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Omicron is the coolest variant so far. But I’ve been holding off catching COVID until we get a variant with extra perks like increased vo2max or loss of pain sensitivity. I’m confident at global scale we will get there eventually.
I’m holding out for the patch with liver restore and eyesight enhance.
_>But I’ve been holding off catching COVID until we get a variant with extra perks_
Once the supply chains loosen up and they solve that spike protein shortage, Covid can finally open preorders for their Zeta Pro Max variant, provided enough people haven't ordered the vaccine instead until then.
It's early, but there have still been _no_ reported Omicron deaths.
If this is that less lethal variant that we have all been waiting for, what's the call here? Should we be intentionally helping spread it to edge out Delta?
Need hard data that it's actually less lethal, which means waiting a month or so from the uptick in cases to make sure no hospitalizations or death actually occur. If it is, spread away. If it's not, and has similar mortality to the original strain but with immune escape and better transmissibility, you've screwed us all.
Not without solid evidence that they're actually in competition, to say the least. If it turns out you can easily get both, then spreading the less lethal variant does nothing good.
We still don't know how long a person who has recovered from COVID-19 experiences cognitive impairment. If it's never, catching it is not a sacrifice I'd ever want to make. If it's of a reasonable duration after which you return to baseline _and_ it's not lethal, fine.
A non-lethal, highly contagious version of the virus is a sort of natural vaccine. I wouldn't try to spread it, but I could see people trying to catch it. I've had Covid (maybe twice) and that was quite enough for me.
Doubling every 1.2 days, but “Only a single patient on oxygen was fully vaccinated but the reason for the oxygen was Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease”.
Odd, I’ve had it 4 or 5 times maybe and only the first was like the real flu. But the long COVID is an annoyance. I did get the vaxxx do maybe that’s why the later rounds were so mild.
Would you share the general lifestyle you’ve lived where you’ve been exposed and taken even mildly ill from covid four or five times?
For example, unmasked attendance to large sporting events, etc?
Are masks supposed to protect you, or protect others from you?
All masks are for protecting others from your virus.
Microfiber N95 is used for making masks that protect you IF is used properly ( real material, disposable, snug fit)
As I understand it as well. Catching the virus is more likely from touching surfaces coated with the virus then touching one's face, or something similar.
Interesting (though not surprising) that my question above has been downvoted. This is a touchy topic where political alignment sometimes supersedes even the will to reason.
Most likely, child-having
Do you have any evidence for having children leading to greater likelihood of catching Covid?
Apparently there was even a small protective effect from children in the household, though this went away after schools reopened. One of the hypotheses in this paper is cross-immunity with other circulating coronaviruses:
https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2021/03/17/ar...
Based on this, I will continue my practice of licking subway handrails instead of religiously “sanitizing” everything like the person preparing to sit next to me just did.
How does one catch it that many times? Are you in the health care space?
Genuinely curious.
Your immunity is not effective enough (sorry, blame you, your ancestors or your vaccine manufacturer ) or you were infected by a variant with enough differences in its antigens that it counts as a different virus.
Did you get tests to confirm that all of those cases were covid?
_>But the long COVID is an annoyance._
What exactly do you mean by that? Were you left with some permanent symptoms?
If this is true, you are a bit of a “miracle of nature”. Catching it twice is highly unlikely. You’ve had it so many times you can’t remember if it was 4 or 5.
There’s long COVID to track on Omicron as well.
we have seen a sharp rise in [hospital] admissions
SARS-CoV-2 has been an incidental finding in patients that were admitted to the hospital for another medical, surgical or obstetric reason
It seems either the rise in admissions is purely coincidental, or Omicron is causing atypical symptoms?
It’s a positive-sounding report but appropriately qualified with caveats that another ~2 weeks are needed to clarify whether the appearance of milder disease persists, or reflects a difference in how the disease progresses.
Oh sweet, we get to Wait Two Weeks again!
Yes, the world is in flux.
The best part about 2 weeks to flatten the curve is the first 2 years.
“Day 500 of 15 days to flatten
the curve. I remain perfectly
still as a U.N. anal swab
drone hovers overhead.”
It matches what we've been told all along, that the virus will become more transmissable and less lethal.
