Quote (Sioux @ 30 Dec 2021 19:58)
If its twice as transmissible as delta but half as deadly, with uncontrolled spread more people will end up in the hospital not less because the growth is exponential.
Omicron is not twice as transmissible as delta, it's outcompeting Delta at a rate which would theoretically correspond to a reproduction rate which is twice as high. Its growth advantage over Delta is based on significant immune escape (vaccinations and prior infections dampening the spread of Omicron much less than that of Delta), a shorter generation time and perhaps some smallish innate transmission advantage.
If Omicron obtained all it's growth advantage over Delta purely from a higher transmissibility, its base reproduction number (R0) would have to be in the 30s or so and would make it the most contagious disease in existence by a wide margin, which is completely unrealistic.
Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ 30 Dec 2021 19:58)
As long as we get over the initial spread without overloading the hospital's than yeah, Omicron will be a pretty good thing
But Omicron has lower hospitalization with much higher spread so it's still possible that we get 10 times the cases over a shorter. Of time and we still end up getting a lot of deaths and hospitalization
So we still need to take it seriously but we can cross our fingers that there's a potential way out
Pretty much, yeah. What will be interesting to see is how long an unchecked Omicron wave will keep going up. The OG wave in South Africa started coming down after a surprisingly short amount of time and without notable countermeasures in place. IF (and that's not a given) a similar pattern emerges in the global north as well, that would effectively be the end of this shit.
Quote (JohnnyMcCoy @ 30 Dec 2021 23:57)
meanwhile in my area in northern germany thousands of people who attended nightclubs during the christmas days are supposed to go into quarantine due to hundreds of infections
every single person was fully vaxxed/freshly recovered AND brought a negative test that was done on the same day
this stuff is working really well
Meh. That vaccines which were developed with and designed for the original Wuhan strain are no longer working two years later when we're 4 VOCs into the future is neither surprising nor a general indictment of the vaccines. At the end of the day, relying entirely on the vaccines' protection against transmission was never a realistic idea. The vaccines are still providing a very strong protection against hospitalization and death, so sufficiently high uptake would still chase away the spectre of an overwhelmed healthcare system, even if we let case numbers soar.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 30 2021 05:17pm