32 ms·

Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado

263 points by shrubble 5y ago

hereforphone 5y ago
I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  I stay inside most of the time and don't really go out or travel or anything. Only time I leave the house is to walk the dog. It does seem like that past month or so I've been hearing constant sniffling, coughing, and sneezing as I walk around the neighborhood.
- samwillis 5y ago
  Here in the UK there seems to be some sort of cold that is ticking all the same symptom boxes as Omicron (sore throat, headache, nasal congestion, cough) but “isn’t Codiv”. My whole family had it before Christmas. I would describe it a rotten cold, we all sat on the sofa for like 5 days but weren’t bed bound, tested negative with LFTs the whole time (each did one at least every other day for a week). We isolated anyway. We know a lot of people who have had this experience in the last month. Most people seem to have had this cold or Covid recently. Now, I am suspicious that something is going on here. I have a suspicion that the LFTs are not testing positive for relatively mild Omicron. The LFTs procedure here, which we followed, has been to only swab the nose (they changed it maybe over the summer?) but I have seen many anecdotal reports over the last week of people who tested negative (LFT) with just a nasal swab but positive if they swabbed their throats. This potentially ties in with reports that Omicron mostly affects the throat whereas Delta affects the back of the nose. I have seen no official studies. It would not surprise me if we find out in a few weeks/months that nasal LFTs have a very high false negative rate with Omicron. Edit: Just found this about a small study suggesting exactly what I am suspicious of: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-omicron-detection.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-o... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v...
  - Bellend 5y ago
    I had this and so did my friend and we live across the country. The same symptoms at different times. It was as you describe and my cough was terrible, unlike previous colds or chest infections. I coughed for about 40 hours straight and didn't sleep. I tested myself multiple times. I found it strange that I am boosted, masked, and sanitized, plus I am isolated as I am an unpaid carer for a family member with poor health and I managed to catch the bloody cold! It seemed suspect to me as well but of course, anecdotal.
  - Hallucinaut 5y ago
    Same experience and suspicions here with December being miserable for the household but no positive LFTs (around 3 each) or PCR (one each). Wife still has a sore throat every night, weeks later, and mine lasted weeks too, which is unlike any cold we've had previously.
  - kolp 5y ago
    There's a recent study(0) that suggests that saliva tests are more reliable than nasal swabs for detection of Omicron variants, whereas the inverse was true for the Delta variant. (0) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v...
  - invalidusernam3 5y ago
    One of my friends tested positive for covid yesterday (via PCR test). He suspected he might have covid so he had been doing LFTs in the days leading up but kept coming up negative. Out of interest he did an LFT after he got his positive PCR and, surprise surprise, negative. Obviously this is very anecdotal and speculative, but like you said, I wonder if LFTs don't pick up this strain of the virus as well as previous, and if that is what is causing the numbers to be so high since I would imagine it is how most people test.
  - slavik81 5y ago
    Michael Mina explains it this way: > Rapid tests do work with omicron. "But why are some people staying negative in the first days they have symptoms??" This is expected. Symptoms don't = contagious virus This is literally a reflection of the fact that vaccines are doing their job! https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1472024457640394756?t=noQ5lER1K6lIGAPnoa4hSQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14720244576403947... There's a nice diagram with additional information there, and further discussion on other possible factors contributing to the results we're seeing.
- throwntoday 5y ago
  Went to a new years party in California and a dozen of us got stuffy noses and a small cough. Test came back negative. Haven't had a cold in so long I had almost forgotten what they were. Before getting the results I had assumed this was the mutation everyone would get as we leave the pandemic with a natural immunity to this weak strain.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Just stating the obvious (but not necessarily true): could be that before covid you never really never thought about others sniffles/coughing, but now after covid, everyone who behave "sick" becomes noticeable. I certainly noticed this in myself.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  This was said in some Covid HN threads 1.5+ years ago when Covid began. We know now it was mostly people noticing stuff they didn’t notice before. Likely the same case here
shrubble 5y ago
I can't easily link to the last chart at the bottom of the page, which shows all the variants. However it does seem to be the case that omicron is taking over in Colorado USA...
- akira2501 5y ago
  The CDC publishes this data as well. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
spuz 5y ago
You can see a similar chart for the entire country (or other countries) here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?count...
__turbobrew__ 5y ago
omicron has solidly taken over Vancouver BC. Anecdotal evidence: in the past two years (except this past week) I have only known 1 person who got covid. In the past week I know over 20 people who have got covid. I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Those 20 people are fine, right?
  - mojzu 5y ago
    Anecdotally from the people I know who've got covid since omicron was identified, none have had to go to hospital (all are double vaccinated, some had booster), but it can still be a rough few days/week while ill and some are still coughing/feeling overly tired a few weeks later
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    yes, all mild cough which resolved in a day or two
  - cecilpl2 5y ago
    Also in Vancouver and similar numbers. I know at least 10 people who currently have COVID, including myself and my partner. It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream". I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    13 people in my immediate circle got it in the last 7 days. A few had 2 days of fever, a few a slight cough, a few sore throats. Everybody is fine now.
- 5y ago
yumraj 5y ago
Question: what does "100% prevalence" mean in this context? sorry, it's not clear.
- loktarogar 5y ago
  all cases are omicron - at least, all sequenced samples came back as omicron
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    yeah, kind of confusing. “omicron at 100% prevalence, Colorado” is easily mistaken as “100% of the population of Colorado has/had omicron”.
- usea 5y ago
  They take samples, randomly sequence some, and use those to estimate the proportion of different variants. Apparently 100% of them were omicron in the week of 12/26/2021
- deleted 5y ago
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akmarinov 5y ago
If it’s milder than Delta - then that’s good right? Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  So far in the UK hospitalisations are increasing, but not dramatically so. There's also brouhaha about how London (where the wave is the worst) is at its peak, or already on the way down. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ [bear in mind, the hospitalisation number is not quite what it seems. It is "people in hospital who happen to have Covid", not "people who got Covid so bad they need to be hospitalised". So if you have asymptomatic Covid and a broken leg, you count for this purpose. Still, you do require the whole Covid-safe theatre, medical staff in PPE so it's also not like "meh doesn't matter"]
  - mprovost 5y ago
    The "peak" in London last week (if it really was the peak) had 1 in 10 people infected. Those are huge numbers, even if most people don't need hospitalisation.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Yes, I was speaking specifically about hospitalisation only.
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  - aorth 5y ago
    According to your link there's definitely a bump in hospital admissions. Only time will tell how high that bump goes. Let's play it safe and reserve judgement just a little longer... https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=overview&areaName=United%20Kingdom https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...
  - OJFord 5y ago
rocqua 5y ago
I thought that a second variant was essentially an independent stochastic process. If I have that right that suggests that, had Omicron not occurred Colorado would currently be Corona-free. I doubt that is true though. Maybe some of the people who now have Omicron would have gotten Delta later on? I don't see how one variant can truly extinguish another variant otherwise. But I am hoping someone here knows better than me.
