6 ms·

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
  Hm, that's [that 'bear in mind'] correct: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/about-data#daily-and-cumulative-numbers-of-patients-admitted-to-hospital https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/about-data#daily-and... Just wanted to check that since (at at least one London hospital) they're on different wards (as in, even discounting that obviously you don't want 'broken leg with covid' on a general 'broken bones' ward with neg/query patients) so seems odd to me they'd report data like that vs. those needing treatment for it.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    My understanding is, there's a fair few people at hospital with "bad Covid" who aren't in Intensive Care. For example, if you have steroids and Remdesivir given to you, you already need to be hospitalised. So there's at least three categories: people with really bad Covid, people with Covid bad enough they can't be at home, but not (at the time) awful, and people who don't suffer with Covid at all but could infect others, and something else is wrong with them. I think they are all challenging to the healthcare system in different ways. Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Yeah, at the one I'm familiar with it's (as far as I know and not necessarily limited to) may-need-intensive-care; intensive-care; out-of-intensive-care; and isolation (the covid+, but only there for the broken leg example). > Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate. Absolutely, and it's all too easy to make 'obvious' armchair policy..! I was just a bit surprised since my assumption would be it counted the relevant wards (if it were up to me, I think that would be the first three; only not the isolation-but-there-for-something-else).
sebow 5y ago
More cases means usually faster ability to spread, which again usually indicates that the virus is getting milder, so to answer you first q: yes.At this point covid realistically cannot be eradicated, i would say even if you achieve 80%+ vaccination rate worldwide(which we won't).To answer your second question i doubt we'll have more hospitalizations than delta.And to also state the obvious: by the time we get a 'jab' against omicron, we'll have another variant out there, whether identified & named or not.
rocqua 5y ago
Scary thing is. Milder disease is a constant factor improvement in hospitalization. But faster spreading (higher R value) is an exponential worsening in hospitalization. It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.
- tomp 5y ago
  Maybe but “exponential growth” is a conspiracy theory promoted by epidemiologists. In reality, growth follows the S-curve, so a milder, faster spreading disease will also saturate the population (flatten the S-curve) much sooner, so overall the impact will be much less.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    You want to keep the number of cases in a range that the health care system still can deal with. Reaching the the flat part of an S-curve (i.e. infecting everyone as fast as possible) is NOT desirable because that leads to many cases in very short term.
    - ngcc_hk 5y ago
      That what I hope for. It looks like uk is like this. But is USA like this?
  - KSteffensen 5y ago
    I've seen this argument elsewhere and I don't get it. From my understanding the limitation on exponential growth, the flattening of the top part of the S-curve, comes from total population. There is no one left to infect, basically. If the rising part of the S-curve is steep, that means people get infected within a shorter timespan and a corresponding higher load on hospital beds and healthcare personnel, which is what we are trying to avoid with the lockdowns. What am I missing? Also, calling exponential growth a 'conspiracy theory' seems unnecessary
ror_shubham 5y ago
Its milder than Delta but way more transmissible. The more people get this, more will be the chances of a new variant which can be more deadly/transmissible.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  If this is all so likely and rapid, why does this not happen constantly every single year? Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak when it seems like with so many humans we should see some super virus come up constantly.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    It does happen from time to time, but it's usually not _quite_ right. In the last couple of decades, there've been at least four or five pandemic false alarms, mostly flu variants. In the event, none of them quite made it. But now that covid _has_ made it, minor variations on the already-very-dangerous-thing can be a big problem.
  - trhway 5y ago
    >Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak why long? The EcoAlliance's gain-of-function (with the "Human Subjects Included" checked) NIH grant for Wuhan started in 2014, the human-specific DNA modifications of the virus were described in the EcoAlliance's 2018 DARPA grant proposal, and in the end of 2019 - voila! With regard to omicron - we may be also witnessing the continuation of the same magic of the fast "gain-of-function" by the virus : https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/omicron-variant-may-have-picked-up-piece-common-cold-virus-2021-12-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... "By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints. This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease."
    - 5y ago
monksy 5y ago
No...@ that's good right Fewer % hospitalizations, but you have a much larger population getting it in a shorter amount of time. When hospitals get oveerwhelmed you're going to get a knock down effect on non-covid issues where medical attention is needed but cannot be provided.
johnchristopher 5y ago
christkv 5y ago
This guy is a uk health professional who go through the numbers in a easy to understand way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfZ62aWf6pk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfZ62aWf6pk It very much looks like Omnicron is an upper respiratory infection vs previous variants that are lower respiratory infections.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Here's a good take on it: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-unquantifiable-challenge-mps-warn-as-expert-says-omicron-variant-will-be-hard-to-outcompete-12507015?postid=3189661#liveblog-body https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-... > Professor Andrew Hayward, of University College London, earlier told Sky News that it is unlikely there will be a variant more severe than Omicron. He said: "This one will be hard to outcompete... given how successful it is." Professor Hayward added that for a "variant to stick", it needs to have "some advantage over the existing variant and that advantage needs to be really in terms of increased transmissibility or escape from immunity". He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe." I thought the virus doesn't care about becoming more or less sever since its transmission capability is all that matters to it and symptoms are hidden (thus increasing transmission between individuals) in the first days of infection and that's what evolution is driving him to be: more transmissible. The fact symptoms appear sooner than delta seems to be a step backward for the virus in terms of efficacy and it's compensated by being way way way more virulent. What am I getting wrong here ? Also: Omicron could as well have been more severe (and the jury is still out on long covid anyway). If there's another variant less virulent but compensated by hiding symptoms longer... then this would take over omicron and this variant could as well be more severe. Is that totally out of the realm of possibilities ? My regular joe thinking tells me that we can only be sure of the direction it's going to take when spring comes. 2021 had 5 vocs, it's only the first days of January.
  - spuz 5y ago
    Yes, I believe the high transmissibility before symptoms appear is the most beneficial trait to Omicron. However, if a variant appeared with exactly the same traits except that it was 10x more deadly, then a lot more people would be taking it more seriously, self-isolating and driving down infections. From an evolutionary perspective, there is an incentive for the virus to become milder rather than more deadly because of how the news of a deadly virus changes human behaviour.
rattray 5y ago
Anecdotally, the hospital my partner works at has been frantically converting almost all of their floors to covid floors due to the influx of patients. But, few require ICU/ventilator. So yes it's bad/dangerous in that hospitals may fill to overflowing and struggle to treat covid or non-covid patients, but not bad in that Omicron is directly killing more people than Delta et al.
hogrider 5y ago
It's still largely the same severity of the original Wuhan variant tho. It's the people getting immunity that's lowered mortality.
- ostenning 5y ago
  Hospitalizations are down 70%, yet in South Africa only 26% of the population is vaccinated, this goes to show that Omicron is less severe than the original variant. The reason for this is Omicron replicates mainly in the upper respiratory areas and does not invade vital organs. This is also why its so contagious.