It's true that over time the best reproduction strategy for a virus is to becoming incredibly transmissible but invisible to hosts, but the virus evolves via random walk and the local maximum could be more transmissible but lethal after a long delay.
There's no guarantees with randomness, though on a decade-long scale we can probably be sure it will fade into the background.
The evolution might be random, but the environment it evolves in and human behavior in response to it is not random. It was my understanding that the latter function is why we expect the course to result in a more transmissible but less lethal virus.
The more lethal it is, the fewer opportunities it would have to spread.
Except Covid-19 has traditionally had a significant lag time between being infectious and showing the first symptoms
Ebola is lethal. HIV is so bad that several treatments had to be engineered.
It is lethal to humans, but not to the animals that typically carry it. Ebola didn't evolve in humans to become highly lethal, it evolved to cross species.
HIV in and of itself does not kill you. It destroys your immune system in a lengthy process that ultimately leads to opportunistic infections that kill you. This process can take several months to several years. Likewise, HIV crossed species to infect humans, it did not evolve it's capabilities directly in humans.
It is naive to think that Sars-Cov2 will evolve to be less lethal.
Long term evolution of the virus would do that yes, but there is no guarantee that any particular mutation go in that manner.
Alpha was just as deadly but more transmissible. While Delta was both more transmissible and more deadly for example.
Less lethal or more slowly lethal? HIV is no less lethal now than it was decades ago. It spreads without issues because it kills the host a few years after infection instead of immediately. But HIV is as much of a death sentence today for people who do not seek or do no have access to treatments as it was 30 years ago.
If Omicron becomes the dominant variant, we can thank a country with low vaccination rates for breeding it!
This is also what a couple of heretics have been telling us, but was suppressed in mainstream.
Your logic is faulty.
No it's not. The more a virus spreads, the more it mutates. The more it mutates towards more transmissible _and_ less lethal, the more it spreads. Thus it's a positive feedback loop. Of course it's not _a given_ though (there could be a more dangerous and more transmissible mutation), but the logic is clear.
Yeah the real fun starts when it makes a quick hop in the opposite direction after we've let it spread everywhere.
I keep feeling like what we've had so far is just a preview, and there's going to be some new variant that has a younger target demographic.
Why do you think the virus would all mutate at the same time everywhere? If we let a variant spread, and it mutates in someone there's no system update that will suddenly make the mutation appear in everyone else. It's not a Trojan horse. In reality it would probably just mean that everyone with the earlier less dangerous variant is probably immune or somewhat immune to the new variant if it ever "hops in the opposite direction".
The global maxima is high transmission and high duration, not necessarily low morbidity.
A virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then kills you is just as transmissible as a virus that makes you contagious for two weeks and then you get better.
Yes, but the public response will be completely different. We're not looking at a virus in a petri dish here, but one that circulates in a human society. _That's_ what tends to lead the virus towards a less lethal evolution.
... assuming no reinfection and that the population of infected individuals is always small compared to a reservoir of susceptible individuals.
And assuming no counter measures. The deadlier the virus, the more measures we take. So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign.
This is key. We're not looking at a statically behaving population, but a dynamic one.
"So it's in the virus' interest to become relatively benign."
I don't speak viruscode
Maybe those of us who the virus kill the fastest die, the rest develops immunity and transmission stops?
All hypothesis
The virus is not conscious.
Not true nor guaranteed. Again your logic is faulty.
Who told you that?
There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal. None whatever.
Furthermore, no human virus has ever evolved to become less lethal.
Unfortunately this myth is often used by those who would like us to let Covid keep on killing, in order to protect their cashflows and for ideological and political reasons.
> There is no selection pressure for Covid to become less lethal.
Isn't there though? Say Covid killed within seconds. Then it couldn't spread. The longer the host lives, the more other people it can infect. I would almost say that the opposite of what you wrote is true.
This is incorrect - there is obvious selection pressure for lower lethality. But it's also absurd and inappropriately politicizing a scientific question to assert that only "those" with a malevolent agenda believe that the virus will ultimately become less dangerous.
It's believed that each one of the other coronaviruses which are now endemic "common colds" began as a more lethal pandemic, the last probably being in 1890.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/did-a-coronavi...
