The Omicron Variant

…which is what I said. The data was from 3 weeks ago. Delta hasn’t gone away.

This is an assumption based on not enough data. You cannot make that assertion. We don’t know how this is going to affect indigenous communities. But they are already marginalised, they are remote, they have less access to healthcare.

It’s only been in Australia for a week. These are not reasonable assumptions of how things are going to play out.

We have seen over and over and over and over again during this pandemic that a “reactive approach” is the wrong one. That going hard and early saves lives. Of course we should be alarmed by case numbers. Its only a "piece of the puzzle, but its an important piece, especially when we know so little about Omicron.

So, there are three levels at which to consider the data:

  1. A politician or public health official making decisions that affect everyone

  2. a person making private choices, like holiday plans, or otherwise considering creating small gatherings

  3. a person trying to make a best guess at the future, with no consequences on the line.

I’m both 2 and 3, and I’m behaving differently in those two capacities. As 2 I’m being extremely cautious, limiting my activities, and doing a lot of masking and testing. As 3 I’m feeling more and more optimistic that omicron is going to be fairly harmless. There IS a lot of promising data. It’s preliminary, and I’m not ready to act on it, in my planning capacity, because the risk of being overly optimistic is so much greater than the risk of being overly pessimistic. But with my actuarial “best guess” hat on, I’m guessing we’re going to be okay.

From it or with it?

The distinction is an important one. At least in the UK the figures flag deaths for people that had a positive covid test in the previous 28 days so a decent proportion may well be people that died of other causes but had covid at the time, or in the recent past.

I get the impression from your tone here that, in the capacity of no.1 (and I thank my lucky stars I’m not) you’d be even more risk-averse?

Someone making public policy needs to consider a lot more than just “what is the theoretical best action.” They need to consider what the public will accept, what market distortions they are are creating, a whole host of issues that I’m honestly grateful I’m not responsible for.

For instance, California had a pretty hard lockdown, except it was widely violated. I know a couple of people who caught covid in CA during the lockdown, and both attended parties that were illegal at the time. (And one caught a lot of flack from her roommates for getting tested and as a result getting the roommates quarantined.)

Public health officials need to weigh the cost of a hospital losing 20% of it’s janitorial staff of they impose a vaccine mandate.

These are the realities that public policy makers need to consider.

There things i would do differently if i had influence over US policy:

  1. i would count a medically documented case of covid as equivalent to 1-2 doses of vaccine. The US currently ignores infection-produced immunity, which i think needlessly exacerbates the efforts to vaccinate those who most need it.

  2. i would communicate in a more nuanced way. Not just “do this”, but “do this while this condition holds, for this reason.”

  3. i would sharply subsidize rapid tests and make them easily available.

Beyond that, I’m not sure.

Now I see begin to see the problem in the UK. This is an article about an exchange between the editor of the Spectator, and the chairman of the SAGE modelling committee.

The question is why SAGE is only modelling scenarios based on the assumption that omicron is equally as deadly as delta, and ignoring the possibility that it may not be.

The answers of Prof. Medley of the modelling committee are highly evasive and disingenuous.

He’s pretty much implying that they only model scenarios intended to push the Government in a specific direction, and omit mentioning other scenarios even though they may be likely.

What it should consider is the next 4 mutations and the probability of one of them becoming massively deadlier and non-responsive to current vaccines.

No, they should do their jobs, not politicize and respond to perverse incentives.

The game theory as to why viruses would become less deadly isn’t hard to understand. Early on, the virus is struggling to survive against anything else, it likely needs to be hardy to win that race. Now, there’s lots of Covid, the virus is competing with its own relatives, better to be nimble and breed a lot rather than being weighted down with hardiness. Because killing the host doesn’t really help the virus.

Any virus could mutate into 10x or 100x the killer, I guess. Why focus on Covid for that? No stats available, either. There are trillions of copies of trillions of viruses, you can spend each day worrying about a different one and you’ll die of something or other before coming near to running out, if that’s how you want to spend your time.