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
Hm, that's [that 'bear in mind'] correct: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/about-data#daily-and-cumulative-numbers-of-patients-admitted-to-hospital https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/about-data#daily-and... Just wanted to check that since (at at least one London hospital) they're on different wards (as in, even discounting that obviously you don't want 'broken leg with covid' on a general 'broken bones' ward with neg/query patients) so seems odd to me they'd report data like that vs. those needing treatment for it.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  My understanding is, there's a fair few people at hospital with "bad Covid" who aren't in Intensive Care. For example, if you have steroids and Remdesivir given to you, you already need to be hospitalised. So there's at least three categories: people with really bad Covid, people with Covid bad enough they can't be at home, but not (at the time) awful, and people who don't suffer with Covid at all but could infect others, and something else is wrong with them. I think they are all challenging to the healthcare system in different ways. Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Yeah, at the one I'm familiar with it's (as far as I know and not necessarily limited to) may-need-intensive-care; intensive-care; out-of-intensive-care; and isolation (the covid+, but only there for the broken leg example). > Ultimately, if you project a complex situation onto R^1, it can't be too accurate. Absolutely, and it's all too easy to make 'obvious' armchair policy..! I was just a bit surprised since my assumption would be it counted the relevant wards (if it were up to me, I think that would be the first three; only not the isolation-but-there-for-something-else).

sebow 5y ago

More cases means usually faster ability to spread, which again usually indicates that the virus is getting milder, so to answer you first q: yes.At this point covid realistically cannot be eradicated, i would say even if you achieve 80%+ vaccination rate worldwide(which we won't).To answer your second question i doubt we'll have more hospitalizations than delta.And to also state the obvious: by the time we get a 'jab' against omicron, we'll have another variant out there, whether identified & named or not.

rocqua 5y ago

Scary thing is. Milder disease is a constant factor improvement in hospitalization. But faster spreading (higher R value) is an exponential worsening in hospitalization. It's probably better to have a 50% hospitalization rate and an R value of 0.8 than a 5% hospitalization rate and an R value of 2. After 3 'generations' of spreading the second situation already has more hospitalizations.

tomp 5y ago
Maybe but “exponential growth” is a conspiracy theory promoted by epidemiologists. In reality, growth follows the S-curve, so a milder, faster spreading disease will also saturate the population (flatten the S-curve) much sooner, so overall the impact will be much less.
- _Microft 5y ago
  You want to keep the number of cases in a range that the health care system still can deal with. Reaching the the flat part of an S-curve (i.e. infecting everyone as fast as possible) is NOT desirable because that leads to many cases in very short term.
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    That what I hope for. It looks like uk is like this. But is USA like this?
- KSteffensen 5y ago
  I've seen this argument elsewhere and I don't get it. From my understanding the limitation on exponential growth, the flattening of the top part of the S-curve, comes from total population. There is no one left to infect, basically. If the rising part of the S-curve is steep, that means people get infected within a shorter timespan and a corresponding higher load on hospital beds and healthcare personnel, which is what we are trying to avoid with the lockdowns. What am I missing? Also, calling exponential growth a 'conspiracy theory' seems unnecessary

ror_shubham 5y ago

Its milder than Delta but way more transmissible. The more people get this, more will be the chances of a new variant which can be more deadly/transmissible.

