The data on Omicron from South Africa is still looking good.
Here’s a summary on twitter late yesterday from Prof. Shabir Madhi, South Africa’s leading and most highly respected virology expert:
One week later and heading into week 5 of Omicron wave in Gauteng SA and outlook remains positive for what matters most - relatively low rates of severe disease and death. Many other provinces now also showing rapid rate of increase, however in Gauteng:
1. Wave of Covid cases has peaked and on a downward trajectory already. Peaked 4 weeks after onset, compared with peaking at 8 weeks after onset in previous 2 waves. Has peaked at same positivity rate of 38%, but at lower case rate per 100000 than delta.
2. Hospitalisation rate in Gauteng seemingly plateaued at one third of where delta peaked, although cases in hospital include coincidental infection. May explain shorter stay (3.5d) than before (8d). Unclear if mainly causing bronchitis vs LRTI ( re lab experiment)
3. Although death rate increasing, coming off an extremely low base rate, as dropped close to zero after Delta wave. Current excess death rate 1 per 100,000 (11Dec) lower than the previous inter-wave period prev. Excess Death rate at peak of Delta as 25 per 100,000. Next 2 wks?
Data from SA and U.K. confirm antibody evasiveness with VE for Pfizer 30-34% against Omicron infection. Pfizer x 2 report 70% VE against Omicron hospitalisation. Probably could have higher VE if boosted older than 50yrs and immuncompromised. Pity bureaucratic delays in SA.
In summary, outlook still optimistic for uncoupling of case and severe disease rate in setting such as Gauteng with high force of past infection (70% in older than 18 yrs), and 45% older than 50yrs ( group with 80% previous deaths in SA) with 2 Covid vaccine doses.
One thing that concerns me is that people will hear “The data on Omicron variant is still looking good.” and drop their precautions. That is, they will forget that there is still the Delta and other variants going around.
Sometimes touched upon by other posters, but I wonder if having the Omicron variant means that a person has some protection against other variants. The anti-vaccination and can’t-be-vaccinated people may have to obtain immunity by catching the more transmissible Omicron variant. (The least objectionable choice considering what we are dealing with?)
When do the precautions drop? Because they will be and eventually this is just something we live with like influenza. My cousin was a healthy 54 year old woman with no underlying medical conditions. She died in 2018 a few days after catching the flu. If Covid gets to the point where it is as deadly as the flu precautions will get dropped. It’s inevitable.
Currently COVID19 is about 10 \times as deadly as the flu. These are all US numbers. Flu deaths bounce around a lot, but we can say 50,000 per year in the US is a high estimate for the average.
In about 2 years of COVID19, we’re at about 800,000 deaths. So maybe around 400,000 per year. We’ll be higher than that for 2021.
So yeah, if we can reduce the deaths due to COVID by to \frac{1}{8} or \frac{1}{10} of what it currently is, then yes, we can pretty much go back to normal.
And that is, though they may not know how to express it, what gets a lot of people so ticked off and willing to say “oh to Hell with it”. Because they look at that , and the thought crosses their minds: "oh God… how many years to achieve that … by then it will be permanently good bye to “normal” as I knew it".
400,000 people a year die from heart disease. That doesn’t stop my kid’s school from selling Krispy Kreme donuts for a fundraiser.
I have no problem with vaccinations and boosters. I will wear a mask wherever you tell me. And I really don’t care if I ever see the inside of my office. Other than that, I’m not sure what precautions should be taken? I don’t think lock-downs work. At least not in the sense where the disease will go away if we just lock down for a couple weeks.
I honestly love this approach. Studying waste streams has got to be one of the most complete ways to study community epidemiology that has ever been conceived. Getting info from surveys and hospitals is useful. But people lie, people refuse to participate, people hide, people prevaricate, evade and avoid treatment.
However everybody poops and if you can make your test specific, fast and accurate enough, poop will very anonymously reveal the truth about what’s floating around a town, city, maybe even a neighborhood. It’s obviously a very macro approach, but one that can yield a literal shit-load of useful information .
My sewage authority has been testing for several months, now, and those numbers are a very relatively leading indicator of where all the other numbers (cases, hospitalization, death) are going.
I wish they would test variants. They stopped a while ago, with a note that they planned to restart eventually. This would be a really good time for them to restart.
That’s not a random sampling of infected people, though. The infected seeking hospitalization are already predisposed to being severe enough cases so as to have a higher probability of needing ventilation.
Experts are being overcautious, with nobody wanting to risk any blame, but in my opinion the worse risk is in crying wolf and losing the confidence of the public.
… that isn’t the worst risk. Because we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. By the time we’ve gathered enough data Omicron will be everywhere. You should have been locking down two weeks ago.
“Hoping for the best” is not the best pandemic strategy. We’ve seen that over and over again.
Saying “we don’t have enough data yet” is not crying wolf.
Data are showing a smaller proportion of cases hospitalized. Nobody is disputing that. The issue is that it’s difficult to control for confounding variables. We don’t yet know if outcomes are looking better because Omicron is much less severe, or because most of the population (especially the most vulnerable) now has some degree of immunity from either vaccination or prior infection. Either would be good news, but the implications are different for different populations with different age profiles or immunity levels, and for individuals within those populations.
The other thing people are concerned about is how much less severe it is. Even if it’s putting a smaller proportion of cases in hospital, it’s so much more infectious that it could still overwhelm hospitals.
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