This virus differs from the influenza virus in the way it replicates itself. It is much more inclined to produce mutations. Here’s an article explaining it.

I suspect that’s why it keeps coming back in a short time span. Clearly this has killed more people than the flue by many multiples.

We literally don’t know what is coming down the pipeline in mutations.

That wasn’t at all what I got out of it; what he seemed to be saying, pretty clearly to my reading, is that they didn’t model far less deadly scenarios because if such a scenario were to unfold then that’s great, the government could back off. There wouldn’t be a contingency plan you’d need for that.

Would you ask firefighters to practice not fighting a fire?

One thing I’m noticing a lot, even in this thread, are a lot of people who seem to assume that, if omicron is less severe and less deadly, that inherently is a good thing.

However its increased ability to spread could wind up easily overcoming this. Something that is less deadly for any one individual can be more deadly if it spreads to enough more people.

For an extreme example: jumping off a tall building has a higher lethality rate than heart attacks. But which kill more people?

I’ll link a Skepchick video (with transcript) who covers this while citing studies.

If you extend that thought out then an increased ability to reproduce along with the faster mutations of corona viruses it means there are more chances of a fast spreading deadlier version.

What I got from it is that they model the scenarios that the government request them to and, I assume, with reasonable values for criteria that they have decent evidence for.
The speed of spread they have good evidence for, the severity of existing variants too. When they get good evidence for the severity of omicron I expect them to plug that value in too.

Of course, given the vaccine situation globally, the infectiousness of omicron, and animal reservoirs, one might argue that it’s impossible to institute measures that would significantly affect the chances of such a mutation…

…I’m dismayed that here we are, two years into a global pandemic, that people don’t understand the job of the people behind the public health response to a global pandemic that has killed millions, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Being concerned about future mutations is very much part of the job of the people trying to mitigate the effect of the pandemic and keep people alive. This isn’t political.

However, using “game theory” in the way you have here is inherently political. And dangerous.

Have you missed what has been happening around the world in the last two years? Hospitals. Labs. Support services. All have been running on empty. And they are all gearing up for another Christmas surge. We focus on that to protect them.

Why focus on that? Because its a global pandemic that has killed millions, where people who have had just “mild” cases are suffering from Long Covid. We focus on that because if we don’t, and we get it wrong, more people will suffer, more people will die, more children will become orphans, more people have to live life with debilitating illness. We focus on that to protect them.

You guys don’t even know what a proper public health response even looks like any more.

Firefighting isn’t a good analogy. If the government implements preemptive lockdowns that prove to be way out of step with the reality of Omicron, it’s going to cut into the ability to respond in the future, because of lost creditability. I don’t think the government can really do a practice lockdown.

…visual explainer created by Toby Morris and Siouxsie Wiles and published by The Spinoff, released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence.

I don’t think a less deadly virus is actually going to kill/hospitalize more people over time. It could do so per week, but the slower but more deadly virus is eventually going to reach all of the same people. Now if the faster but less deadly virus crowds out the slower, deadly virus, if the faster one gives immunity towards the slower one then the faster one is going to save people from the slower one.

More typically, people are saying that more people will be hospitalized at a particular time. The peak will be higher, so the hospitals will be overrun. Such a scenario is possible, BUT it comes down to math. Your speed of transmission is the numerator, hospitalization your denominator. If your virus is 10 TIMES more infectious, but it also is 30 TIMES less likely to result in hospitalization, then the hospitalization peak will be less than a slower but more lethal virus.

Field data from South Africa is indicating that hospitalization is LESS than the peaks for other variants, despite increased infectiousness. This scenario is not coming into play there. Also hospital stays are shorter and less severe, which would be a mitigating factor in this peak.

Is this from 2020? If so, it’s not relevant to Omicron variant.

…the “success looks like over-reaction” visualization is directly relevant to your assertion. The dates don’t matter.