- c-fe 5y ago
  How do you see them as independent stochastic processes? Assuming one person can only be infected with 1 variant at a time, then they are not independent, instead they would be negatively correlated since the more people have omikron the less people can get delta. If instead one person can have more than 1 variant at a time, and they are really independent, then your conclusion is incorrect since a 100% prevalance of omikron would not imply a 0% prevalance of other variants.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    There's something I don't understand: why can't we be infected with different variants at the same time ? And does it extend to viruses (eg: can't get infected with flu if currently fighting measles) ? I read someone in Israel got `flurona`, flu + covid (https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-first-case-of-patient-with-covid-and-flu-at-same-time/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-fir...).
    - zmmmmm 5y ago
      well, at least with the different coronavirus strains, they are similar enough that getting one is effectively like an immunisation against all the other strains. Now you could probably get two strains simultaneously if you were independently infected separately by both at the same time. Delta, however, isn't quite common enough for that to be likely I think.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  There are multiple factors involved. The extremely high rate of spread of Omicron does a lot to bring it to the top. More subtle is the difference between immunity generated by each. That is, it appears that vaccinations and post infection immunity from Delta are little help against Omicron infections, but post Omicron immunity is highly effective against Delta. This appears to be related primarily to differences in the spike protein.
Bellend 5y ago
As someone else mentioned and I agree that I hope we are at the end of covid lockdown potential but is that realistic? Is it pure luck that Omicron is more transmissible but apparently less severe than Delta? What is to stop the next variant being more transmissible than Omicron but 10 times more deadly? I know news outlets are really bad for clickbait titles, but I read yesterday that a new variant was detected in South France in the last few days? When will the carnival end and what does it mean?
- deleted 5y ago
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- rich_sasha 5y ago
  It depends whether it confers immunity to other variants, and how long it lasts. If it’s good at that, it is so transmissible that quickly everyone will get it (the fabled “herd immunity”) and new variants, unless they break the mould, won’t have a large enough population of o sustain themselves in. Otherwise, maybe we’ll enter into some kind of equilibrium, where there’s enough of not-terrible Omicron to keep everyone “topped up”, equivalent to permanently high vaccination levels. Or, none of our happens and as you say, the next variant is more transmissible and more deadly, and we’re screwed again. Re France, new variants pop up all the time, if it’s the same one I read about, there’s no indication that it’s special right now so for now I’d say clickbait.
- chubot 5y ago
  As far as I understand that's not likely because the it would be maladaptive for the virus. If there were a really deadly variant in South Africa, then 1) it wouldn't spread as fast because viruses need live hosts to spread and 2) people would change their behavior before it reached the entire world. That is, Omicron is mild so people likely didn't change their behavior too much. If you saw a lot of people around you going to the hospital, you would likely stop going out so much. (Some people knew many people going to the hospital during the pandemic; others saw none for years. The infection was very unevenly distributed. On HN I expect most people are remote workers and know few people getting infected.)
- hedgehog 5y ago
slavik81 5y ago
December 27th was the first day I personally knew a Canadian that had caught COVID. Today, I know of three independent outbreaks among my friends and even more at work. The Alberta active case rate looks like a vertical line [1], and that's even after recently switching mostly to take-home test kits that don't get reported in these numbers. In my group of friends, 6/7 tested with take-home kits. [1]: https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/1478861702573740032?t=4jKWKCrYrqzyx1WnNsq_pg&s=19 https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/147886170257374003...
GoldenMonkey 5y ago
In Colorado. Anecdotal, 6 ppl I know here all have covid. 3 of them had their boosters 2 weeks before hand. 1 unvaccinated. Was like a bad cold for all of them.
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- swasheck 5y ago
  also in colorado. currently have O. the + tests from our (previously very cautious) friend groups are coming in rapidly. i was boosted in mid-novemeber. _physical_ symptoms feel like a bad cold (cough, congested head, sinus headaches) though i'm afebrile. the mental symptoms are definitely different/stronger. sleeplessness. auditory hallucinations. i'd say mental fog but i can't say that's not related to the sleeplessness.
  - frebord 5y ago
    I'm now 10 days clear of the last obvious symptoms - but I've been having major trouble focusing since the end of the Holiday and not sure if due to covid or not.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      I hope you'll fully recover soon! Most people hoping COVID-19 burns through the entire population are not considering the ramifications of wide-spread long-covid.
nayuki 5y ago
My province has a nice data presentation too: https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/ https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/
gz5 5y ago
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, has a nice substack from perspective of an epidemiologist. Two notable recent Omicron posts on that substack: The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-jan-4 https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa... The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good-news https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good... Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.
- enragedcacti 5y ago
  Thanks for this, just in those two blog posts she answered many lingering questions I had about how omicron has been changing things. the SEOd google results are always a flood of incomplete or speculative information when I try to find answers to covid questions so this is a dream come true. If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.
  - bengale 5y ago
    I've also found this blog to be useful: https://thezvi.substack.com https://thezvi.substack.com
    - harpersealtako 5y ago
      Calling zvi's blog "useful" is an understatement, he's practically a lesser deity of covid-19 modeling.
      - toolz 5y ago
        I think thought-leaders and experts could use a whole lot less deification right now.
        tharne 5y ago
        > I think thought-leaders and experts could use a whole lot less deification right now I'm not sure that's possible - the experts are more or less screaming into the wind at this point. The WHO and the CDC have been reduced to punchlines by liberals and conservatives alike. IMHO this scorn is well-deserved.
opwieurposiu 5y ago
There are 15k covid RNA in every ml of sewage coming out of boston right now. Figure 200l a day of sewage per person and that is a lot of covid. I would hold off on eating oysters for a bit. https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
- tpmx 5y ago
  Lobster consumption aside, those graphs show an insane increase compared to previous waves.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I’d be surprised if coronavirus can infect non-mammals. I don’t think there’s been any scientific evidence of this. For the reports of contaminated fish and what not, it’s suspected the contamination happened on the supply chain (e.g. someone at a fish packing plant coughed on food.)
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  That's not how viruses work. Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.
  - opwieurposiu 5y ago
    It's how norovirus works, and sometimes hepatitis too: https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-into-oysters.html https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-int... Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.
    - numpad0 5y ago
      You should not be eating that oyster raw if you are not sure, and that only applies to norovirus which is resistant to mild disinfectants(e.g. ethanol)
nradov 5y ago
The CDC publishes a weekly chart showing the proportions of circulating variants for the US as a whole. The Delta variant had previously driven most other variants near extinction, and now Omicron is doing the same to Delta. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariants https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...
- rafale 5y ago
  Our savior Omicron. The ultimate vaccinator. Nature finally had mercy on us.
  - politician 5y ago
