Been coughing and spluttering for weeks here. Fed-up with covid tests. I know so many people right now with almost permanent colds that are not the small c.
Despite more or less obsessing about the mathematics and modelling of this variant, my capacity to be stunned at the slope doesn’t seem to be diminishing. I just keep looking at, the parameters, and saying that can’t be right…and then the data says ‘no, that fits’. We have at least tripled our case rate in a week here. Just over two weeks ago, we were seeing daily case rates as low as 19 in an urban area of over 1M. Today is 206.
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Does anyone recall what the sequencing rate in the UK? I am just trying to understand if the surge we are seeing now is truly from Omicron or whether the foundations were already set. Todays number of Omicron cases is 1691 and the daily case rate was 88,000+. I realise that Omicron can also be identified through SGTF as well so I’m trying to make sense of whether data quality is the issue or if 98% of daily cases really are Delta still.
As a healthcare provider in this pandemic, we are completely and utterly spent. Within the next couple of years there will not be enough workers to keep everything open. The amount of people quitting due to Covid burnout is alarming. And administration doesn’t care and aren’t addressing it. I’ve seriously thought about leaving the profession more times than I care to admit. Those who workin healthcare are done.
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The percentage has fluctuated with the case numbers, but I don’t think it has ever gone much above 7%. In October, the UK sequenced its one millionth, I think by that time it had done 325 million tests. The number of Omicron cases is a sum of sequenced results, the estimates are far far higher. I don’t think there is a great deal of doubt that the surge is Omicron, although Delta still would be a significant number of cases.
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Healthcare is really where my major fear is. Ontario just released modelling results that more or less show disaster, even with some fairly modest assumptions about severity. One of the scenarios actually made me laugh out loud, it showed the effects of policies that were not put in place yesterday, but modelled anyway. Still awful. The core finding is that we run out of hospital capacity on the rising slope, before the end of the year, and likely as much as two weeks before the peak.
Which also assumes that doctors and nurses don’t get sick in significant numbers themselves…
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There was a piece in the Atlantic this week that positioned continued Covid concern as just the focus of the liberal coastal elites and in his “real America’ no one cares and are just going on with their life. It produced a shit storm of criticisms and then criticisms of the criticisms - oh, we have to understand what the other half think to be able to communicate with them.” What was not touched upon in this piece or much of the internet response was the disgust it generated in healthcare workers. I have friends who work in ER in Detroit who has experience as an army medic and he says it is no exaggeration to say that the emotional toil of it has been akin to a war like experience. No, they’re not having to triage with bullets whizzing by, but they have found themselves showing up to work to find that the people they expect to work next to them are off sick. Or dead.
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This week Our Covid testing machine broke where I work because we ran it into the ground. Earlier this year the administration made the decision to fire all the nurses because they were in danger of not making enough money to get their bonuses. What they failed to realize is that by doing so they stopped us from being able to charge as much as we used to and we have ended up losing even more money.
PTSD is very real for us. We got into this to help people. It’s frustrating to know there is a free and widely available shot to help stop the spread and keep people from having severe Illness. Yes you can still get Covid if you are vaccinated but it isn’t nearly as bad.
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I honestly don’t know what to say other than thank you, and those that run the funding and resources for health care systems need a fucking slap.
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I appreciate that. Sorry to vent on here. It’s just been a continual shitshow from the beginning
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Don’t apologise.
Vent away. We’re probably all feeling a bit low atm, but chances are it’s nowhere fucking near what you have had to put up with.
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A little bit on the lighter side of things…
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EU curve looks interesting above. Suggesting a down turn but I get the feeling there are some places that haven’t seen omicron yet. But EU deaths are rising.
Hopefully the UK death figures dont follow suit in about a week or so.
The new hero from down under
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@SBYM reveals his secret identity 
Really pissed off with our testing capacity here still. In January 2020 it was known that testing capacity was going to be a key in breaking chains of transmission and now 2 years later it’s still damn near impossible to by an at home test that if readily available and affordable would make operationalizing our approach so much easier, especially during this festive period.
There is a lot of talk still about PCR vs antigen tests, with the ability of PCR tests to detect positives in cases where the antigen cannot, and that is often presented as a difference in accuracy, and therefore positioning the former as the better type of test. In reality, almost all of what PCR can identify in an antigen negative person is evidence of someone who has had the virus recently but is no longer contagious. So, rule of thumb, if you’re going anywhere to mingle, test as close to the time of the event as possible with at home antigen test, and as long as you test negative you can be very confident you will not be contagious for the duration of that event.
If you have reason to think you’ve been exposed, with the exposure to this we’ve all had by this wave, we’re seeing that symptoms are kicking in much quicker, making that long period of asymptomatic contagiousness a thing of prior waves - symptoms are the result of the immune response, and by this wave we’re all generating a much quicker response than we were in earlier waves when our immune system was still mostly naive to it.
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