Coronavirus - General Chat - No statistics

[Mike4]

It's been so long since we had a proper pandemic that few (if any) people are still alive to remember what happens.

I've been taken aback at how political it all is and how there is virtually no consensus about anything, not even the technical stuff like R numbers or how it transmits.

The other thing I notice is that nearly all the way through, there has been this feeling that we are approaching the end. Back in August 2020 an acquaintance left me speechless when she asserted "This pandemic is all but over, give it a couple more weeks and we'll be done and dusted." The ensuing disagreement had her deciding I was a blithering idiot with no idea about pandemics. (Which is probably true.)

And now Sarah Gilbert (and a few others) is telling us much the same thing. History will I suspect, show up Boris's over-confident "vaccine roll-out, vaccine boosters will get us through this" as a horrible underestimation of what we have to come.

[XFool]

In fact the signs so far are that Omicron might almost be the perfect Covid variant, i.e. it is highly infectious but relatively harmless...So bring it on, Omicron.

It's not "relatively harmless" - the nature of these things is that it's not a case of everyone just gets the sniffles, it's more like playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet rather than 2. Russian roulette gives "mild to no problems for the majority of people" - but for some it ends really badly.

And in this case the transmissibility increase is to be feared more than we smile about the reduced damage. Take a hypothetical example of a city of 1,000,000, which gets 1,000 new infections each day with delta and (thanks to reasonable levels of vaccination) 1 new admission to intensive care per day where they stay 20 days. The city has 75 ICU beds so 20 are taken up with Covid patients - not easy, it takes up most of the slack in the system, but they can just about manage. And although delta is the norm, there's enough masking, ventilation etc to keep the effective R number at about 1, so it stays pretty steady at 1,000 infections per day, and 1 to ICU.

The above describes the current situation of the UK (within an order of magnitude). Now replace that scenario with something that looks like omicron, where the (very provisional) data suggests we're looking at half the hospitalisation rate, but three time the transmissibility of delta in a part-vaxxed population. So initially it's great - on day 0 there's 1000 cases and 1 patient every 2 days going into ICU. But after one infection cycle (5 days) you have 3000 cases and 1.5/day into ICU, after 10 days you have 9x the cases and 4.5x the numbers going into ICU - and it just gets worse from there, very quickly you have no more ICU capacity and lots of people start dying, both from Covid and other things that need intensive care.

People on this site more than most should appreciate the power of compounding - and the provisional data suggests that the reduced harm of omicron doesn't compensate for the much higher transmissibility.

Or, to put it another way: It's (highly) infectious!

Or to put it yet another way: It's the difference between people knowing (or at least having some idea) of what "infectious" means (in a pandemic) and people who think they know what "infectious" means because they "know the meaning of" the word "infectious"...

[dealtn]

People on this site more than most should appreciate the power of compounding - and the provisional data suggests that the reduced harm of omicron doesn't compensate for the much higher transmissibility.

People on this site also hopefully understand the finite nature of the number of people to infect. So the compounding is more nuanced. For example in the (perhaps unlikely) example where you can only catch it once, (and can only pass it on from that single infection) the "faster" that transmission occurs also means the point where population herd immunity occurs (or everyone has got it, for simplicity) arrives sooner.

It's not as simple as pure compounding, and there will be optimal transmission rates (versus healthcare resource availability) such that faster transmission with average better outcomes are preferable.

[XFool]

It's been so long since we had a proper pandemic that few (if any) people are still alive to remember what happens.

I've been taken aback at how political it all is and how there is virtually no consensus about anything, not even the technical stuff like R numbers or how it transmits.

Seems to be the way the world 'works' nowadays. If you can call it working.

The other thing I notice is that nearly all the way through, there has been this feeling that we are approaching the end.

Hah! The end of this pandemic has surely now been declared more times than there have been pandemics in human history.

That's not even to include certain professors of "evidence based medicine" telling us at the start how it wasn't even a pandemic...

[Hallucigenia]

People on this site also hopefully understand the finite nature of the number of people to infect. So the compounding is more nuanced. For example in the (perhaps unlikely) example where you can only catch it once, (and can only pass it on from that single infection) the "faster" that transmission occurs also means the point where population herd immunity occurs (or everyone has got it, for simplicity) arrives sooner.

It's not as simple as pure compounding, and there will be optimal transmission rates (versus healthcare resource availability) such that faster transmission with average better outcomes are preferable.

Of course, but now we have omicron which may have enough immune escape as to effectively increase the UK population size by 30 million, which gives enough "transmission space" to cause real problems.

For instance James Ward has sketched a few numbers that suggest that [omicron + 80% population immunity] will put hospitals in the same place next month as the peak of January 2021 with [alpha + no vaccines and some infection-derived immunity]. He could be wrong - these are early days and we don't have good data yet - but it gives an idea of what we could be facing.