    Too bad they skipped a letter in naming it; it would've been some good PR for China. https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - chasd00 5y ago
    i wonder what countries like China and New Zealand who are taking a zero COVID approach are going to do. COVID is endemic in the rest of the world except for those places where it doesn't exist at all? I don't see that working.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Are they still doing zero Covid now?
      - nradov 5y ago
        China is still pursuing a zero COVID policy. Personally I think that's bad policy, but they're sticking to it. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/china/xian-covid-outbreak-lockdown-mic-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/china/xian-covid-outbreak-loc...
bigyellow 5y ago
- sroussey 5y ago
  My friends without the vaccine that got Covid are dead, and the one that did get the vaccine are alive.
  - bigyellow 5y ago
    How many comorbidity did your "friends without the vaccine" have?
  - empressplay 5y ago
    That's incredibly unlucky! I know several people who got Covid pre-vaccine (including myself) and we're all still alive. Although it wasn't exactly a party and most of us (including myself) have been vaccinated since so we could be fairly certain we wouldn't get it again.
  - xkbarkar 5y ago
    - sroussey 5y ago
      not
- Taywee 5y ago
  The vaccines were never purported to be 100% effective, and all the data and information was clear that they had lower effectiveness against Delta, and even lower against Omicron. If people told you that the vaccines would lower your chances of contracting every known major variant and lower your chances of a serious illness, they were right. If they told you that the vaccines were guaranteed to completely prevent every variant of the virus, they were lying to you. If you heard the former but interpreted it as the latter, that's on you.
  - 5y ago
benjaminwootton 5y ago
Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished. Or am I missing something?
- kuroguro 5y ago
  I really hope so. The hospitalizations usually lag behind case detection AFAIK, so there might still be some damage to watch out for.
  - rytcio 5y ago
    People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving. It's been almost two months. It's time to stop hoping for doom and gloom and accept that it's over.
    - magicalist 5y ago
      > People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving People have been saying that since 2020, but if you're talking about the current variant, omicron wasn't even given the omicron designation until the day after Thanksgiving.
    - archagon 5y ago
      It is quite offensive to suggest that anyone is “hoping for doom and gloom.”
- etchalon 5y ago
  I'm not sure if we can say it's "over". People were saying the same thing after the Delta waves started subsiding and behold … Omicron.
  - monological 5y ago
time_to_smile 5y ago
I don't think it matters if omicron is ultimately worse or not, nobody cares anymore. I was out visiting a gym yesterday, in an area with sky rocketing cases, and no one was wearing masks. They talked multiple times about how much they cared about health, without even a hint of irony. I was initially put off, but realized that this is just the world we're in. In two weeks we'll find out if the calculus of lower death rate x higher case count means anything, but even if it turns out to be a complete disaster with record deaths, I just don't see anyone caring. Pandemic is done after omicron no matter what. We already largely ignore deaths from climate change (which depending on your calculations can easily be as high globally as covid), we don't even speculate on deaths from environmental pollution. Covid is just another environmental hazard that we will accept like any other.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I have a feeling we are gonna want more things to worry about. Done with the pandemic? Let’s latch on to something to make sure 1) You have no kids 2) We keep increasing the power of the government measures 3) Equality meaning we stoop to the lowest level, not bring up the baseline 4) Keep eroding the standard of living. Even if we are a space faring civilization, these people will make it uncool to “pollute” space or would be against fusion power if we are able. I can already see progressives against SpaceX. No optimism for you!
  - time_to_smile 5y ago
    > No optimism for you! This is a weird observation to make. Optimism is by far the dominant ideology in our society and has been for well over 300 or so years. Even currently when you browse mainstream media news postings the vast majority of the articles focus on how mild omicron is and how people should get to back to work. I'll agree that the media makes plenty of money pedaling anxiety but real pessimism is nearly forbidden in everything from mainstream media to academic philosophy (seriously, Schopenhauer is basically it and he's much more of a buddhist than a true pessimist, the majority of German pessimist thinker remain untranslated in English). Reacting to any observation of concerning data as "against optimism!" speaks more to a prevalence of hard denial than the rise of true pessimism.
callumprentice 5y ago
Can anyone point me to a reliable source that explains in layman's terms why one cancels out the other and it's not possible to have both (say) delta and omicron at once. Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)
- gpm 5y ago
  > could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;) You overestimate our abilities to make viruses that do what we want, let alone to make viruses that do what we want and won't evolve into viruses that do what we don't want after being released into the wild. This is also basically saying "can't we make a transmissible vaccine", and as much as I like vaccine mandates, I think there would be significant ethical issues with that.
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  - tkahnoski 5y ago
    A bit of a sidebar this was basically the plot of The Last Ship. With infrastructure of the world crumbling how do you distribute immunity without the manufacturing infrastructure. So yeah I'd put it in a 'last ditch Hail Mary to save the world' type of plan...
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I feel like I recall at least one worm that somebody released that would infect servers, patch the vulnerability that it used to get in, infect other vulnerable servers, then delete itself.
- hogrider 5y ago
  Just a no sources comment: you can get confection of the flu and covid or any variant with any other variant at the same time. It's just over time one variant out competes the others because it's more fit.
bratwurst3000 5y ago
Just giving my 2 cents. Got boosted 3 weeks ago. Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast. I did wear a ffp2 mask with nearly every social contact and if we didnt wear mask we would test ourself. I am sure I got it from the streets from people passing by. That said I am in the french alps and it was vacation time here. And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation
- contravariant 5y ago
  Why are you hoping for Covid to become endemic?
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Honestly I hope that one day it is gone for good but until then an endemic situation would be somehow better than a pandemic one. I didnt say that clearly and hoping for a, also, bad situation is not the best thing to whish for but after 2 years of pandemic I am whishing for something less bad….
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    At this point that is the best case. COVID zero is a pipe dream, there are just too many vaccine refusers and too many people refusing to do anything to avoid spreading the virus. If COVID follows the typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous, we can get back to normal life -- the question is how long that will take.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      > typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous Wishful thinking (that I hope comes true). Ebola got more lethal, not less.
mperham 5y ago
The metrics presentation on the page are very misleading. The use of color is confusing (red generally means bad or getting worse, green means good or getting better). The up/down arrows are seemingly red or blue arbitrarily. Why are the four rows each colored differently? Just a bizarre UI. If you have to present data to a user, please read a book by Edward Tufte first. His books will change your entire perspective, e.g. https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
frebord 5y ago
The spread is so fast, all charts now look insane and would be terrifying if not for the mild symptoms. I wonder if it is possible for a virus to wipe itself out by spreading so quickly that it ends up with very few left to infect, assuming it doesn't mutate enough in time.
Marazan 5y ago
Omicron has probably saved Florida (andnother southern states) from a horrendous Delta winter wave.
- rhino369 5y ago
  I'm skeptical. The 2020 Winter wave started in October. But cases were decreasing of flat Oct. and Nov. with barely any mitigations in place. There was some sign of an increase in very late nov. and early december. Whether that is an early sign of a wave, a thanksgiving bump, or signs of Omicron spreading, it's hard to tell. But it Florida and the South had a high degree of immunity to delta even pre omicron.