These other coronas are different, mostly upper respiratory and don't target ACE2 deep in the lungs or other organs.
Did the Spanish flu not evolve into our less lethal, seasonal flu?
I don't think so. I also don't know why the black plague (Yersinia Pestis) ended.
Wikipedia theories are as reliable as usual. (Not reliable)
I would caution against getting your hopes up.
A milder variant might be nice, and on the longer term help resolve the pandemic.
On the short term, however, increased infectiousness may easily outweigh this. It is not hard to see the number of hospitalizations and deaths _increasing_, simply because of the larger total number of cases. Humanity will then generally try to mitigate this by stricter measures, and altogether we might end up with a rather nasty winter... again.
if not all tests can identify omicron, how do we know where the epicenter is or even where omicrom is most concentrated right now?
It's a cold.
Though the NICD has confirmed that almost all cases of SARS-C0V-2 in Tshwane are due to the new variant, we have not been able to establish that in every instance the variant is Omicron as the PCR machine in use at the SBAH laboratory does not screen for the S-gene. A reasonable assumption is being made that the cases described here represent infection with the new variant.
The main observation that we have made over the last two weeks is that the majority of patients in the COVID wards have not been oxygen dependent. SARS-CoV-2 has been an incidental finding in patients that were admitted to the hospital for another medical, surgical or obstetric reason.
Basically the facts that are being reported aren’t facts. Nothing new. This is how free speech ends.
Looks pretty factual. They've been quite clear that it's a 'reasonable assumption'
I think this says that mortality appears to be lower for Omicron, and that the need for oxygen treatment is lower in severe Omicron cases. Looking forward to Fauci not talking about this ever.
Just like he talks about how gain of function research wasn't really gain of function.
Though the NICD has confirmed that almost all cases of SARS-C0V-2 in Tshwane are due to the new variant, we have not been able to establish that in every instance the variant is Omicron as the PCR machine in use at the SBAH laboratory does not screen for the S-gene. A reasonable assumption is being made that the cases described here represent infection with the new variant.
Translation(?): It's omicron all right, but we didn't test for it because we don't have the equipment. Still, it's reasonable to assume we're dealing with omicron.
This statement alone throws into question, at a minimum, the competence of the author and likely all of the report's data and conclusions.
>This statement alone throws into question, at a minimum, the competence of the author and likely all of the report's data and conclusions.
This is an emerging situation where all data may be useful. At present, the authors have access to some imperfect data due to circumstances beyond their control, and are clearly reporting the data -- complete with appropriate caveats about the limitations of their measurement equipment. This is exactly what competent practitioners should be doing, and to impugn their competence is completely inappropriate.
It's in your quote: "NICD has confirmed that almost all cases of SARS-C0V-2 in Tshwane are due to the new variant". They have confirmed almost all of them. That's a far cry from "we didn't test for it because we don't have the equipment".
I think that their reasoning is solid though. Omicron is the majority of SA cases now. It is early days and it is great to get any information like this out into the world, even if it is imperfect.
Unless it favors unvaccinated people, then it should definitely be censored. Sarcasm but not.
No offense, but what are your qualifications to question the competence of the author?
The NICD has (presumably) been doing sample sequencing of local positive covid cases. This is how the NICD knows that almost all new covid cases in Tshwana are omicron.
The SBAH lab is using PCR tests to confirm cases. Some PCR tests detect the "s gene", which omicron lacks. Thus a positive PCR test that lacks the s-gene is quite probably a case of omicron. The SBAH lab's PCR tests doesn't check for the "s gene" so can't be a direct indicator that the particular strain of covid is omicron. However, because the NICD sequencing has shown that almost all covid cases in the area are omicron, it is pretty safe to assume that almost all the cases at SBAH are omicron (as long as you trust NICD's data.) The responsible thing as a scientist is make such assumptions explicit, even when those assumptions are pretty safe. This statement should increase your confidence in the credibility of the scientist issuing it, not call it into question.
Edit: If you don't think the assumption is safe, do you think it is less safe than relying on the lack of an "s gene" to indicate omicron without doing the sequencing? Both are assumptions whose reasonableness depend entirely on assumptions about the current local genetic pool of variations.