection against severe effects is still strong. I'd say experimentally you're better off partially immunized with one of the well-known vaccines than when waiting around for one of the variants to catch you naive.
• cdrini 5y ago
  That chart is misleading; the rise/spike in deaths is always delayed from the rise/spike in cases. It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals. Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (WHO) https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE
  • ls612 5y ago
    It is delayed, but not by a month. Remember the spike began around Thanksgiving, and it's almost Christmas now.
    • jader201 5y ago
      Are we looking at the same chart, or are you talking about some other data/country? That chart shows it spiking just days ago (~Dec 15) in SA, not on Thanksgiving. So it’s still too early to know the effect on deaths (though I still agree that it seems they won’t be as bad).
  • nostromo 5y ago
    I'm glad it's more contagious than Delta, because Delta is much worse than Omicron. Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.
    • toolz 5y ago
      I can't wait until public opinion seems to catch on to the fact that we will never eliminate covid. It blows my mind that we see 100% vaccinated universities going back to online-only learning. What exactly are they waiting on?
      • tjs8rj 5y ago
        This is what a liability state looks like. Nobody gets sued for following the CDC, that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi or rare steak
• jerlam 5y ago
  Denmark is the other country with an Omicron-fueled spike, but they have a corresponding increase in deaths: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/denmark/ https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
  • ralfd 5y ago
    But compare that to the delta wave last winter! The infections are 3-4 times higher and the death count is 2-3 times lower (so far).
    • jerlam 5y ago
      So far, it does look much better than last winter, but last year they had neither vaccines nor significant previous exposure.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      This isn't unexpected though: Besides a much higher vaccination rate COVID-19 has been doing the rounds now for two years and at some point the people that were highly susceptible will have simply died off. The remainder of the population may deal with current strains better or worse depending on what differences those strains bring to the table, and not all of those differences may end up targeting the same populations.
    • kansface 5y ago
      The people who were killed last winter can’t be killed again. They were definitionally the most susceptible and we haven’t replaced that demographic. You can’t naively compare the two waves without a control since they effect very different populations. In other words, if you ran the same experiment backwards, you could plausible get the same results.
• localhost 5y ago
  One report [1] (of many now) about Omicron being less severe than Delta: "Overall, we find evidence of a reduction in the risk of hospitalisation for Omicron relative to Delta infections, averaging over all casesin the study period. The extent of reduction is sensitive to the inclusion criteria used for cases and hospitalisation, being in the range 20-25% when using any attendance at hospital as the endpoint, and 40-45% when using hospitalisation lasting 1 day or longer or hospitalisations with the ECDS discharge field recorded as “admitted” as the endpoint (Table 1)" [1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2021-12-22-COVID19-Report-50.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
• gavin_gee 5y ago
  because the media needs something to talk about. its entertainment through fear driving the revenue. What else will CNN have as "Breaking News"
• Marazan 5y ago
  Weekly deaths have doubled 3 weeks in a row. Yes from a low base, but they have still done multiple doublings. Fortunately they are on track to only rise 50% this week.
• kelnos 5y ago
  That graph is pretty impossible to read; I can't draw any conclusions from that.
• anonred 5y ago
  Genuine question as I haven’t been following COVID news closely. What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID? Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
  • brazzy 5y ago
    Long term effects? It hasn't even been known to exist for a whole month. Look around this thread and you will find many links to data that indicates Omicron might have less severe outcomes, but it's really still a bit early to really have confidence in that data because there are a lot of confounding factors.
  • lolc 5y ago
    My current Best Guess from reading Reliable Internet Sources(tm): > What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID? Hospitalization could be about the same. While we see decreased hospitalisations in South Africa, the assumption is that this is due to widespread immunity from exposure to earlier waves and vaccinations. For the last two weeks, Omicron has been hitting populations that have higher shares of naive subjects. Now the first results on hospitalizations are coming in. Refreshing my tabs constantly :-) I assume that long-term damage is related to immediate severity, so it's likely not going to be worse. But I'm out on a twig here. > Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc? Suggestive evidence of mildness is being discussed. No conclusions.
• deleted 5y ago
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• zerocount 5y ago
  I second the absurdness. It's almost as if there are entities that don't want it to end.
• deleted 5y ago
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• jimbob45 5y ago
  For us young people (probably most everyone on here), the fear is not and has not been death for some time. The fear is long COVID, which remains poorly understood.