  - Marazan 5y ago
    The 2021 Summer peaks in the south were much later than the equivalent 2020 summer peaks. In 2020 Florida peaked in mid July. In 2021 they only started coming down in Early September. This would push their winter peaks back as acquired immunity would fade at a later point.
dheera 5y ago
What does 100% prevalence mean? 100% of people are at least silent carriers?
- lsaferite 5y ago
  Based on the chart it's 100% of the positive tests being Omnicron.
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tedkz 5y ago
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ecf 5y ago
Is this the part in Plague Inc where the virus infects everyone and then mutates into a 99% chance of death monster?
dehrmann 5y ago
With all the restrictions over the past two years, have we been selecting for hyper-contagious strains?
- convolvatron 5y ago
  yes. would letting the original strains run amok freely have been better? I guess more people would have died, but it would have been over sooner.
  - martythemaniak 5y ago
    Some places have been pretty close to "let it run amok", ie indifference by the population and government, widespread antivax sentiment, etc. I'm talking about places like Bulgaria, Russia, etc. They have seen around 0.75% of the population die. Letting the original run freely would have likely cost at least 1% of the population, plus the long covid, lack of treatment for other conditions etc.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    Death counts are also hard to compare because earlier variants already killed a lot of high-risk people. Would we rather have a widespread epidemic we know less about and can control or a less deadly one we have treatments for, but have limited control over? It's hard to say. It'll be interesting to see what happens with omicron in China where they're trying their hardest to control it.
listless 5y ago
Everyone in my house had COVID in September and now we all have it again. Vaccinated, boosted, prior infection - none of it matters when it comes to avoiding the virus. I think we’re at the point where the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.
- chasd00 5y ago
  i don't know why the parent was modded down. It seems to me the governments are beginning to change the narrative to "the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.".
rubyist5eva 5y ago
If the studies suggesting that Omicron antibodies help protect against the Delta variant, and Omicron seems much more mild in comparison - looks like we're seeing an actual possibility of an end to the pandemic (at least to the point where we deal with COVID like we do with cold and flu season instead of shutting down the world).
romaniv 5y ago
I highly recommend everyone here to watch these two cannels for Covid news and analysis: https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1 https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1 The first one is a bit more user-friendly, the second one goes more in-depth into mechanics and research, but neither peddle fear or moralism. There is actually quite a bit of positive news lately: Omicron uses two different ways to enter cells. This is part of why it's so transmissible, but it's also why it is less severe: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-different-it-uses-two:7 https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-differ... Omicron generates some immunity for Delta, so it is likely to displace Delta entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc Most Omicron hospitalization are accidental so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI
intrasight 5y ago
I am reminded of "Don't Look Up" scene: It is going to happen. Exactly. 99.78% to be exact. Oh, great. Okay, so it’s not 100%. Well, scientists never like to say 100%.
- asdfsd234234444 5y ago
  aside: that movie was absolutely terrible and cringey
ostenning 5y ago
What are covid hospitalization rates for children currently?
joelbondurant1 5y ago
openasocket 5y ago
I'd love to see a numbers breakdown estimating the impact Omicron would have on the US if we had a nearly complete (say 90%) vaccination rate. How many infections would we be seeing, how many hospitalizations, how many people in the ICU? How much would this strain our healthcare system? And how would that compare with, say, the flu?
- xkbarkar 5y ago
  Iceland is 92% vaccinated double and I think 60% of them triple. Half the famn population is in isoliation because of infection. Feel free to check their covid stats in covid.is ( they have an english version ). Most hospitalized are fully vaccinated ( 2 or 3 ) Most serious cases are unvaccinated, HOWEVER. Out of 34 hospitalized with c19 6 were patients in cardiology that got infected in the hospital and had to be tranferred to c19. Authorities have not wanted to comment if any of the serious c19 cases came from people who were already seriously ill, already hospitalized and not vaccinated due to that. Since the ICU numbers are so small, this significance is easily skewed. Much less hospitalizations than the models predicted.
  - xkbarkar 5y ago
    Id like to add. C19 severity has a very clear link to obesity, Iceland is one of europes most obese peoples. If omicron is not filling the iceland c19 ward ( I think we are up to 30 patiens out of thousands of active cases ). then I think this wave will pass as more of a scare than anything else. It certainly disproves the usefulness of vaccine passports. But that particular science is of course not followed. Sigh
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namelessoracle 5y ago
Serious question. If Omicron was the initial variant of Covid 19, would we have seen shut downs and the level of global response we did? Is the thought it's only this level of mildness because of vaccination rates? My gut is that the answer would be yes because this variant targets children more effectively.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  define "targets". Transmissibility or actual harm? Children are at no more risk of harm from this variant than any other AFAIK.
yeswecatan 5y ago
I have no idea how to read this website. Could someone break this down for me?
clcaev 5y ago
Don't forget about long covid. My covid infection was mostly gone in 3 days; yet 7 days after that I'm in the ER for peripheral neuropathy. Several days later I am still here with perhaps permanent loss of function. There are a few other youngsters like me with covid complications on the neurology floor, most with less than 2 comorbidities. Oh yea, the ER was packed, 6h to triage.
- redanddead 5y ago
  Wasn't there some kind of anticoagulant therapy that helped persons with long covid? it was posted here yesterday I think
  - damontal 5y ago
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357428572_Combined_triple_treatment_of_fibrin_amyloid_microclots_and_platelet_pathology_in_individuals_with_Long_COVID_Post-Acute_Sequelae_of_COVID-19_PASC_can_resolve_their_persistent_symptoms https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357428572_Combined_...
- cheeze 5y ago
  Were you vaccinated when you caught it? Hope your body recovers over time friend.
- aarongray 5y ago
  Sorry to hear about your peripheral neuropathy. Check out some of the treatments for dysautonomia. There are some cutting edge treatments that have been developed over the past few years, they just haven't become mainstream knowledge or trickled down to the medical schools yet. The two most effective approaches are using neuroplasticity exercises to retrain the limbic system (cheap, but time consuming - an hour a day for 6 months): https://ansrewire.com/ https://ansrewire.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/ Or doing microcurrent neurofeedback (costs ~$150 a session, do one session a week for a couple months): https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/ https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/ Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.
dqpb 5y ago
It’s amazing how China has apparently been almost untouched by the pandemic since end of March 2020.
troyvit 5y ago
People seem to see this as another sign that the pandemic is either getting worse or almost over. I just see it as another reason not to use Tableau.
ptx 5y ago
> we have plenty of N95’s in supply. We also have KN95s for kids. Are they buying Chinese masks for the kids? Or is there an American "for kids" N95 standard that creates a name collision with the Chinese KN95 standard?
- luhn 5y ago
  NIOSH (the agency behind the N95 standard) has not approved any type of facemask for children, so any "N95 for kids" mask would be counterfeit.
- wffurr 5y ago
  The child-size masks I have for my three year old are all KF94s from Korea. https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ lists small-size KN95s from China and an uncertified mask from an N95 manufacturer.
denton-scratch 5y ago
That article doesn't seem to say anything about "100% prevalence".
tamaharbor 5y ago
Imagine if ‘scientists’ named every variant of the cold or flu.

