SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Apparently a massive amount of cases in Ireland are 5-12 year olds and 30-45 year olds I.e. their parents.

Who was it who repeatedly said schools weren’t a problem over and over? Can’t remember
 
Massive Spanner said:
Apparently a massive amount of cases in Ireland are 5-12 year olds and 30-45 year olds I.e. their parents.

Who was it who repeatedly said schools weren’t a problem over and over? Can’t remember
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Interesting. Kids have been back in school since September 2020. Any thoughts about why we’re only seeing this pattern now? If you really concentrate hard you’ll work it out for yourself.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Interesting. Kids have been back in school since September 2020. Any thoughts about why we’re only seeing this pattern now? If you really concentrate you’ll work it out for yourself.
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I already said that schools in isolation weren’t a big issue but combined with everything else being open they clearly are. You kept peddling the notion that they didn’t make any significant difference under any circumstances.
 
Massive Spanner said:
I already said that schools in isolation weren’t a big issue but combined with everything else being open they clearly are. You kept peddling the notion that they didn’t make any significant difference under any circumstances.
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No. No I didn’t. You keep misrepresenting what I say. Which is a dick move tbh.

When U12 year olds are literally the only age group in the country not yet offered a vaccine, we’re dealing with a variant that is more infectious than anything we’ve dealt with before and community transmission is high then obviously kids that age are going to make up significant proportion of the cases nationwide.

Despite this, this current surge didn’t start until well over a month after the schools filled up with kids. Funny that. Almost as though something else significant happened in mid-October…
 
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Massive Spanner said:
I already said that schools in isolation weren’t a big issue but combined with everything else being open they clearly are. You kept peddling the notion that they didn’t make any significant difference under any circumstances.
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Once a country reopens the case rates rise fast. That gets moderated in the vaxxed and the previously infected, but kids aren't vaxxed and most of them were kept away from infection, so they're easy targets for the virus.

But it's not kids who are superspreaders - it's normal life is one long string of events where the virus is around. Anyone not immune is going to catch it, it's only the timing that we get to choose. We stalled it for the kids, but we aren't doing that now.
 
Completely unrealistic hope but Im praying this new variant ends up being less dangerous and its more infectious traits swamp the other variants and then by next xmas everything is all lovely again.
 
Anecdotally, I personally know a few people who have been re-infected here in SA - they had covid in either May or Dec last year and were double vaxxed in about August :( Having said that, they’re all mild at this stage (one of those re-infected was in hospital for their first infection).
 
Stack said:
Completely unrealistic hope but Im praying this new variant ends up being less dangerous and its more infectious traits swamp the other variants and then by next xmas everything is all lovely again.
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It’s like living in a bloody nightmare.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
As per the lengthier quote you posted, that’s 2.4 times more likely to cause serious illness than the OG variant. I actually don’t know how much more deadly delta is than original covid but I’m fairly sure it is. So the jump from delta to omicron will be less than the 2.4 they calculated.

Anyhoo. As @jojojo said, large pinches of salt all round.
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Yeah - twitter thread below on it. I don’t see how they can possibly know vaccine efficacy after three doses considering hardly anyone in SA has had a booster:

 
Stack said:
Completely unrealistic hope but Im praying this new variant ends up being less dangerous and its more infectious traits swamp the other variants and then by next xmas everything is all lovely again.
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Not completely unrealistic. Delta has more or less wiped Beat which I think evaded vaccines more. If we are very lucky it will wipe out Delta but be less severe.

I know we shouldn't post memes in the CE forum but I hope people will forgive me for this one.

258486314_4935754749796262_3390276789045906759_n.jpg
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Even if we’re happy to let thousands of unvaccinated people die, the problem is they’ll fill up hospital and ICU beds, which will impact on everyone else. Cancellation of elective hip replacements, knee replacements, spinal surgery etc etc
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I’m not happy to let anyone die but when so many recoil in horror at fines and other punishments for those who refuse vaccinations, why is potentially unlimited restrictions on everyone seen as the lesser of two evils when it’s weighed alongside curbing the freedoms of those who choose not to be vaccinated?