[Julian]

In fact the signs so far are that Omicron might almost be the perfect Covid variant, i.e. it is highly infectious but relatively harmless...So bring it on, Omicron.

It's not "relatively harmless" - the nature of these things is that it's not a case of everyone just gets the sniffles, it's more like playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet rather than 2. Russian roulette gives "mild to no problems for the majority of people" - but for some it ends really badly.

And in this case the transmissibility increase is to be feared more than we smile about the reduced damage. Take a hypothetical example of a city of 1,000,000, which gets 1,000 new infections each day with delta and (thanks to reasonable levels of vaccination) 1 new admission to intensive care per day where they stay 20 days. The city has 75 ICU beds so 20 are taken up with Covid patients - not easy, it takes up most of the slack in the system, but they can just about manage. And although delta is the norm, there's enough masking, ventilation etc to keep the effective R number at about 1, so it stays pretty steady at 1,000 infections per day, and 1 to ICU.

The above describes the current situation of the UK (within an order of magnitude). Now replace that scenario with something that looks like omicron, where the (very provisional) data suggests we're looking at half the hospitalisation rate, but three time the transmissibility of delta in a part-vaxxed population. So initially it's great - on day 0 there's 1000 cases and 1 patient every 2 days going into ICU. But after one infection cycle (5 days) you have 3000 cases and 1.5/day into ICU, after 10 days you have 9x the cases and 4.5x the numbers going into ICU - and it just gets worse from there, very quickly you have no more ICU capacity and lots of people start dying, both from Covid and other things that need intensive care.

People on this site more than most should appreciate the power of compounding - and the provisional data suggests that the reduced harm of omicron doesn't compensate for the much higher transmissibility.

Or, to put it another way: It's (highly) infectious!

Or to put it yet another way: It's the difference between people knowing (or at least having some idea) of what "infectious" means (in a pandemic) and people who think they know what "infectious" means because they "know the meaning of" the word "infectious"...

With all the at times heated debate on various threads re infectiousness, which on occasion has led the conversation towards comparisons with Flu, the following just under 8 minute video from Prof Tim Spector of the ZOE Codid-19 tracking project at Kings College that has just been posted seems timely since it addresses exactly that comparison ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oLbZLrcE3c

- Julian

[redsturgeon]

Yes, in a nutshell Covid is five times more infectious and 10 times more deadly than flu.

John

[BullDog]

From an article this afternoon in The Times -

More than a quarter of colds are actually coronavirus, says scientist.

Perhaps the theory that the covid19 virus will soon become endemic and cause something like a cold is coming to pass before our eyes? If the latest mutation becomes the dominant global strain and is less prone to causing serious disease and death, that's actually a good thing that it's spreading very rapidly through populations?

[MrFoolish]

Yes, in a nutshell Covid is five times more infectious and 10 times more deadly than flu.

John

Which age groups? Which variant? Vaccinated or not vaccinated? I don't think there is any "in a nutshell".

[XFool]

From an article this afternoon in The Times -

More than a quarter of colds are actually coronavirus, says scientist.

Perhaps the theory that the covid19 virus will soon become endemic and cause something like a cold is coming to pass before our eyes? If the latest mutation becomes the dominant global strain and is less prone to causing serious disease and death, that's actually a good thing that it's spreading very rapidly through populations?

Yes... IF.

And IF that is the end of any possible future mutations that are a lot worse than "something like a cold".

[jfgw]

Perhaps the theory that the covid19 virus will soon become endemic and cause something like a cold is coming to pass before our eyes? If the latest mutation becomes the dominant global strain and is less prone to causing serious disease and death, that's actually a good thing that it's spreading very rapidly through populations?

It does seem to be a bit more like a cold: It contains genetic sequences not previously found in SARS-CoV-2 but found in HCoV-229E — a common cold virus, suggesting a bit of genetic mixing.

Cells in the lungs and in the gastrointestinal system can harbour Sars-CoV-2 and common-cold coronaviruses simultaneously, according to earlier studies.

Such co-infection sets the scene for viral recombination, a process in which two different viruses in the same host cell interact while making copies of themselves, generating new copies that have some genetic material from both “parents.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3158448/omicron-covid-19-variant-likely-picked-piece-common?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3158448

Hopefully, it will be as harmless.

It seems that prior infection by pre-Omicron variants may provide fairly limited immunity to the Omicron variant. While it has been suggested that the Omicron variant may be a good thing (e.g., by Dr. John Campbell) in that it could provide immunity without making people seriously ill, I would question how effective this immunity would be against existing variants. Only time will tell.


Julian F. G. W.