263 points by shrubble 5y ago

I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.

TranquilMarmot 5y ago
I stay inside most of the time and don't really go out or travel or anything. Only time I leave the house is to walk the dog. It does seem like that past month or so I've been hearing constant sniffling, coughing, and sneezing as I walk around the neighborhood.
samwillis 5y ago
Here in the UK there seems to be some sort of cold that is ticking all the same symptom boxes as Omicron (sore throat, headache, nasal congestion, cough) but “isn’t Codiv”. My whole family had it before Christmas. I would describe it a rotten cold, we all sat on the sofa for like 5 days but weren’t bed bound, tested negative with LFTs the whole time (each did one at least every other day for a week). We isolated anyway. We know a lot of people who have had this experience in the last month. Most people seem to have had this cold or Covid recently. Now, I am suspicious that something is going on here. I have a suspicion that the LFTs are not testing positive for relatively mild Omicron. The LFTs procedure here, which we followed, has been to only swab the nose (they changed it maybe over the summer?) but I have seen many anecdotal reports over the last week of people who tested negative (LFT) with just a nasal swab but positive if they swabbed their throats. This potentially ties in with reports that Omicron mostly affects the throat whereas Delta affects the back of the nose. I have seen no official studies. It would not surprise me if we find out in a few weeks/months that nasal LFTs have a very high false negative rate with Omicron. Edit: Just found this about a small study suggesting exactly what I am suspicious of: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-omicron-detection.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-o... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v...
- Bellend 5y ago
  I had this and so did my friend and we live across the country. The same symptoms at different times. It was as you describe and my cough was terrible, unlike previous colds or chest infections. I coughed for about 40 hours straight and didn't sleep. I tested myself multiple times. I found it strange that I am boosted, masked, and sanitized, plus I am isolated as I am an unpaid carer for a family member with poor health and I managed to catch the bloody cold! It seemed suspect to me as well but of course, anecdotal.
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  Same experience and suspicions here with December being miserable for the household but no positive LFTs (around 3 each) or PCR (one each). Wife still has a sore throat every night, weeks later, and mine lasted weeks too, which is unlike any cold we've had previously.
- kolp 5y ago
  There's a recent study(0) that suggests that saliva tests are more reliable than nasal swabs for detection of Omicron variants, whereas the inverse was true for the Delta variant. (0) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v...
- invalidusernam3 5y ago
  One of my friends tested positive for covid yesterday (via PCR test). He suspected he might have covid so he had been doing LFTs in the days leading up but kept coming up negative. Out of interest he did an LFT after he got his positive PCR and, surprise surprise, negative. Obviously this is very anecdotal and speculative, but like you said, I wonder if LFTs don't pick up this strain of the virus as well as previous, and if that is what is causing the numbers to be so high since I would imagine it is how most people test.
- slavik81 5y ago
  Michael Mina explains it this way: > Rapid tests do work with omicron. "But why are some people staying negative in the first days they have symptoms??" This is expected. Symptoms don't = contagious virus This is literally a reflection of the fact that vaccines are doing their job! https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1472024457640394756?t=noQ5lER1K6lIGAPnoa4hSQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14720244576403947... There's a nice diagram with additional information there, and further discussion on other possible factors contributing to the results we're seeing.
throwntoday 5y ago
Went to a new years party in California and a dozen of us got stuffy noses and a small cough. Test came back negative. Haven't had a cold in so long I had almost forgotten what they were. Before getting the results I had assumed this was the mutation everyone would get as we leave the pandemic with a natural immunity to this weak strain.
capableweb 5y ago
Just stating the obvious (but not necessarily true): could be that before covid you never really never thought about others sniffles/coughing, but now after covid, everyone who behave "sick" becomes noticeable. I certainly noticed this in myself.
skinnymuch 5y ago
This was said in some Covid HN threads 1.5+ years ago when Covid began. We know now it was mostly people noticing stuff they didn’t notice before. Likely the same case here

shrubble 5y ago

I can't easily link to the last chart at the bottom of the page, which shows all the variants. However it does seem to be the case that omicron is taking over in Colorado USA...

akira2501 5y ago
The CDC publishes this data as well. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

spuz 5y ago

You can see a similar chart for the entire country (or other countries) here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?count...

__turbobrew__ 5y ago

omicron has solidly taken over Vancouver BC. Anecdotal evidence: in the past two years (except this past week) I have only known 1 person who got covid. In the past week I know over 20 people who have got covid. I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end of covid lockdowns. omicron is taking the world by storm and I wouldn't be surprised if the entire world gets it in the next few weeks.

hereforphone 5y ago
Those 20 people are fine, right?
- mojzu 5y ago
  Anecdotally from the people I know who've got covid since omicron was identified, none have had to go to hospital (all are double vaccinated, some had booster), but it can still be a rough few days/week while ill and some are still coughing/feeling overly tired a few weeks later
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  yes, all mild cough which resolved in a day or two
- cecilpl2 5y ago
  Also in Vancouver and similar numbers. I know at least 10 people who currently have COVID, including myself and my partner. It's not mild for all. Two people in particular have been brutally sick for over a week. One spent three days in a self-described "fever dream". I actually don't know whether I have it, since I'm asymptomatic and can't get a test. But the four other people at my dinner party all got symptoms and two tested positive.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  13 people in my immediate circle got it in the last 7 days. A few had 2 days of fever, a few a slight cough, a few sore throats. Everybody is fine now.
5y ago

yumraj 5y ago

Question: what does "100% prevalence" mean in this context? sorry, it's not clear.

loktarogar 5y ago
all cases are omicron - at least, all sequenced samples came back as omicron
- deleted 5y ago
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- wallacoloo 5y ago
  yeah, kind of confusing. “omicron at 100% prevalence, Colorado” is easily mistaken as “100% of the population of Colorado has/had omicron”.
usea 5y ago
They take samples, randomly sequence some, and use those to estimate the proportion of different variants. Apparently 100% of them were omicron in the week of 12/26/2021
deleted 5y ago
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akmarinov 5y ago

If it’s milder than Delta - then that’s good right? Or do the increased cases lead to more hospitalizations than Delta?

rich_sasha 5y ago
So far in the UK hospitalisations are increasing, but not dramatically so. There's also brouhaha about how London (where the wave is the worst) is at its peak, or already on the way down. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ [bear in mind, the hospitalisation number is not quite what it seems. It is "people in hospital who happen to have Covid", not "people who got Covid so bad they need to be hospitalised". So if you have asymptomatic Covid and a broken leg, you count for this purpose. Still, you do require the whole Covid-safe theatre, medical staff in PPE so it's also not like "meh doesn't matter"]
- mprovost 5y ago
  The "peak" in London last week (if it really was the peak) had 1 in 10 people infected. Those are huge numbers, even if most people don't need hospitalisation.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Yes, I was speaking specifically about hospitalisation only.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- aorth 5y ago
  According to your link there's definitely a bump in hospital admissions. Only time will tell how high that bump goes. Let's play it safe and reserve judgement just a little longer... https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=overview&areaName=United%20Kingdom https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...
- OJFord 5y ago

rocqua 5y ago

I thought that a second variant was essentially an independent stochastic process. If I have that right that suggests that, had Omicron not occurred Colorado would currently be Corona-free. I doubt that is true though. Maybe some of the people who now have Omicron would have gotten Delta later on? I don't see how one variant can truly extinguish another variant otherwise. But I am hoping someone here knows better than me.

c-fe 5y ago
How do you see them as independent stochastic processes? Assuming one person can only be infected with 1 variant at a time, then they are not independent, instead they would be negatively correlated since the more people have omikron the less people can get delta. If instead one person can have more than 1 variant at a time, and they are really independent, then your conclusion is incorrect since a 100% prevalance of omikron would not imply a 0% prevalance of other variants.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  There's something I don't understand: why can't we be infected with different variants at the same time ? And does it extend to viruses (eg: can't get infected with flu if currently fighting measles) ? I read someone in Israel got `flurona`, flu + covid (https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-first-case-of-patient-with-covid-and-flu-at-same-time/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/flurona-israel-records-its-fir...).
  - zmmmmm 5y ago
    well, at least with the different coronavirus strains, they are similar enough that getting one is effectively like an immunisation against all the other strains. Now you could probably get two strains simultaneously if you were independently infected separately by both at the same time. Delta, however, isn't quite common enough for that to be likely I think.
m0llusk 5y ago
There are multiple factors involved. The extremely high rate of spread of Omicron does a lot to bring it to the top. More subtle is the difference between immunity generated by each. That is, it appears that vaccinations and post infection immunity from Delta are little help against Omicron infections, but post Omicron immunity is highly effective against Delta. This appears to be related primarily to differences in the spike protein.

