This is consistent with what I’ve been reading. I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence either way to say whether omicron is less lethal. In practice fewer people are dying from it, but the numbers are consistent with what you’d hope the vaccines and improved medical treatment would be able to accomplish even if it were just as deadly under identical conditions. It’s also worth noting that a lot of people had already died from the original and delta strains by the time omicron came along, and a much larger number had already survived one or both of those, so the remaining population was already a bit hardier.
Make sense. I was reading “by the time the Chinese decided to let the WHO say this was a real thing” to mean that China was essentially dictating when the WHO could announce how bad Covid was by controlling the flow of data to them. If they don’t have reason to think it’s bad (due to little or no data), they don’t have anything to announce.
There is some evidence that Omicron is intrinsically less fatal than the original. However, the papers in the Omicron threads (out of UK and Scotland), seem to point to prior immunity (vaccine or infection) playing a much larger role in the lower hospitalization/death numbers.
You seem to be getting awfully upset here. Why don’t you go explain your position to Dr Li Wenliang?
Moderating:
I realize you have left this discussion, but for future reference if you make an assertion, be prepared to back it up with cites.
Please cease the hijack about the Chinese and the WHO, and the personal sniping over it.
I am directing all in this thread who have participated in the hijack to drop it. If you deem it worthy of discussion, please start a new thread in an appropriate forum.
Also, leave the snark for the Pit.
This is a mod note for guidance only. But if the hijack or the snark persist, expect Warnings to ensue. Thanks.
I don’t know about that. Past infection doesn’t seem to prevent future all that well. And if we had started off with Omicron, then at this point we’d have a new mutation that makes Omicron look like Vanilla COVID.
One thing driving down the omicron death rate is that a lot of people ARE vaccinated now and the breakthrough infections for the vaccinated are more like headcolds (usually, not always) than the more severe pre-vaccine illness (Having now experienced both I can attest to this personally). If we hadn’t had tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) people already vaccinated who knows how this would have played out? Omicron certainly is causing severe illness among the unvaccinated.
Speaking as someone who had “original covid” back in October 2020, two Pfizer shots, and a booster… I’m currently in isolation due to yet another covid infection. So infection with original covid does not guarantee immunity to whatever strain I currently have (either delta or possibly omicron - I don’t for sure which I have), nor does being vaccinated.
So no, I wouldn’t assume that if omicron was the original version of covid that infection would protect you from subsequent variants.
The only upside is that instead of eight days of fever spiking up to 102 F, terrible body aches, and overwhelming fatigue my first go-round with covid this time it’s more of a minor headcold with an extra dose of tired - no fever, no bodyaches. So lots better this time, except for being sick at all, and the isolation-at-home period, and worry that I might have inadvertently infected other people on Christmas, which would totally suck as a present.
Yeah, I’m just a little pissed off and bitter…
But vaccines were already largely in place for Delta. That hasn’t changed all that much.
This isn’t true. Both acquired and natural immunity is much higher now than it was when Delta started to take hold last summer. Only about 50% of people in the US was fully-vaccinated and we’ve added another 20 million infections. No one was boosted. Many other countries were well behind us in vaccination and cases in the summer. They quickly surpassed us though.
As @Tfletch1 said, a lot more vaccines have been given since then. But I believe the research has already started to show that, at least for omicron, getting a booster makes you more protected than you were when you were exactly the magic 2 weeks out from your second shot.
The evidence is saying both things, it would wrong for anyone to infer that the latter point is leading people to conclude the former.
The evidence is mounting that it is intrinsically less fatal, the hospital data says it and the mechanism of infection and location of the viral attack for omicron would suggest a lower likelihood of death and severe illness.
The best analysis of the data will stratify cases/outcomes by vaccination and prior infection status along with the strain of infection and many other factors.
That will give the clearest picture on the innate lower severity of omicron strain and my reading of the analysis so far leads me to believe it is less severe and it is not all down to vaccination status or previous infection. Here is one report.. That makes clear that current lower hospitalisation rates overall are linked to higher rate of vaccination but it is still able to take that into consideration when comparing innate severity of omicron v delta.
This picture will only become clearer as omicron spreads and with delta still in circulation but I’d be frankly astonished if the writers of this report and others had made such a basic statistical error that led them to this conclusion.
The study shows hospitalization rate (HR) for the reinfected vs the naive infected in Table 3, but only overall, not for Omicron specifically, which would at least be a start to get at severity. Assuming I’m reading their numbers correctly, we can back into that number ourselves.
Using their corrected numbers, out of 277,847 naive infected (both Omicron and Delta), 3164 ended up hospitalized, which gives us 1.1% (1.138756%) HR. That is for both vaccinated and unvaccinated.