[BullDog]

Perhaps the theory that the covid19 virus will soon become endemic and cause something like a cold is coming to pass before our eyes? If the latest mutation becomes the dominant global strain and is less prone to causing serious disease and death, that's actually a good thing that it's spreading very rapidly through populations?

It does seem to be a bit more like a cold: It contains genetic sequences not previously found in SARS-CoV-2 but found in HCoV-229E — a common cold virus, suggesting a bit of genetic mixing.

Cells in the lungs and in the gastrointestinal system can harbour Sars-CoV-2 and common-cold coronaviruses simultaneously, according to earlier studies.

Such co-infection sets the scene for viral recombination, a process in which two different viruses in the same host cell interact while making copies of themselves, generating new copies that have some genetic material from both “parents.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3158448/omicron-covid-19-variant-likely-picked-piece-common?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3158448

Hopefully, it will be as harmless.

It seems that prior infection by pre-Omicron variants may provide fairly limited immunity to the Omicron variant. While it has been suggested that the Omicron variant may be a good thing (e.g., by Dr. John Campbell) in that it could provide immunity without making people seriously ill, I would question how effective this immunity would be against existing variants. Only time will tell.


Julian F. G. W.

I suspect we might be having a covid jab at the same time we have a flu jab every year?

[pje16]

I suspect we might be having a covid jab at the same time we have a flu jab every year?

wouldn't surpsrise me in the slighest
I also think we might get it at 6 monthly intervals as it seems to wear off in some respects in that sort of timeframe

[XFool]

Javid advised to take ‘stringent’ Covid measures within a week, leak reveals

The Guardian

Exclusive: Health officials say urgent action needed to avoid mass hospitalisations and overwhelming the NHS

"Britain’s top public health officials have advised ministers that “stringent national measures” need to be imposed by 18 December to avoid Covid hospitalisations surpassing last winter’s peak, according to documents leaked to the Guardian."

[XFool]

"Britain’s top public health officials have advised ministers that “stringent national measures” need to be imposed by 18 December to avoid Covid hospitalisations surpassing last winter’s peak, according to documents leaked to the Guardian."

Thinks: I wonder if that could possibly be because it is (very) infectious?

[Dod101]

Out of the 9000 or so posts on this thread I have not read 1% of them so the book by Michael Lewis called 'Premonition' may have been mentioned already. If so I am sorry but it stands to be mentioned again if so. I am only half way through it; indeed I am only now at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic at the end of 2019. So far it has been about the preparations that the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control) have made for a pandemic or at least an epidemic. Very revealing in so many ways. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in this pandemic. Lewis writes with a fluency that many Americans manage and keeps the narrative going whilst disgorging a huge amount of information. Quite fascinating. Published in the UK and available from Amazon UK. The list price is £25 as it is currently only available in hardback. I think most books are cheap at whatever price, provided you avoid current fiction which seems to me to be mostly rubbish.

Dod

[swill453]

I have to say I was pretty impressed by Nicola Sturgeon's Covid briefing yesterday. Informative, compassionate, and with an attention to detail that other government leaders could only dream of. Totally (apparently) honest about what we know and don't know about Omicron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkoSP8 ... =DailyMail

(apologies for the Daily Mail branding on the video, it was the first one I found on YouTube).

Scott.

[XFool]

Omicron could cause 75,000 deaths in England by end of April, say scientists

The Guardian

Peak of 2,400 daily hospital admissions is most optimistic scenario if England stays in plan B, say advisers

"Even in the most optimistic scenario, projected infections could lead to a peak of more than 2,000 daily hospital admissions, with a total of 175,000 hospital admissions and 24,700 deaths between 1 December and 30 April."

[Hallucigenia]

Frenchwoman who didn't get jabbed but bought a fake certificate from her doctor, caught Covid-19 and died :

She suffered from a severe form of the disease "which progressed rapidly to severe respiratory damage," said Djillali Annane, head of the intensive care unit, interviewed on RTL . However, if the doctors had known that the patient was not vaccinated against Covid-19, they could "have given her early neutralizing antibodies, which we know are effective in reducing the risk of progression of the disease".

https://www-leparisien-fr.translate.goo ... r_hl=en-GB

[BullDog]

Frenchwoman who didn't get jabbed but bought a fake certificate from her doctor, caught Covid-19 and died :

She suffered from a severe form of the disease "which progressed rapidly to severe respiratory damage," said Djillali Annane, head of the intensive care unit, interviewed on RTL . However, if the doctors had known that the patient was not vaccinated against Covid-19, they could "have given her early neutralizing antibodies, which we know are effective in reducing the risk of progression of the disease".

https://www-leparisien-fr.translate.goo ... r_hl=en-GB

An excellent nominee for a posthumous Darwin award then.