Bellend 5y ago

As someone else mentioned and I agree that I hope we are at the end of covid lockdown potential but is that realistic? Is it pure luck that Omicron is more transmissible but apparently less severe than Delta? What is to stop the next variant being more transmissible than Omicron but 10 times more deadly? I know news outlets are really bad for clickbait titles, but I read yesterday that a new variant was detected in South France in the last few days? When will the carnival end and what does it mean?

deleted 5y ago
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rich_sasha 5y ago
It depends whether it confers immunity to other variants, and how long it lasts. If it’s good at that, it is so transmissible that quickly everyone will get it (the fabled “herd immunity”) and new variants, unless they break the mould, won’t have a large enough population of o sustain themselves in. Otherwise, maybe we’ll enter into some kind of equilibrium, where there’s enough of not-terrible Omicron to keep everyone “topped up”, equivalent to permanently high vaccination levels. Or, none of our happens and as you say, the next variant is more transmissible and more deadly, and we’re screwed again. Re France, new variants pop up all the time, if it’s the same one I read about, there’s no indication that it’s special right now so for now I’d say clickbait.
chubot 5y ago
As far as I understand that's not likely because the it would be maladaptive for the virus. If there were a really deadly variant in South Africa, then 1) it wouldn't spread as fast because viruses need live hosts to spread and 2) people would change their behavior before it reached the entire world. That is, Omicron is mild so people likely didn't change their behavior too much. If you saw a lot of people around you going to the hospital, you would likely stop going out so much. (Some people knew many people going to the hospital during the pandemic; others saw none for years. The infection was very unevenly distributed. On HN I expect most people are remote workers and know few people getting infected.)
hedgehog 5y ago

slavik81 5y ago

December 27th was the first day I personally knew a Canadian that had caught COVID. Today, I know of three independent outbreaks among my friends and even more at work. The Alberta active case rate looks like a vertical line [1], and that's even after recently switching mostly to take-home test kits that don't get reported in these numbers. In my group of friends, 6/7 tested with take-home kits. [1]: https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/1478861702573740032?t=4jKWKCrYrqzyx1WnNsq_pg&s=19 https://twitter.com/ByMatthewBlack/status/147886170257374003...

GoldenMonkey 5y ago

In Colorado. Anecdotal, 6 ppl I know here all have covid. 3 of them had their boosters 2 weeks before hand. 1 unvaccinated. Was like a bad cold for all of them.

deleted 5y ago
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swasheck 5y ago
also in colorado. currently have O. the + tests from our (previously very cautious) friend groups are coming in rapidly. i was boosted in mid-novemeber. _physical_ symptoms feel like a bad cold (cough, congested head, sinus headaches) though i'm afebrile. the mental symptoms are definitely different/stronger. sleeplessness. auditory hallucinations. i'd say mental fog but i can't say that's not related to the sleeplessness.
- frebord 5y ago
  I'm now 10 days clear of the last obvious symptoms - but I've been having major trouble focusing since the end of the Holiday and not sure if due to covid or not.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    I hope you'll fully recover soon! Most people hoping COVID-19 burns through the entire population are not considering the ramifications of wide-spread long-covid.

nayuki 5y ago

My province has a nice data presentation too: https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/ https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/

gz5 5y ago

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, has a nice substack from perspective of an epidemiologist. Two notable recent Omicron posts on that substack: The potentially scary aspects: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-jan-4 https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa... The potentially good news: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good-news https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good... Obviously it is still early, but imo those 2 posts give a decent lay of the land.

enragedcacti 5y ago
Thanks for this, just in those two blog posts she answered many lingering questions I had about how omicron has been changing things. the SEOd google results are always a flood of incomplete or speculative information when I try to find answers to covid questions so this is a dream come true. If anyone has any other sources like this that can find and interpret good data for covid I'd love to hear about them.
- bengale 5y ago
  I've also found this blog to be useful: https://thezvi.substack.com https://thezvi.substack.com
  - harpersealtako 5y ago
    Calling zvi's blog "useful" is an understatement, he's practically a lesser deity of covid-19 modeling.
    - toolz 5y ago
      I think thought-leaders and experts could use a whole lot less deification right now.
      - tharne 5y ago
        > I think thought-leaders and experts could use a whole lot less deification right now I'm not sure that's possible - the experts are more or less screaming into the wind at this point. The WHO and the CDC have been reduced to punchlines by liberals and conservatives alike. IMHO this scorn is well-deserved.

opwieurposiu 5y ago

There are 15k covid RNA in every ml of sewage coming out of boston right now. Figure 200l a day of sewage per person and that is a lot of covid. I would hold off on eating oysters for a bit. https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

tpmx 5y ago
Lobster consumption aside, those graphs show an insane increase compared to previous waves.
jdavis703 5y ago
I’d be surprised if coronavirus can infect non-mammals. I don’t think there’s been any scientific evidence of this. For the reports of contaminated fish and what not, it’s suspected the contamination happened on the supply chain (e.g. someone at a fish packing plant coughed on food.)
KennyBlanken 5y ago
That's not how viruses work. Early in the pandemic researchers swabbed lots of surfaces and while they were able to amplify COVID DNA from a bunch of the swabs, they were not able to successfully culture a single sample from any surface, which included the hospital room of a patient on a respirator where the virus would have been beyond abundant.
- opwieurposiu 5y ago
  It's how norovirus works, and sometimes hepatitis too: https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-into-oysters.html https://www.livescience.com/62485-how-does-norovirus-get-int... Some harvesters will hold oysters in sterile water for a few days to clean them out (Depuration). This usually works but it is hard to know for sure if the one on your plate got this treatment or not.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    You should not be eating that oyster raw if you are not sure, and that only applies to norovirus which is resistant to mild disinfectants(e.g. ethanol)

nradov 5y ago

The CDC publishes a weekly chart showing the proportions of circulating variants for the US as a whole. The Delta variant had previously driven most other variants near extinction, and now Omicron is doing the same to Delta. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariants https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#circulatingVariant...

rafale 5y ago
Our savior Omicron. The ultimate vaccinator. Nature finally had mercy on us.
- politician 5y ago
  Too bad they skipped a letter in naming it; it would've been some good PR for China. https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chasd00 5y ago
  i wonder what countries like China and New Zealand who are taking a zero COVID approach are going to do. COVID is endemic in the rest of the world except for those places where it doesn't exist at all? I don't see that working.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Are they still doing zero Covid now?
    - nradov 5y ago
      China is still pursuing a zero COVID policy. Personally I think that's bad policy, but they're sticking to it. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/china/xian-covid-outbreak-lockdown-mic-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/china/xian-covid-outbreak-loc...

