Generic Virus Thread

[Chindie]

9 minutes ago, Kuwabatake Sanjuro said:

The case rises in SA are fairly astonishing and scary at the moment.

They're just people who were going to catch Covid anyway.

[sharkyvilla]

6 hours ago, Chindie said:

They're just people who were going to catch Covid anyway.

I read a few days ago that South Africa has a very low vaccine uptake and had to stop a shipment coming in because they had too much stock, so it probably is sadly true that many of these people infected were likely to catch it, especially if it is a more catchable strain.  I don't know whether they have ramped up the testing as well, hopefully they can encourage more people to take the jab now but it's obviously still a very complex country.

[Jareth]

In the UK they're pointing to a picture where Omicron will infect folks with and without the vaccine just as easily. But the WHO are also reporting there have been no deaths attributed to Omicron. If those facts continue to hold, one could feel a bit optimistic. Time will tell...

[Wainy316]

Omicron sounds like nice covid.  If I do catch the virus, I want that one. 

[Xela]

1 hour ago, Jareth said:

But the WHO are also reporting there have been no deaths attributed to Omicron. If those facts continue to hold, one could feel a bit optimistic. Time will tell...

I never knew that. That makes the scaremongering in the media completely disgraceful and irresponsible. 

[AVFCDAN]

2 hours ago, Jareth said:

In the UK they're pointing to a picture where Omicron will infect folks with and without the vaccine just as easily. But the WHO are also reporting there have been no deaths attributed to Omicron. If those facts continue to hold, one could feel a bit optimistic. Time will tell...

I thought the natural order of a virus was eventually one strain becomes much more transmissible but at a cost of not being so severe which is essentially where you want it to be. Not sure why the narrative is so negative on it when it’s possible this is a positive place to be in.

[Panto_Villan]

55 minutes ago, Xela said:

I never knew that. That makes the scaremongering in the media completely disgraceful and irresponsible. 

It typically takes about three weeks for the rise in infections to show in the deaths (or it did for the earlier strains), so that’s fairly non-conclusive atm I’d say. South Africa has a relatively young population too. It’s sensible to play it safe until scientists are able to confirm the facts.

I very much hope it does turn out to be milder and can outcompete Delta. We’d need the reverse of border controls in that case though; we’d need to be shipping in as many people with Omicron as possible!

[Jareth]

58 minutes ago, Xela said:

I never knew that. That makes the scaremongering in the media completely disgraceful and irresponsible. 

TBF - the data isn't in yet - could be that deaths go up in a couple of weeks and we're into something crap again - so personally I'd rather we all took it seriously to start with, just in case. But yes, since the start of coverage, there have been some quite sensational statements even from scientists and the like which really were not helpful - think we definitely need some more balance. 

[Panto_Villan]

29 minutes ago, AVFCDAN said:

I thought the natural order of a virus was eventually one strain becomes much more transmissible but at a cost of not being so severe which is essentially where you want it to be. Not sure why the narrative is so negative on it when it’s possible this is a positive place to be in.

So apparently this isn’t always true (although I initially also thought it was). Covid spreads best in the early stage of the disease, so it doesn’t really matter to the virus whether the host dies in hospital a week later or not. Covid therefore isn’t susceptible to that sort of selection pressure.

(Thats what Niall Ferguson was saying anyway.)

[MakemineVanilla]

The Times had a headline yesterday declaring that 'more than half who die (from covid) under 50 are unvaccinated'.

Isn't that the same as saying that just under half who die from covid under 50 have been vaccinated?

[Panto_Villan]

18 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

The Times had a headline yesterday declaring that 'more than half who die (from covid) under 50 are unvaccinated'.

Isn't that the same as saying that just under half who die from covid under 50 have been vaccinated?

I guess so - but the proportion of vaccinated adults is something like 86%. So if 14% of people represent over 50% of the deaths then that seems worth mentioning.

[bannedfromHandV]

1 hour ago, AVFCDAN said:

I thought the natural order of a virus was eventually one strain becomes much more transmissible but at a cost of not being so severe which is essentially where you want it to be. Not sure why the narrative is so negative on it when it’s possible this is a positive place to be in.

Because we love bad news these days.

[sidcow]

3 hours ago, Wainy316 said:

Omicron sounds like nice covid.  If I do catch the virus, I want that one. 

I thought it was a transformer? 

[Straggler]

34 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I thought it was a transformer? 

So glad it's not just me. I say it in Optimus primes voice every time.

[El Zen]

1 hour ago, bannedfromHandV said:

Because we love bad news these days.

And, frankly, we seem to have become more easily scared as a society and to have collectively lost ability to proportionally assess risk. 

[bannedfromHandV]

5 minutes ago, El Zen said:

And, frankly, we seem to have become more easily scared as a society and to have collectively lost ability to proportionally assess risk. 

Social media and 24 hour news outlets, two of the worst things to have ever happened to us.

Without those two things I don’t think we’d have even had a lockdown once over recent years.

[Xann]

https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-the-Johnson-and-Johnson-vaccine-out-of-my-system?share=1

[Rolta]

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

I thought it was a transformer? 

Clearly a deceptacon. I thought this too. I was wondering if they had given it a too-epic name.

 

[bickster]

38 minutes ago, Rolta said:

Clearly a deceptacon. I thought this too. I was wondering if they had given it a too-epic name.

 

They already skipped a greek letter so as not to blame China, I don't think they were thinking that deeply

[HanoiVillan]

On 03/12/2021 at 21:33, Kuwabatake Sanjuro said:

The case rises in SA are fairly astonishing and scary at the moment.

Some encouraging signs on this though:

It's worth clicking on the tweet to read the thread, rather than just this first tweet, as the rest of the thread suggests:

• So far, there is a smaller proportion of omicron patients on oxygen;
• 76% of admissions were admitted for other conditions and then found out they had covid because they had to do a test;
• Those testing positive were younger than in previous waves;
• The in-hospital death rate for omicron so far is 6.6%, compared to 23% for previous waves, but more data is needed here;
• Covid patients stayed in hospital for 2.8 days on average, versus 8.5 days average for previous waves

Still much much more data to collect, but this initial data seems really quite promising that what we may have here is a more transmissible variant, which could yet become the dominant strain, and which may lead to much milder illness. This could be really quite good news.