Coronavirus general discussion and chit-chat

The Quarantine Zone
1485

I am really at a loss about how to assess risk now. There are no statewide mask restrictions anymore in my state. They can be imposed again on a more local basis based on how hospitals are doing.

One of my kids had a sore throat and sniffles at the end of last week. We kept him home, as required by his school. We tested him twice with home tests, but we were concerned that they won’t pick up the b.2 Omicron, so we called the doctor’s office. They didn’t recommend getting him tested. The mass testing sites are closed down, so the only way to get a PCR test would be to pay for it, I think. The school has changed their policy so that now, he could go back to school after a day of no symptoms, so he was back in school today. No idea if he had mild Covid or just a mild cold.

The kids’ birthday is coming up, and we were discussing what to do about masks at an indoor venue. I really don’t know what to think about making the kids they see in school every day wear masks except when eating.

1486

Looks like the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) is reporting a day early this week because of the Easter Holidays. Here’s the BBC update - about one person in 15 has the virus this week:

About 4.4 million people had the virus in their body in the week up to 9 April, down from nearly 4.9 million the week before…

…The study, which uses its own testing, gives the clearest indication of the virus’s spread since free testing ended in England.

It tests thousands of people at random - whether or not they have symptoms - to estimate how much virus there is in the country.

The article has a handy graphical summary of test results going back to October 21. Just eyeballing it, I would say that the average weekly figure going back to the start of the year is about 3.5 million. As many (most?) cases are likely to be (close to?) asymptomatic, I’ll guess that, on average, testing would give a positive result for about a week for each infection - it’s an assumption that simplifies the math. (I have no idea how reasonable some of these assumptions are, but go with me here, as we head to a ballpark figure.)

OK, that’s 3.5 million x 14 weeks = 49 million = 73% of the UK population.

Alright, I admitted some assumptions are iffy. I don’t know which tests were used. I’m not accounting for re-infections. And so on - it’s all very sloppy, I admit, but I just wanted, for myself, some idea of what these results represent. Maybe I’m out by 50 %. Or more. But it’s hard to get away from this: a staggering proportion of the country has had COVID since the start of the year. Even if they are unaware of it.

We have 20 000 people in hospital with (not necessarily because of) COVID. 300 or so are on ventilators. (Source). Vaccination rates are high. Masking in (eg) stores is now the exception - sometimes very much the exception - rather than the rule.

Og protect us from another disastrous variant, but it’s starting to feel like the endgame now.

j

1487

To add some context to this. More than half of those 20,000 are in hospital for some other reason, They just happen to be Covid positive. Same for deaths and ICU’s.
That is always likely to be the case with a virus circulating as widely, and as closely-monitored as Covid. You are going to see patterns in the data that warrant some extra context in order to understand them.
Current ICU levels are probably the most pressing concern and they are running at a fraction of what they were from Aug 21 to Jan 22.

I’m honestly not sure that the reported numbers now have any great meaning in their simplest expression. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the UK and other countries dial down the level of data publicity over the summer period or find a more relevant way of expressing it.

1488

[I don’t think a separate thread is needed for this question, so I’ll add it here.]

Is there some reason they haven’t given the BA.2 variant its own Greek letter? It seems to be causing its own surges in infection numbers, so you’d think it was worthy of top billing.

1489

A coworker tested positive for COVID, so everyone in the office needs to take a test. I’m only in the office once a week, and I seldom see this person. Actually, I seldom see but a couple of coworkers. Anyway, I took a test this morning and it came back negative.

I’m a little concerned the tests may have passed their expiry dates; but I did see a strong control line, so I assume it’s working.

1490

Seems to be as much an art as a science when it comes to COVID variant naming. From a recent Atlantic article:

BA.1 and BA.2 have caused big, successive waves in parts of Europe. The two subvariants are actually quite distinct from each other, almost as evolutionarily divergent as Alpha was from Delta. But the WHO decided back in February that BA.2 should still be considered Omicron, and more recently, it decided BA.4 and BA.5 should be too. Could an Omicron subvariant look and behave so differently that it actually should get a new Greek letter? In retrospect, BA.2 falls in a somewhat debatable zone: The BA.2 wave got as big, if not bigger, than the original BA.1 wave in some European countries, but it’s not looking to be quite as dramatic yet in the U.S. There’s a balance, O’Toole said, between giving a lineage a name as soon as possible and giving it a name when you know its epidemiological importance. The earlier we try to designate variants with Greek-letter names, the less we know about what they’re potentially capable of. The WHO has also designated many variants of interest—Epsilon, Eta, Iota, and Lambda, to name a few—that did not end up making a big epidemiological impact.

