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Covid 44: The Sickening


Mlle. Zabzie

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4 hours ago, Zorral said:

"America’s Omicron Wave Already Looks More Severe Than Europe’s'

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/americas-omicron-wave-now-looks-more-severe-than-europes.html

Depressing read.  The fact that the US is just below its previous hospitalisation peak is very bad.

11 hours ago, Heartofice said:

John Burn-Murdoch, who seems to be everyone’s go to guy for covid graphs these days, uses the the phrase without blinking.

It is all over the place.  Doesn't make it right.

Raja/Fragile Bird.  I don't have the words.

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1 hour ago, HoodedCrow said:

Someone told me that Ontario increased its boosted population by the rumors that a passport would be required at government run liquor and cannabis stores. It’s probably true, and it’s a method:)

Quebec announced that people could not go to cannabis or liquor stores if they weren’t vaccinated and the rate of first vaccinations jumped from 1,500 a day to 6,000 a day. The Minister has now announced that they will expand the ban to other places like grocery stores next, and the final step would likely be to make vaccinations mandatory. He also said he expects other provinces to follow their lead.

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9 hours ago, Zorral said:

"America’s Omicron Wave Already Looks More Severe Than Europe’s'

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/americas-omicron-wave-now-looks-more-severe-than-europes.html

Um, that decoupling thang?

 

I don't even think it's decoupling in the UK. 7-day moving average for deaths has been going up in the UK since 30 Dec. There still appears to be a link between number of cases and number of deaths. Decoupling means no link between case numbers and deaths, what we still seem to be seeing is a change in the ratio between case numbers and deaths. But that's not decoupling. I thought there might be a decoupling because global infections had been rising for a while and deaths were beginning to fall, but it looks like globally deaths may have bottomed out and are going to start rising again. Even in South Africa deaths went up. So there does not appear to be a decoupling yet, because of Omicron, just a re-rating.

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3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Quebec announced that people could not go to cannabis or liquor stores if they weren’t vaccinated and the rate of first vaccinations jumped from 1,500 a day to 6,000 a day. The Minister has now announced that they will expand the ban to other places like grocery stores next, and the final step would likely be to make vaccinations mandatory. He also said he expects other provinces to follow their lead.

I guess as long as un-vaxed can click and collect it's OK. But people gotta eat, I am not keen on making it harder for people to get the basics for needing to just live. Make the luxuries harder to enjoy as an incentive, sure, but not the bare necessities.

This worries me more for the fact that Canada has slightly better vax rates than us (as does Aus) which indicates a direction of travel here if Omicron leaks in from the border. The vast majority of cases we're picking up at the border are omicron now, so it's a ticking time bomb that we are waiting to go off, knowing it can't be kept out for too long. We need to get the vulnerable age groups and demographics boosted, and we need to get the population boost from the 5-11s vaxxing which will be starting in just over a week. If we can keep omicron out until the end of Feb at least we have a chance to get the most vulnerable boosted and the total population at least single vaxed up to 90% (80% single vaxed as of now). 95% of eligible people are already singe vaxed 92% double vaxed, so we are running out of road among the current eligible population ro bump our overal % up substantially.

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In the meantime the governments of both the UK and the USA have said, 'We quit. It's too hard. We don't know what to do, so you figure it out yourselves, individually.  By-by, gone fishin'."  Cannot express my anger, and more particularly my sheer disgust.

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Appointment for the 6 yr old for vaccination on Thursday. Never so glad to request a half days annual leave that wasn’t for a holiday. Think I’m going to bring her to the Disney store afterwards

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15 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

This worries me more for the fact that Canada has slightly better vax rates than us (as does Aus) which indicates a direction of travel here if Omicron leaks in from the border. 

I think the big issue for both Aus and NZ is that because the outbreaks in both countries have been so (comparitively) small the unvaccinated populations in both are basically entirely naive. So a good 10% of adults - hundreds of thousands of people in NZ, and millions in Aus are completely unprotected. Those people alone is enough to completely overwhelm the healthcare system, let alone the breakthrough infections. Most overseas countries dealing with large outbreaks would have had the virus rip through those populations already.

And before anyone mentions it no - this doesn't make the letting it rip through the unvaccinated populations previously a good strategy either. Is basically having the vulnerable not be vulnerable by being already dead.

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36 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

I think the big issue for both Aus and NZ is that because the outbreaks in both countries have been so (comparitively) small the unvaccinated populations in both are basically entirely naive. So a good 10% of adults - hundreds of thousands of people in NZ, and millions in Aus are completely unprotected. Those people alone is enough to completely overwhelm the healthcare system, let alone the breakthrough infections. Most overseas countries dealing with large outbreaks would have had the virus rip through those populations already.

And before anyone mentions it no - this doesn't make the letting it rip through the unvaccinated populations previously a good strategy either. Is basically having the vulnerable not be vulnerable by being already dead.

And suggesting letting it rip 18 months ago (even 8 months ago), based on the omicron characteristics making it difficult to do anything else, before anyone had any idea that a variant like omicron would exist is the most 20/20 hindsight thinking that there could ever be. Even if every unvaccinated person in the country gets COVID this year, and a proportion of vaccinated people die from it, it is unlikely we will have more deaths than we would have with a no mandatory measures and some firm guidance approach. And economically it does not appear that countries that took strong mandatory measures suffered any worse than countries that took few mandatory measures.

I still believe that future historians with an objective perspective will conclude that countries that took decisive and mandatory action came through the pandemic in better shape than those which did.