As noted, I don’t see them give an actual data point for the unvaccinated naive infected with Omicron, but they do show a reinfection rate among them of 56.4%. From that I infer that the naive infected of the unvaccinated is 43.6%. Using those percentages, we can take their unvaccinated Omicron infected case count of 9585 and distribute it. 5406 of those cases should be reinfections. 4179 of them are naive. They also tell us the distribution of hospitalizations among that group. 21.1% of the 56 hospitalizations are reinfections, which leaves 78.9% of hospitalizations being from the unvaccinated naive infected population. That gives us a total of slightly over 44 hospitalizations among that group.
Assuming I dug all of those numbers out correctly, we end up with the below table for the unvaccinated naive infected:
| Variant | Cases | Hospitalizations | HR |
|---|---|---|---|
| All | 277,847 | 3,164 | 1.138756% |
| Omicron | 4,179 | 44 | 1.057271% |
The sample sizes for Omicron are tiny, and it shows it to be slightly less severe, but the HR of both of those rounds to 1.1%, so wouldn’t be calling it significant quite yet.
Feel free to chime in if I missed some data in that report, but this doesn’t look compelling to me so far.
It’s now becoming clearer that omicron is inherently less severe, apart from vaccinations and exposure:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html
A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus.
In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.
“It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.
Overall, experiments from multiple independent laboratories of the SAVE/NIAID network with several different B.1.1.529 isolates demonstrate attenuated lung disease in rodents, which parallels preliminary human clinical data.
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Dang, we’ve lucked out again. Really. Viruses don’t have to evolve to less virulence.
This was Global Pandemic in Easy Mode.
I despair that we haven’t really learned the lessons we needed to with this one.
The UK paper (the one you linked) even had to put a fudge factor (corrected) in for underestimates of immunity due to prior infection. When they did that, omicron was only slightly less severe with respect to a hospital visit (Table 2. HR 0.89 omicron:delta). It gets more significant when considering actual hospital admissions (HR 0.65 omicron:delta).
A major caveat is that their fudge factor is pretty conservative since estimates of seroprevalence in the UK is 95%. Seroprevalence in South Africa was estimated to be 70-80% (Figure 1) with a lot of recent infections during the delta wave.
Trying to find a truly immune naive person in the UK, US, or much of europe since the delta wave would be very difficult. Maybe a study could be done in New Zealand (which would still be tough since they’re 74% vaccinated).
The best studies we have so far are the one in hamsters showing less lung damage with omicron relative to delta and the one in vitro showing lower infection of lung cells.
Sure, the picture is incomplete at the moment and people are doing the best they can with the data available.
The analysis I linked to isn’t conclusive and doesn’t claim to be but it is another piece of evidence that is suggestive of reduced severity for omicron. If it is completely off-base then it’ll be corrected in time.
I mean, obviously. In 2020 it took like 6 weeks to have a collective “oh shit” moment with the original COVID strain. We didn’t even have adequate test coverage until months later. The acute phase of the thing would have been over before we even really knew what hit us.
It seems increasingly safe to say that omicron is milder than other strains. But given the absolutely unpreparedness of the population, and the rapidity of the spread, hospitals would have gotten crushed.
It would be really weird politically. The acute effects of the thing would have come and gone in a month, but we as a society couldn’t possibly process it that fast. We’d barely know what happened, the data would be inadequate to tell us. Though the virus is milder, we’d have basically no good treatments. World leaders would have died. Trump himself would probably have been dead by December 2019.
The fight between the do-somethings and do-nothings would be even uglier. In the absence of good data, either side could make a strong case for their course of action (or inaction). Both the science and anecdotal evidence would suggest that we simply got fucked and there’s nothing to do but move forward assuming COVID is now endemic. The “herd immunity” crowd would have the more compelling argument. The opposition would point out that this is insane given that we barely even know what happened. We might not even bother researching vaccines, or at least not the all-out moonshot that we did in the real-world timeline.
Some of this is going to play out toward the end of January of 2022. Omicron saturation did not have to be inevitable… this was a collective choice. But the choice has been made, for better or worse. We’re headed over the cliff. Much as I despise the herd-immunity Polyannas, I hope they’re correct this time.
Well, they don’t have to, but they usually do. More-lethal viruses tend to eliminate themselves by killing off their hosts, so the less-lethal variants are going to predominate.
I am not so sure about this. If we’d had a virus that killed healthy white children in rich countries, it seems like there would be more political appetite for everyone to pull together and take drastic measures.
If I had to engineer a virus specifically to destroy and divide a society, I’d make one exactly like COVID. It targets everyone to some degree, but saves the worst effects for the most vulnerable and marginalized people, except for children. It’s enough to cause tremendous suffering, but not quite enough to pull everybody on the same page to defeat it. It will take a really long time for people to forget the way part of society was so ready to feed the other half to the wolves.
From here:
Does this mean that, if Omicron had been the original COVID strain, it wouldn’t have spread much faster than what we did start with?
Great article. A great real-life case study of evolution happening right in front of our eyes.