Gigachad 5y ago
If this is all so likely and rapid, why does this not happen constantly every single year? Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak when it seems like with so many humans we should see some super virus come up constantly.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  It does happen from time to time, but it's usually not _quite_ right. In the last couple of decades, there've been at least four or five pandemic false alarms, mostly flu variants. In the event, none of them quite made it. But now that covid _has_ made it, minor variations on the already-very-dangerous-thing can be a big problem.
- trhway 5y ago
  >Why did it take so long for one particular virus to leak why long? The EcoAlliance's gain-of-function (with the "Human Subjects Included" checked) NIH grant for Wuhan started in 2014, the human-specific DNA modifications of the virus were described in the EcoAlliance's 2018 DARPA grant proposal, and in the end of 2019 - voila! With regard to omicron - we may be also witnessing the continuation of the same magic of the fast "gain-of-function" by the virus : https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/omicron-variant-may-have-picked-up-piece-common-cold-virus-2021-12-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... "By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints. This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease."
  - 5y ago

monksy 5y ago

No...@ that's good right Fewer % hospitalizations, but you have a much larger population getting it in a shorter amount of time. When hospitals get oveerwhelmed you're going to get a knock down effect on non-covid issues where medical attention is needed but cannot be provided.

johnchristopher 5y ago

christkv 5y ago

This guy is a uk health professional who go through the numbers in a easy to understand way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfZ62aWf6pk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfZ62aWf6pk It very much looks like Omnicron is an upper respiratory infection vs previous variants that are lower respiratory infections.

CodeGlitch 5y ago

Here's a good take on it: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-unquantifiable-challenge-mps-warn-as-expert-says-omicron-variant-will-be-hard-to-outcompete-12507015?postid=3189661#liveblog-body https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-latest-nhs-backlog-is-... > Professor Andrew Hayward, of University College London, earlier told Sky News that it is unlikely there will be a variant more severe than Omicron. He said: "This one will be hard to outcompete... given how successful it is." Professor Hayward added that for a "variant to stick", it needs to have "some advantage over the existing variant and that advantage needs to be really in terms of increased transmissibility or escape from immunity". He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe."

johnchristopher 5y ago
> He said: "There's no advantage to the virus itself becoming more severe." I thought the virus doesn't care about becoming more or less sever since its transmission capability is all that matters to it and symptoms are hidden (thus increasing transmission between individuals) in the first days of infection and that's what evolution is driving him to be: more transmissible. The fact symptoms appear sooner than delta seems to be a step backward for the virus in terms of efficacy and it's compensated by being way way way more virulent. What am I getting wrong here ? Also: Omicron could as well have been more severe (and the jury is still out on long covid anyway). If there's another variant less virulent but compensated by hiding symptoms longer... then this would take over omicron and this variant could as well be more severe. Is that totally out of the realm of possibilities ? My regular joe thinking tells me that we can only be sure of the direction it's going to take when spring comes. 2021 had 5 vocs, it's only the first days of January.
- spuz 5y ago
  Yes, I believe the high transmissibility before symptoms appear is the most beneficial trait to Omicron. However, if a variant appeared with exactly the same traits except that it was 10x more deadly, then a lot more people would be taking it more seriously, self-isolating and driving down infections. From an evolutionary perspective, there is an incentive for the virus to become milder rather than more deadly because of how the news of a deadly virus changes human behaviour.

rattray 5y ago

Anecdotally, the hospital my partner works at has been frantically converting almost all of their floors to covid floors due to the influx of patients. But, few require ICU/ventilator. So yes it's bad/dangerous in that hospitals may fill to overflowing and struggle to treat covid or non-covid patients, but not bad in that Omicron is directly killing more people than Delta et al.

hogrider 5y ago

It's still largely the same severity of the original Wuhan variant tho. It's the people getting immunity that's lowered mortality.

ostenning 5y ago
Hospitalizations are down 70%, yet in South Africa only 26% of the population is vaccinated, this goes to show that Omicron is less severe than the original variant. The reason for this is Omicron replicates mainly in the upper respiratory areas and does not invade vital organs. This is also why its so contagious.