The Corona Pandemic

“This study finds that previous infection reduces the risk of hospitalisation by around two thirds, indicating Omicron is milder if you have some immunity."

“However, the study suggests there is no reduction in the severity of Omicron compared to Delta for the doubly vaccinated, indicating that it is not milder."

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-preprint-from-imperial-college-looking-at-hospitalisation-risk-for-omicron-cases-in-england/

No Way Wtf GIF by Harlem

Less likely to end up in hospital but if you do, it’s just as bad as Delta.

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That is quite strange as it isn’t really in line with the current Doxa, isn’t it (vaccinate yourself by any means)… It would confirm the arguments of a part of those who didn’t want to be vaccinated in the first place, because they feared a reduction in capacity of their immune system to resist a potential new variant appearing.

It’s worth knowing if that info is genuine, or if it is just another fake news.

This one is weird:

In the UK, most of the Omicron cases and people ending up in hospital are under the age of 40 so we do not know for sure what will happen when it reaches old and vulnerable populations.

Quite strange that one, why aren’t elderly people going to hospital by now already?

Not really - the best possible scenario to face Omicron now is triple vaccinated and having contracted an earlier variant. Your chance of infection is the lowest possible, and the likelihood of a serious case is vanishingly small.

Most places are seeing younger people getting infections much earlier and faster, likely due to significant differences in behaviour.

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So the above is fake news then?

Positive tests from this party now up to 7.

Most feeling really shitty, like a bad flu, but none seem at risk of it being anything more than really unpleasant. But lots of christmases now ruined.

I doubt its anything more than logistics of what they can get their hands on. There certainly is no clinical reason for them to switch from one mRNA vaccine to the other.

Its another example of the limitation of the free market. For a variety of reasons testing was way down all over the board in the summer, and with demand down everything required to keep testing capacity at a high level stopped because it couldnt commercially justified. In some cases it went further, with Abbott reported to have destroyed a massive inventory of ready to ship kits they had waiting to be purchased.

The failure here is of the public-private partnership model we have been using to manage this public health issue. There are caves in Wisconsin that were hollowed out for the sole purpose of storing government cheese. The Federal government could have bought them and warehoused them had they known.

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No, not at all. That more or less what that piece says. Prior infection is important for the Omicron variant outcomes, double vaccinations provide much less protection, hence the push for a 3rd dose. Best possible is all of the above.

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Less of a free market issue here though, PCR testing is entirely public. Applicable for rapid tests, but even there a terrible failure of government. They have held a ‘massive’ reserve back through the previous waves, so warped the demand side of the market. In October when they were comparatively cheap and available in 2-3 days to your door, I sent around a note to neighbours asking if they wanted to get in on a group buy for better pricing. No takers, and two of them told me they understood the Province would be making them available for free.

As it turns out, the ‘massive’ reserve lasted about 3 days, distribution was a goddamn goat rodeo that excluded many of the most vulnerable, and places like long term care homes are having to exclude visitors because of rationed testing capacity.

It’s also a piece that is cutting and chopping for multiple different analyses, which is a fair approach when we’re so early in this specific outbreak and looking for information on so many different questions, but will necessarily result in several answers being shown to be wrong.

Ultimately PCR is never going to be the way out of a public health emergency. The approaches that allow us to responsibility manage the risks while doing as much of our lives as normal was always going to be based around the at home kits, but used at a frequency way higher than all but a small % of people (who the general public would think are lunatics) appreciate. The free market was never going to be able to ramp up production to meet that level of use when demand is way lower, especially given how lax people seem to have been about this stuff only 2-3 months ago. Biden has just acquired half a billion kits to be distributed to Americans for free on demand. If they are to be used in the way Public Health Testing experts like Michael Mina recommend, that will last less than 2 days.

For us to get to where we needed, government needed to be driving the private sector to be maximizing production of these to sustain the sort of frequent testing regime that has long been recommended by experts. But it seems we’re waiting for the general public to adopt that philosophy on testing before we produce the kits in the numbers required to accomplish it.

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not much of a surprise there. Sounds like something Trudope’s government would do.

request billions of dollars from Parliament for ongoing “covid relief” but when asked what they’re spending the money on or who is paying for it, just a bunch of blank fucking stares from the MP’s, Min of Finance, etc. like we’re just growing billions on trees.

They haven’t been visited by the family yet. Pretty sure almost everybody I know has had a cold of late but ffs don’t cancel Christmas.

This one is squarely on Ford’s Ontario PCs, with just spillover to the Feds.

We are basically growing the money on trees. This will be the second Trudeau in my lifetime that we will spend a generation paying the debt from, but Junior is going to get a freebie because of the pandemic, even though it was true in 2019 as well.

This variant is staggering. Two days ago, our all-time case peak was 4387, in April. The record fell yesterday. We doubled it today.

Price hasn’t got down to the levels required for that sort of common place testing - in the Fall, we were able to get tests for ~$7 a piece, not available at 4x that now. But even $7 is out of reach for a daily+ regimen for some families

yep. I think I said previously that Dr Bonnie here in BC plainly stated that it’s just a matter of WHEN everyone gets it.

But I think you nailed it, that this may be the beginning of the end for the pandemic. if a huge percentage of the population gets this one quickly enough and we’re cresting 85% vaccination at this point, it could just fizzle out in the subsequent 6 months of a lot of people having antibodies (non-vax included). this variant doesn’t seem to be hospitalizing people. as long as we can keep people out of the ICU, we can hope to see the backside of this by Christmas.

Absolutely staggering though, last I checked New Zealand had 59 cases. What a job they have done.

Variants happen because the virus stays longer in unvaccinated individuals therefore making variants more likely to happen.

Majority are triple vaccinated?

I have a relative who is a consultant anaesthetist in Leeds and she is ranting about the number of younger unvaccinated in the hospitals over there…

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Here’s the problem with that. With hospitals being full of Covid patients the other emergent situations (heart attacks, strokes, etc) are not treated in a timely fashion. This leads to an increase in mortality rates for other illnesses and that increase is indirectly caused by Covid.

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Healthcare provider checking in here. We have been seeing more breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals but 100% of the patients that I have to send to the hospital are unvaccinated. In the vaccinated patients the most common symptoms are body aches and sore throat. In the unvaccinated population it is shortness of breath, high fever, low blood pressure, dizziness.

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