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"We Talked to the NYC Student Whose Post About High School Life Under Omicron Went Viral"

 

Slate: What do you hope people get out of reading your Reddit post?

Josh: One of the intents was to—I wouldn’t say laugh, but just recognize a certain level of absurdity in the way that school is being managed right now. I think the most important thing is that when people look at the issue of closing schools, they’re really only looking at the health side of it. It’s a black-and-white discussion—people are either saying “you’re risking students’ health” or “it’s just idiotic to close schools.” It seems that there’s little nuance. But just with the sheer volume of cases, it makes it impossible for there to be actual learning conditions at school.

Josh Marshall, one of those who made this kid's post go viral, who has two school age children, who are both home with Covid, says the schools are entirely effed up and indeed, there is no such thing as learning going on.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/01/schools-open-closed-omicron-covid-staffing-shortages.html

Quote

 

.... For one high school student, though, the issue is much more practical. COVID “has completely taken over any function of daily school life,” wrote a sophomore in a Reddit post last week, titled “I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation is Beyond Control.” The post quickly went viral for its level of detail on what school is actually like right now. (The student asked to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Josh, after his Reddit handle. But we confirmed his identity.) In the post, he describes how his week after winter break was upended by teacher absences, as cases in the city hit an all-time high. The school day is filled with empty classes, and extra study hall periods in which students gather in an auditorium where there is “functionally no learning occurring.” (After the second study hall in a row, Josh and some of his peers realized that the “health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium” and left.)

We spoke to Josh on Saturday about how omicron has changed things at his high school, what he wishes administrators would do right now, and what it’s like to have peers test positive during the school day itself. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. ....

 

 

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19 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

My ex who I broke up with for refusing vaccination now has Covid

I have seen this play out with so many workmates it's despicable. So many spouting their shit and refusing to be responsible.......then taking no stock in their role towards the spreading, spreading, spreading.........onto us all.

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24 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I glimpsed a headline about Omnicom and Delta combing for the new mutant virus Delticom or some such near future threat lurking.

Recombination events are always possible. However I've seen several experts on covid / bioinformatic analysis who believe that the Delta / Omincron sequence getting press at the moment is almost certainly a sequencing error as a result of sample contamination.

I haven't done buckets of sequencing myself - though analysis of bacterial genomes is a thing I do have some experience with after someone has curated them for me. When you sequence a sample you (generally*) don't get one clean long read of a genome. You get many many, many much smaller (hopefully) overlapping reads which then have to be pieced back together. You run these through an automated pipeline which then assembles these into a single genome. If you've got a few closely related things mixed in together it can get very messy and difficult to parse. This can then make it look like recombination events which haven't actually occured, have.

*Unless you're doing long read sequencing which is too error prone to make these kind of conclusions from anyway.

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11 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

I think the big issue for both Aus and NZ is that because the outbreaks in both countries have been so (comparitively) small the unvaccinated populations in both are basically entirely naive. So a good 10% of adults - hundreds of thousands of people in NZ, and millions in Aus are completely unprotected. Those people alone is enough to completely overwhelm the healthcare system, let alone the breakthrough infections. Most overseas countries dealing with large outbreaks would have had the virus rip through those populations already.

Thing is, outbreaks are looking completely different across countries. UK's outbreak is worse than S. Africa's and US outbreak definitively worse than UK's. Why the difference?

At the same time, Denmark outbreak is as old as UK's and they aren't seen any strain and they did have low levels of infections and the fraction of boosted population is not much higher than US.  I was reading some days ago they had around 50 persons in ICU with Delta and 5 with Omicron (they know) and epidemiologists do not consider Omicron worse than the flu but they are reluctant to easy the comparatively light restrictions. So uh?

39 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I glimpsed a headline about Omnicom and Delta combining for the new mutant virus Delticom or some such near future threat lurking.

Lab error most likely from what I read in twitter.

Anyway. It's something to keep a watch. I said earlier that Omicron is likely unstoppable but it doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. Doing something even light things might help to decrease the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 and reduce the risk of recombinants, pushing other nasty variants in the path of extinctions.

Probably you have seen that Marseille's variant with lots of mutations too, which popped up in Canada too. Yes, it's not of concern right now, but letting things like that to spread is an unnecessary risk.

 

 

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54 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Thing is, outbreaks are looking completely different across countries. UK's outbreak is worse than S. Africa's and US outbreak definitively worse than UK's. Why the difference?

At the same time, Denmark outbreak is as old as UK's and they aren't seen any strain and they did have low levels of infections and the fraction of boosted population is not much higher than US.  I was reading some days ago they had around 50 persons in ICU with Delta and 5 with Omicron (they know) and epidemiologists do not consider Omicron worse than the flu but they are reluctant to easy the comparatively light restrictions. So uh?

Yep the infection dynamics are definitely strange. Many Asian countries aren't getting big omicron outbreaks either. Still the complete naivity of the unvaccinated population here does worry me.

As at a week ago (last stats I could find) in NSW (Sydney) approx 50% of the ICU patients were completely unvaccinated. That's in a population with a 95% adult vaccination rate. Be interesting to see what happens when they update those numbers. Looking at the numbers you'd have to currently think somewhere between 12-25% of Sydney has been infected.

Edit: I guess this is all baked in here now we've got an outbreak of this scale. But there's still time for NZ to learn. Be balancing game of giving yourself time to get the most vulnerable boosted, but at the same time not wanting this to hit during winter. Though I doubt they can keep it out that long anyway.

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