Perhaps there is a misunderstanding and perhaps it’s my fault, but you still are missing the mark completely on the deliverable. I’m asking for some sort of demonstration that Omicron is less severe, all else being equal. We all suspect it to be the case. None of us, other than you, are ready to confirm that that is the case. None of us, other than you, seem to have a problem with waiting until we actually have the proper data to make the final call.
None of your charts show how how vaccination status, nor any other variable (and there are many of them that matter), comes into play. Hell, the last chart actually shows the beginning of a new wave since Omicron. And can we please stop using third, fourth and fifth parties as sources? Your article by Fraser Nelson shows charts purportedly shared without permission from a banking entity named Jeffries Equity Research which is supposed to be using openly available data from South Africa as the source of the graphs. Link to that data and I’ll answer my own questions instead of wasting my time attempting to get answers out of you.
South Africa’s top infectious-disease scientist, who has been leading the country’s pandemic response, said Wednesday that the country had rapidly passed the peak of new omicron cases and, judging by preliminary evidence, he expected “every other country, or almost every other, to follow the same trajectory.”
“If previous variants caused waves shaped like Kilimanjaro, omicron’s is more like we were scaling the North Face of Everest,” Salim Abdool Karim* said in an interview, referring to the near-vertical increase in infections that South Africa recorded in the first weeks of December.
“Now we’re going down, right back down, the South Face — and that is the way we think it may work with a variant like omicron, and perhaps even more broadly what we’ll see with subsequent variants at this stage of the pandemic,” he said.
Also on Wednesday, South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases released a study — not yet peer-reviewed — that bolstered earlier findings from the country that omicron was causing fewer hospitalizations and instances of severe side effects than previous coronavirus variants.
The study found that the omicron variant was 80 percent less likely to lead to hospitalization than the delta variant and that for patients who were hospitalized, the risk of severe illness was 30 percent lower.
* Prof. Karim is a professor at Columbia University as well as at a South African university, and Vice President of the International Science Council.
Optimistic results are starting to come out more quickly now.
Here’s a new study from Scotland that finds a two-thirds reduction in risk of hospitalization for Omicron:
And one from Denmark that finds a 60% reduction in risk of hospitalization.
This research is starting to paint a clearer picture – that the South African results will apply to other countries as well. Also note Prof. Karim’s statement above that he expects the rapid rise and rapid fall of cases to apply to almost every country.
Day by day, we are starting to see that same pattern emerge in the UK and New York too.
Straight from Denmark and a good demonstration of why stand alone twitter feeds and articles from The Spectator are for shit.
Data from Denmark - 11/22-12/14
Vaccination Status (12+ year olds)
Other variants (No. of cases)
Other variants (%)
Omicron (No. of cases)
Omicron (%)
Booster vaccinated
8866
8.6
1851
10.8
Fully vaccinated
67034
65.3
13546
79
Not vaccinated
23492
22.9
1454
8.5
Received first dose
3216
3.1
304
1.8
Total
102608
99.9
17155
100.1
If you look carefully, you’ll see that the unvaccinated are a much smaller portion of the Omicron infected as compared to other variants. So, the results showing simply that Omicron has better outcomes is biased by the fact that a larger portion of the Omicron infected are fully vaccinated and a decent chunk even have the booster shots.
While my fingers are still crossed, we don’t have the necessary data yet, no matter what someone’s brother on TikTok might claim.
Since I spoke specifically to that fact, I’d say that it’s correct that I don’t deny it. I then pointed out a strong correlation that could be causal (but might not be as there are many variables at play, all of which you seem to ignore).
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Want to clarify?
Is there any compelling evidence that omicron is the same or worse than other variants? I find it hard to reject the conclusions of these studies that it results in fewer hospitalizations since the exact same thing is evident in Ontario’s data. Seems like the skepticism is disproportionate against positive news.
I don’t see any skepticism that Omicron is potentially less deadly. What I see is a lot of people saying “we don’t have enough data yet.” This is the part that GW seems to have a problem with. We aren’t disagreeing that it is probably less virulent. The argument is that we don’t know yet, and it is unsafe to act otherwise.
Linking to new studies that show it is less virulent is good evidence that GW’s original suspicion was correct. It does absolutely nothing to support the idea that they were right to assert that as fact before the data was available.
Yes, the data in that table can be interpreted to say that vaccines are good at preventing hospitalization, not that Omicron causes fewer hospitalizations.
From that same study:
1.3% of non-Omicron COVID cases end up in the hospital (after a positive test, or a positive test within 48 hours of admission)
0.5% of Omicron COVID cases end up in the hospital (after a positive test, or a positive test within 48 hours of admission)
Looks great! Fewer Omicron cases in the hospital! Except:
77.1% of non-Omicron cases had vaccination
98.2% of Omicron cases had vaccination
So, maybe Omicron is less likely to result in hospitalization, or maybe having been vaccinated is less likely to result in hospitalization, regardless of COVID variant. Also, Omicron cases skew younger than other variants.
I wish they’d broken down hospitalization rates by vaccination status and age, because without that, the questions of the relative severity of Omicron is impossible to address.
There are some pretty basic statistics that can look at the probability of hospitalization controlling for age and vaccination status. I’m sure researchers are just waiting for a larger N to perform such analyses. The wait will be too long (to answer these questions as quickly as people want), and too short (because COVID cases are on the rise again).
That should be 91.5% of Omicron cases had vaccination (from the table, 8.5% unvaccinated. The situation is further complicated by the fact that, outside of the unvaccinated population, some of the remaining subjects had received 3 shots, some 2 shots, and some one. Stratification would help, but I suspect the numbers are not large enough to do this in a meaningful way - yet.)
The table also doesn’t include prior Covid infection. Omicron also is said to cause reinfection more than other variants. To know its virulence in the abstract, you need to know what the chances of hospitalization are for immunologically “naiive” people. Then you can factor in how it affects the various groups with some degree of protection, and what proportion of the population they are.
…more information from NSW that won’t be clear from the official stats: patients being care for via “hospital at home” have risen from 2058 cases on the 23rd of November to 8356 cases on the 21st of November.
And healthcare workers in isolation have gone from 100 to over 1000.
Oh wow. A friend’s father was put on a “hospital at home” program. It wound up with my friend having to be there with her father all the time, thereby being exposed. And she had to take him back to the hospital several times.
Those healthcare worker numbers are one of the issues I’ve been considering. Even if the illness is relatively mild, there could be a lot of temporary disruption from high numbers of people having to stay home sick and/or quarantining at the same time. Particularly in vital jobs like healthcare.
Yes. Looks like @echoreply and l are seeing the same thing.
I also agree with @eschrodinger that prior infection is also contributing to milder outcomes, which is speculation on South Africa’s data. Both UK and US are over 90% seropositive from either vaccines or infection.
It would be nice if the virus was also less virulent since that would immunize the small number of seronegative people left and cause mild illness in countries that haven’t been able to vaccinate a significant portion of their population.