bigyellow 5y ago

sroussey 5y ago
My friends without the vaccine that got Covid are dead, and the one that did get the vaccine are alive.
- bigyellow 5y ago
  How many comorbidity did your "friends without the vaccine" have?
- empressplay 5y ago
  That's incredibly unlucky! I know several people who got Covid pre-vaccine (including myself) and we're all still alive. Although it wasn't exactly a party and most of us (including myself) have been vaccinated since so we could be fairly certain we wouldn't get it again.
- xkbarkar 5y ago
  - sroussey 5y ago
    not
Taywee 5y ago
The vaccines were never purported to be 100% effective, and all the data and information was clear that they had lower effectiveness against Delta, and even lower against Omicron. If people told you that the vaccines would lower your chances of contracting every known major variant and lower your chances of a serious illness, they were right. If they told you that the vaccines were guaranteed to completely prevent every variant of the virus, they were lying to you. If you heard the former but interpreted it as the latter, that's on you.
- 5y ago

benjaminwootton 5y ago

Surely this is the end of the pandemic? With an estimated 300k+ cases per day here in the UK, that is 10 million this month on top of everyone who has already had it. It’s as though nobody is ready to acknowledge the elephant in the room that Covid is nearly finished. Or am I missing something?

kuroguro 5y ago
I really hope so. The hospitalizations usually lag behind case detection AFAIK, so there might still be some damage to watch out for.
- rytcio 5y ago
  People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving. It's been almost two months. It's time to stop hoping for doom and gloom and accept that it's over.
  - magicalist 5y ago
    > People have been talking about how hospitalization numbers are lagged since before Thanksgiving People have been saying that since 2020, but if you're talking about the current variant, omicron wasn't even given the omicron designation until the day after Thanksgiving.
  - archagon 5y ago
    It is quite offensive to suggest that anyone is “hoping for doom and gloom.”
etchalon 5y ago
I'm not sure if we can say it's "over". People were saying the same thing after the Delta waves started subsiding and behold … Omicron.
- monological 5y ago

time_to_smile 5y ago

I don't think it matters if omicron is ultimately worse or not, nobody cares anymore. I was out visiting a gym yesterday, in an area with sky rocketing cases, and no one was wearing masks. They talked multiple times about how much they cared about health, without even a hint of irony. I was initially put off, but realized that this is just the world we're in. In two weeks we'll find out if the calculus of lower death rate x higher case count means anything, but even if it turns out to be a complete disaster with record deaths, I just don't see anyone caring. Pandemic is done after omicron no matter what. We already largely ignore deaths from climate change (which depending on your calculations can easily be as high globally as covid), we don't even speculate on deaths from environmental pollution. Covid is just another environmental hazard that we will accept like any other.

systemvoltage 5y ago
I have a feeling we are gonna want more things to worry about. Done with the pandemic? Let’s latch on to something to make sure 1) You have no kids 2) We keep increasing the power of the government measures 3) Equality meaning we stoop to the lowest level, not bring up the baseline 4) Keep eroding the standard of living. Even if we are a space faring civilization, these people will make it uncool to “pollute” space or would be against fusion power if we are able. I can already see progressives against SpaceX. No optimism for you!
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > No optimism for you! This is a weird observation to make. Optimism is by far the dominant ideology in our society and has been for well over 300 or so years. Even currently when you browse mainstream media news postings the vast majority of the articles focus on how mild omicron is and how people should get to back to work. I'll agree that the media makes plenty of money pedaling anxiety but real pessimism is nearly forbidden in everything from mainstream media to academic philosophy (seriously, Schopenhauer is basically it and he's much more of a buddhist than a true pessimist, the majority of German pessimist thinker remain untranslated in English). Reacting to any observation of concerning data as "against optimism!" speaks more to a prevalence of hard denial than the rise of true pessimism.

callumprentice 5y ago

Can anyone point me to a reliable source that explains in layman's terms why one cancels out the other and it's not possible to have both (say) delta and omicron at once. Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)

gpm 5y ago
> could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;) You overestimate our abilities to make viruses that do what we want, let alone to make viruses that do what we want and won't evolve into viruses that do what we don't want after being released into the wild. This is also basically saying "can't we make a transmissible vaccine", and as much as I like vaccine mandates, I think there would be significant ethical issues with that.
- deleted 5y ago
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- tkahnoski 5y ago
  A bit of a sidebar this was basically the plot of The Last Ship. With infrastructure of the world crumbling how do you distribute immunity without the manufacturing infrastructure. So yeah I'd put it in a 'last ditch Hail Mary to save the world' type of plan...
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I feel like I recall at least one worm that somebody released that would infect servers, patch the vulnerability that it used to get in, infect other vulnerable servers, then delete itself.
hogrider 5y ago
Just a no sources comment: you can get confection of the flu and covid or any variant with any other variant at the same time. It's just over time one variant out competes the others because it's more fit.

bratwurst3000 5y ago

Just giving my 2 cents. Got boosted 3 weeks ago. Now I have covid. Everything is fine, feels like the least ill i ever was from anything. But I wanted to state that omnicron is a beast. I did wear a ffp2 mask with nearly every social contact and if we didnt wear mask we would test ourself. I am sure I got it from the streets from people passing by. That said I am in the french alps and it was vacation time here. And until now it was rare to know someone who has covid …. Now it feels like people who dont have it are getting rare I hope so much this is the entrypoint for an endemic situation

contravariant 5y ago
Why are you hoping for Covid to become endemic?
- deleted 5y ago
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- bratwurst3000 5y ago
  Honestly I hope that one day it is gone for good but until then an endemic situation would be somehow better than a pandemic one. I didnt say that clearly and hoping for a, also, bad situation is not the best thing to whish for but after 2 years of pandemic I am whishing for something less bad….
- betterunix2 5y ago
  At this point that is the best case. COVID zero is a pipe dream, there are just too many vaccine refusers and too many people refusing to do anything to avoid spreading the virus. If COVID follows the typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous, we can get back to normal life -- the question is how long that will take.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    > typical evolutionary pattern of viruses and becomes less dangerous Wishful thinking (that I hope comes true). Ebola got more lethal, not less.

mperham 5y ago

The metrics presentation on the page are very misleading. The use of color is confusing (red generally means bad or getting worse, green means good or getting better). The up/down arrows are seemingly red or blue arbitrarily. Why are the four rows each colored differently? Just a bizarre UI. If you have to present data to a user, please read a book by Edward Tufte first. His books will change your entire perspective, e.g. https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

frebord 5y ago

The spread is so fast, all charts now look insane and would be terrifying if not for the mild symptoms. I wonder if it is possible for a virus to wipe itself out by spreading so quickly that it ends up with very few left to infect, assuming it doesn't mutate enough in time.