The article doesn’t go into exactly what the WHO’s reasoning was in keeping several current variants under the Omicron name. But that last sentence in the quote above – assigning Greek letters to past variants that didn’t do much epidemiologically – might have something to do with the WHO’s stance on naming current variants. Speculatively, maybe they simply don’t want to burn through all the Greek alphabet quite so fast.

1491

My post-vacation COVID19 test was negative!
Imgur

1492

Had fun on vacation?

1493

Stayed masked!

1494

“Are you sure the test was negative?”

“I’m not just sure, I’m HIV positive!”

Sorry, sorry, awful South Park joke that makes me laugh anyway.

1495

You should have been covering more than your face, mister!

1496

Okay, here’s a question that just occurred to me: has there been a superspreader event linked to the NBA that I haven’t heard of? The league recently finished a normal 82 game season played by 30 teams at crowded indoor stadiums with minuscule rates of mask wearing, even in the north, and with how contagious Omicron and its variants are, I’m really surprised that I haven’t heard the media making hay out of some kind of case explosion lined to basketball.

1497

Sure, as long as you can separate all of the college basketball game, high school basketball games, bars, restaurants, private parties, Christmas parties, concerts, parts of the country with no mask mandates…

By Omicron, my city still had a mask mandate, but it was the only place in the state. Kids wore them in schools but not elsewhere.

It’s like the dike has a thousand holes in it and you’re trying to map out the effects of the little boy taking his finger out of the dike and creating a thousand and one. Superspreader events in January 2022 are not something I think possible or even particularly worthy to track.

1498

Huh, this is counterintuitive to me. Because the risk is spread out among multiple places and events instead of this one thing that’s going on?

1499

I’d guess it’s because omicron was so very contagious that every event was a superspreader event.

1500

In January 2022, “life in the United States” was a superspreader event. Omicron made the virus pervasive, and not something readily avoided by just being careful (short of near-total isolation). Cross-posted from the ‘2022 Breaking News’ thread:

Sixty percent of Americans, including 75 percent of children, had been infected with the coronavirus by February , federal health officials reported on Tuesday — another remarkable milestone in a pandemic that continues to confound expectations.

The highly contagious Omicron variant was responsible for much of the toll. In December 2021, as the variant began spreading, only half as many people had antibodies indicating prior infection, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the numbers came as a shock to many Americans, some scientists said they had expected the figures to be even higher, given the contagious variants that have marched through the nation over the past two years.

There may be good news in the data, some experts said. A gain in population-wide immunity may offer at least a partial bulwark against future waves. And the trend may explain why the surge that is now roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States.

1501

Another fake vaxxine card seller busted:

1502

About fucking time.

The FDA also announced plans to meet June 7 with its advisers — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee — to discuss an emergency authorization request for a coronavirus vaccine made by Novavax for people 18 and older. A vocal group of investors and some people who say they prefer the more traditional vaccine technology have been pushing for access to that vaccine for months.

(I plucked a random paragraph hidden in an article about something else.)

1503

It makes absolute sense to me that as the Omicron strains are milder and people are more protected, those who do die are those for whom even a mild illness is problematic. The same way it would be for the flu.

1504

Speaking as someone whose mother died of omicron, it wasn’t a “mild” illness for her. I find that language problematic, suggesting that someone was hanging on by a thread and just faded away from a light cough.

My mother was profoundly immunocompromised, but otherwise in okay shape. She had recently had some bleeding from a stomach ulcer that was treated and healed quite quickly and normally, for instance.

But because she was immunocompromised, even though she’d been vaccinated and boosted, omicron roared through her, and did tons of damage. It was a horrible death, too. (In many ways i wish she hadn’t been treated for that ulcer. That would have been a quick and peaceful death, not the long, painful horror that she had to go through.) I think that’s common among those who actually die (or are hospitalized) of omicron.

Better to say that omicron is usually mild, or “less aggressive”, or some such language.