Scrutable

jimbob wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 6:35 pm I'm looking back on the Wuhan Coronavirus thread from March 2020. We were talking about similar doubling rates then to Omicron now in a heavily-vaccinated population.

lpm wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 5:55 pm

Woodchopper wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 4:26 pm The thing is that Delta became significantly less severe as a consequence of mass vaccination. As far as I remember from about 10% of cases needing hospital treatment down to about 2%.

I assume that when people talk about Omi being less severe they mean in comparison to the early phases of the other variants. I haven’t seen any evidence that Omi would be less virulent in a population without any antibodies (if such a population even exists now).

That's ratios. It's misleading and is making people go wrong.

If Delta puts 2% of cases in hospital, Omicron will put 1%, say. Far less. That's guaranteed. It's simply the outcome of the mix.

We saw it with Delta. A huge number of kids in the case numbers, the hospitalization ratio falls. A huge number of vaccinated breakthroughs and the ratio falls.

But that's just aggregation across a population and is irrelevant to real world outcomes. It's individuals and their personal risk that matter. I'm never sure what people are talking about with "milder" because they seem confused by mix vs individuals.

I'm not managing to explain it very well though. What we need to discover is individual impacts.

Take David. He is 80 years old. Two Pfizers. Likes to spend time with grandchildren.

He didn't catch Delta. Either luck or the good vaccine protection. He's now quite likely to catch Omicron, because it'll be so widespread and his Pfizers are less protective against infection.

He catches it. Has David's risk of hospitalization changed vs if he'd caught Delta?

- Higher risk, because two Pfizers are still very good protection against hospitalization, but not quite as good as before
- Lower risk, because Omicron is milder underlying virulence

It's impossible to determine individual risk from aggregated national statistics because the vax vs unvax ratio changes in such a dramatic way for Omicron. Look at any aggregated statistic and you'll see a far lower hospitalization ratio - tricking you into telling David he's got a lower risk of going into hospital now he's caught Covid. This might well be false.

shpalman wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 8:01 pm

jimbob wrote: Sat Dec 11, 2021 6:35 pm I'm looking back on the Wuhan Coronavirus thread from March 2020. We were talking about similar doubling rates then to Omicron now in a heavily-vaccinated population.

That was due to how we were suddenly discovering cases when the virus had been around a week or two already.

The new variant of coronavirus now accounts for a third of cases in London

Today we report 37 875 new cases, which includes 19 840 retrospective cases and 18 035 new cases. In the past 24 hours a total of 18,035 positive COVID-19 cases have been reported. The positivity testing rate today is 28.9%.

Woodchopper wrote: Sun Dec 12, 2021 9:23 pm There’s been some commentary on Twitter that the Omicron wave in Gauteng had peaked and case numbers were now descending. Which would be really weird given everything else we know about Omi.

It looks like the recent lower case numbers were just a reporting backlog:

Today we report 37 875 new cases, which includes 19 840 retrospective cases and 18 035 new cases. In the past 24 hours a total of 18,035 positive COVID-19 cases have been reported. The positivity testing rate today is 28.9%.

https://www.nicd.ac.za/latest-confirmed ... mber-2021/

lpm wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:00 pm I've ventured onto twitter.

Everyone is forgetting the steepness of the age curve again. This makes me cross. In the face of this virus 80 year olds are very very different humans to 30 year olds.

A country with a fairly young population, let's call it Shouth Ashfrica, will have a hugely different hospitalisation and death profile to an ageing European country, let's call it Ununited Shitdom.

bob sterman wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:10 pm

lpm wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:00 pm I've ventured onto twitter.

Everyone is forgetting the steepness of the age curve again. This makes me cross. In the face of this virus 80 year olds are very very different humans to 30 year olds.

A country with a fairly young population, let's call it Shouth Ashfrica, will have a hugely different hospitalisation and death profile to an ageing European country, let's call it Ununited Shitdom.

Indeed. To keep it mild, instead of booking boosters - we need to book appointments to change our our middle aged and elderly folk - into young South Africans with previous exposure to the Beta variant.

Sajid Javid, above link wrote:we expect it to become the dominant Covid 19 variant in the capital in the next 48 hours.

Brightonian wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 5:35 pm

Sajid Javid, above link wrote:we expect it to become the dominant Covid 19 variant in the capital in the next 48 hours.

raven wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 3:43 pm There's a VUI (A.Y 4.2, unnamed as yet) from October that has given the UK 15k+ of cases in the last reporting period to Delta's 96k. It seems to be outcompeting Delta from these graphs: (Delta purple, VUI dark blue)

So is that part of what's causing this slow upward rise of cases we've seen from 30k to 50k+? (Because Omicron hasn't really got going yet.)

shpalman wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 5:06 pm 200,000 a day!

A health source has clarified what Sajid Javid meant in the Commons when he implied Omicron infections were running at 200,000 per day. (See 4.19pm and 5.2opm.)

Javid was referring to Omicron infections, not Covid infections.

But he was referring to a UK Health Security Agency estimate for the number of people who currently are infected with Omicron, not to the number who are catching the infection for the first time every day.