Marazan 5y ago

Omicron has probably saved Florida (andnother southern states) from a horrendous Delta winter wave.

rhino369 5y ago
I'm skeptical. The 2020 Winter wave started in October. But cases were decreasing of flat Oct. and Nov. with barely any mitigations in place. There was some sign of an increase in very late nov. and early december. Whether that is an early sign of a wave, a thanksgiving bump, or signs of Omicron spreading, it's hard to tell. But it Florida and the South had a high degree of immunity to delta even pre omicron.
- Marazan 5y ago
  The 2021 Summer peaks in the south were much later than the equivalent 2020 summer peaks. In 2020 Florida peaked in mid July. In 2021 they only started coming down in Early September. This would push their winter peaks back as acquired immunity would fade at a later point.

dheera 5y ago

What does 100% prevalence mean? 100% of people are at least silent carriers?

lsaferite 5y ago
Based on the chart it's 100% of the positive tests being Omnicron.
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tedkz 5y ago

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ecf 5y ago

Is this the part in Plague Inc where the virus infects everyone and then mutates into a 99% chance of death monster?

dehrmann 5y ago

With all the restrictions over the past two years, have we been selecting for hyper-contagious strains?

convolvatron 5y ago
yes. would letting the original strains run amok freely have been better? I guess more people would have died, but it would have been over sooner.
- martythemaniak 5y ago
  Some places have been pretty close to "let it run amok", ie indifference by the population and government, widespread antivax sentiment, etc. I'm talking about places like Bulgaria, Russia, etc. They have seen around 0.75% of the population die. Letting the original run freely would have likely cost at least 1% of the population, plus the long covid, lack of treatment for other conditions etc.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Death counts are also hard to compare because earlier variants already killed a lot of high-risk people. Would we rather have a widespread epidemic we know less about and can control or a less deadly one we have treatments for, but have limited control over? It's hard to say. It'll be interesting to see what happens with omicron in China where they're trying their hardest to control it.

listless 5y ago

Everyone in my house had COVID in September and now we all have it again. Vaccinated, boosted, prior infection - none of it matters when it comes to avoiding the virus. I think we’re at the point where the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.

chasd00 5y ago
i don't know why the parent was modded down. It seems to me the governments are beginning to change the narrative to "the virus is part of life and the best we can do is get back to living.".

rubyist5eva 5y ago

If the studies suggesting that Omicron antibodies help protect against the Delta variant, and Omicron seems much more mild in comparison - looks like we're seeing an actual possibility of an end to the pandemic (at least to the point where we deal with COVID like we do with cold and flu season instead of shutting down the world).

romaniv 5y ago

I highly recommend everyone here to watch these two cannels for Covid news and analysis: https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching https://www.youtube.com/c/Campbellteaching https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1 https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1 The first one is a bit more user-friendly, the second one goes more in-depth into mechanics and research, but neither peddle fear or moralism. There is actually quite a bit of positive news lately: Omicron uses two different ways to enter cells. This is part of why it's so transmissible, but it's also why it is less severe: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-different-it-uses-two:7 https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/omicron-science-is-differ... Omicron generates some immunity for Delta, so it is likely to displace Delta entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLbJ0H8zdc Most Omicron hospitalization are accidental so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2VgBm9pTI

intrasight 5y ago

I am reminded of "Don't Look Up" scene: It is going to happen. Exactly. 99.78% to be exact. Oh, great. Okay, so it’s not 100%. Well, scientists never like to say 100%.

asdfsd234234444 5y ago
aside: that movie was absolutely terrible and cringey

ostenning 5y ago

What are covid hospitalization rates for children currently?

joelbondurant1 5y ago

openasocket 5y ago

I'd love to see a numbers breakdown estimating the impact Omicron would have on the US if we had a nearly complete (say 90%) vaccination rate. How many infections would we be seeing, how many hospitalizations, how many people in the ICU? How much would this strain our healthcare system? And how would that compare with, say, the flu?

xkbarkar 5y ago
Iceland is 92% vaccinated double and I think 60% of them triple. Half the famn population is in isoliation because of infection. Feel free to check their covid stats in covid.is ( they have an english version ). Most hospitalized are fully vaccinated ( 2 or 3 ) Most serious cases are unvaccinated, HOWEVER. Out of 34 hospitalized with c19 6 were patients in cardiology that got infected in the hospital and had to be tranferred to c19. Authorities have not wanted to comment if any of the serious c19 cases came from people who were already seriously ill, already hospitalized and not vaccinated due to that. Since the ICU numbers are so small, this significance is easily skewed. Much less hospitalizations than the models predicted.
- xkbarkar 5y ago
  Id like to add. C19 severity has a very clear link to obesity, Iceland is one of europes most obese peoples. If omicron is not filling the iceland c19 ward ( I think we are up to 30 patiens out of thousands of active cases ). then I think this wave will pass as more of a scare than anything else. It certainly disproves the usefulness of vaccine passports. But that particular science is of course not followed. Sigh

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namelessoracle 5y ago

Serious question. If Omicron was the initial variant of Covid 19, would we have seen shut downs and the level of global response we did? Is the thought it's only this level of mildness because of vaccination rates? My gut is that the answer would be yes because this variant targets children more effectively.

bagacrap 5y ago
define "targets". Transmissibility or actual harm? Children are at no more risk of harm from this variant than any other AFAIK.

yeswecatan 5y ago

I have no idea how to read this website. Could someone break this down for me?

clcaev 5y ago

Don't forget about long covid. My covid infection was mostly gone in 3 days; yet 7 days after that I'm in the ER for peripheral neuropathy. Several days later I am still here with perhaps permanent loss of function. There are a few other youngsters like me with covid complications on the neurology floor, most with less than 2 comorbidities. Oh yea, the ER was packed, 6h to triage.

redanddead 5y ago
Wasn't there some kind of anticoagulant therapy that helped persons with long covid? it was posted here yesterday I think
- damontal 5y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357428572_Combined_triple_treatment_of_fibrin_amyloid_microclots_and_platelet_pathology_in_individuals_with_Long_COVID_Post-Acute_Sequelae_of_COVID-19_PASC_can_resolve_their_persistent_symptoms https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357428572_Combined_...
cheeze 5y ago
Were you vaccinated when you caught it? Hope your body recovers over time friend.
aarongray 5y ago
Sorry to hear about your peripheral neuropathy. Check out some of the treatments for dysautonomia. There are some cutting edge treatments that have been developed over the past few years, they just haven't become mainstream knowledge or trickled down to the medical schools yet. The two most effective approaches are using neuroplasticity exercises to retrain the limbic system (cheap, but time consuming - an hour a day for 6 months): https://ansrewire.com/ https://ansrewire.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/ https://retrainingthebrain.com/ Or doing microcurrent neurofeedback (costs ~$150 a session, do one session a week for a couple months): https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/ https://microcurrentneurofeedback.com/ Essentially you have got to get the brain producing the proper amount and type of brain waves again, and then once you have that, slowly work back into exercising while trying to avoid triggers and push / crash cycles.

dqpb 5y ago

It’s amazing how China has apparently been almost untouched by the pandemic since end of March 2020.

troyvit 5y ago

People seem to see this as another sign that the pandemic is either getting worse or almost over. I just see it as another reason not to use Tableau.

ptx 5y ago

> we have plenty of N95’s in supply. We also have KN95s for kids. Are they buying Chinese masks for the kids? Or is there an American "for kids" N95 standard that creates a name collision with the Chinese KN95 standard?

luhn 5y ago
NIOSH (the agency behind the N95 standard) has not approved any type of facemask for children, so any "N95 for kids" mask would be counterfeit.
wffurr 5y ago
The child-size masks I have for my three year old are all KF94s from Korea. https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ https://bonafidemasks.com/childrens-face-masks/ lists small-size KN95s from China and an uncertified mask from an N95 manufacturer.

denton-scratch 5y ago

That article doesn't seem to say anything about "100% prevalence".

tamaharbor 5y ago

Imagine if ‘scientists’ named every variant of the cold or flu.