• svara 5y ago
  > Deaths didn't budge. At all. The plot doesn't show that. You're looking at the moving average which doesn't move much, but the underlying data (daily, presumably) shows a drastic increase in the last one or two data points, in line with the expected lag time. Others have already pointed out the other major issue with your comment, that the situation in South Africa doesn't transfer to many other places in the world due to the exceptionally high pre-existing immunity rate there.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  People come up with endless excuses to remain hysterical. There will never be enough evidence to show omicron is less severe. There is always some excuse as to why some data should be discarded or is not applicable. But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all. Some people just want the world to continue burning.
  • rsfern 5y ago
    People want to believe the headlines that confirm their prior beliefs, when if you read the actual research reports your will find that there is still just a lot of uncertainty on the question of intrinsic severity. Those that want to report that omicron is milder focus on overall stats and average symptoms, and gloss over confounding factors. Those that want to report that it’s just as severe as delta seem to be just picking up the status quo of poor science journalism, and equating “insufficient evidence” with “conclusive there’s no difference”. This preprint from today out of SA lays out some prospective good news, but still with a lot of uncertainty over how much the lower severity is intrinsic vs mediated by prior infection/vaccination. And there are plenty of limitations, not least of which that their study only includes confirmed omicron infections up to the end of November (they study hospitalizations, and even had to prune their dataset because some patients are still in hospital). There is just legitimately not enough data yet to answer the questions that most need answering. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116 https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116
    • parkingrift 5y ago
      It would be refreshing to see this level of scrutiny applied to bad news.
• tdrdt 5y ago
  A Japanese study showed that Omicron is reproducing 70 times faster in the bronchi but 10 times slower in the lungs than Delta. That's why it is giving less lung problems and therefore doesn't make people as ill as Delta.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    I thought it was HK?
    • tdrdt 5y ago
      Yes I think you are right: LKS Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong.
• tunesmith 5y ago
  I think a lot of the panic can effectively be ignored if you're a bit savvy technically and follow some benchmarks. I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red: - RT > 1 - Cases/100k > 10 - Test Positivity > 5% - ICU Usage > 85% If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my social activities. This seemed about right to me for Delta. For Omicron, I'm holding steady with that strategy for now, but if it turns out that Omicron isn't as severe for unvaccinated people, I might relax the strategy to only look at ICU usage. What's been interesting over the past six months is that it has tended to turn red when everyone was partying, and it'd turn green again when people were still freaked out. At any rate, it means I can ignore a lot of the rhetoric, because if Omicron subsides quickly, it just means my benchmark will turn green sooner.
  • clairity 5y ago
    lots of people following that advice would create a bullwhip effect actually. instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doesn't (exceptions like a holiday family gathering would still need to be handled exceptionally). [0]: i'd suggest 'overall health' is the more accurate (if more vague) factor, but weight tends to inversely correlate with general health (overweight ==> weaker immune system, less efficient pulmonary/cardiovascular system, lower muscle tone, more visceral fat, higher diabetes risk, etc.).
    • tunesmith 5y ago
      My own personal health is such that I wouldn't have to be so conservative if I were thinking only of myself. But Covid isn't just symptomatic, it's also contagious, as in, I can pass it to others who may not be able to handle it as well as I can, including those that aren't merely antivax. So the idea is more that if Covid is doubling at some rate, I limit my social activity so as not to contribute to the spread.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  I hope omicron is a gateway to the virus becoming less and deadly until it's essentially like the common cold. But it seems unwise to be certain that will be what happens. Worst case scenario is omicron running wild mutates into something much more lethal and a bit more contagious. With a variety of uncertainties imaginable, it's understandable that authorities are currently taking omicron as a serious threat even if it seem like there's a significant chance it will be a "good thing" as you say.
• jandrese 5y ago
  One of the questions asked early on with COVID19 was how we managed to end the Spanish Flu 100 years ago without vaccines. When I saw this question posted it was typically met with shrugs and "not sure". I think Omicron offers a possible explanation. An even more infectious variant with lower mortality should out-compete the deadly variant over time. After a few mutations like that it should be no worse than the seasonal flu--which has its own death toll each year, remember.
• alkonaut 5y ago
  I don't think there is any panic surrounding omicron and deaths. The panic is around whether omicron has an extreme effect where lots of mild and moderate disease happens in a 2 week period. So saying "look it's mild stop panicking" isn't really correct. If Omicron has even a tenth of the cases the delta wave had, but concentrated in a smaller period of time, it could be just as bad or worse.
• mmcnl 5y ago
  Just because you're presenting a more optimistic narrative based on two charts without context doesn't mean the panic is absurd. There's a lot of uncertainty that could end up the wrong way with potentially devastating effects.
• ChrisRR 5y ago
  Hindsight is 20:20. It's easy to say after the fact once you've got the data, but I think the response was perfectly justified when an unknown strain was tearing through the population and it would be over a month until we start to see the physiological effects