This thread is full of “gosh that is going too far” responses every time a country announces plans to protect their population from the unvaccinated and the unvaccinated from themselves.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
No. No I didn’t. You keep misrepresenting what I say. Which is a dick move tbh.

When U12 year olds are literally the only age group in the country not yet offered a vaccine, we’re dealing with a variant that is more infectious than anything we’ve dealt with before and community transmission is high then obviously kids that age are going to make up significant proportion of the cases nationwide.

Despite this, this current surge didn’t start until well over a month after the schools filled up with kids. Funny that. Almost as though something else significant happened in mid-October…
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Nightclubs? With the restrictions opposed on them I doubt they could’ve been much worse than the pubs!

anyway I think we should move on from this like adults so if you just admit you were wrong all this time we can both move on and enjoy the next lockdown.
 


So this news has triggered predictably frantic virtue signalling on Twitter about racist policies intended to ‘punish’ South Africa. Is there anything to that?

Is it not likely that there was also some delay in South Africa picking up the extent of the rise of this new variant? i.e. South Africa has always been the epicentre and it started to spread to other countries before the variant was identified and notified to the rest of the world.

Not a criticism of South Africa for the great work in identifying this variant, obviously. I doubt they could have done what they did any quicker.

I guess it’s possible that Omicron is behind the recent massive surge in Europe but that seems very unlikely. It would have surely been picked up much sooner.
 
jojojo said:


Ouch. And yes, as regulars in here will guess: I understand why they want to do it. I think it could be a bad idea that won't address the fundamental question of trust in the health services, government and science. Nor does it help people with health issues (physical or psychological) that are affecting their judgment.

I could be wrong of course, maybe the Greek oldies just haven't bothered to get it and this will get them to move on from thinking that it doesn't matter to them, to knowing that it does - I hope so. Maybe they've already tried inducements, education and better access and this is a last resort to be used after a last individualised personal approach - I hope so.
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This could become the norm. Either everybody gets vaccinated, or we continually shut the world down whenever a new variant rears its head. A few more lockdowns and people will begin to support that idea.

It's either that, or a variant appears that drowns the others out. So far this pandemic looks an awful lot like Spanish flu, which if that trend continues would have it dying out by mid 2022.

Then:

1918_spanish_flu_waves.gif


vs. Now:

_121147481_optimised-uk_daily_deaths_with_ra_19oct-nc.png
 
11101 said:
This could become the norm. Either everybody gets vaccinated, or we continually shut the world down whenever a new variant rears its head. A few more lockdowns and people will begin to support that idea.

It's either that, or a variant appears that drowns the others out. So far this pandemic looks an awful lot like Spanish flu, which if that trend continues would have it dying out by mid 2022.

Then:

1918_spanish_flu_waves.gif


vs. Now:

_121147481_optimised-uk_daily_deaths_with_ra_19oct-nc.png
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Why did the Spanish Flu die out again? I think I read it somewhere, but can't remember...
 
Pogue Mahone said:


So this news has triggered predictably frantic virtue signalling on Twitter about racist policies intended to ‘punish’ South Africa. Is there anything to that?

Is it not likely that there was also some delay in South Africa picking up the extent of the rise of this new variant? i.e. South Africa has always been the epicentre and it started to spread to other countries before the variant was identified and notified to the rest of the world.

Not a criticism of South Africa for the great work in identifying this variant, obviously. I doubt they could have done what they did any quicker.

I guess it’s possible that Omicron is behind the recent massive surge in Europe but that seems very unlikely. It would have surely been picked up much sooner.
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Not sure where it originated, but the South African cases are probably due to the founders effect - we were close to zero cases until this most recent outbreak.

So it's definitely possible that Omicron simply didn't have to compete with Delta at all, giving it a free run to take over in SA and hence be all of the cases. In Europe though, Delta has a firm grip. I think genome sequencing in Europe is done on c1% of cases, so it's very possible Omicron was effectively a variant of interest in Europe before the SA outbreak, but the SA outbreak has become the epicentre as it can infect everyone here.
 
Traub said:
Not sure where it originated, but the South African cases are probably due to the founders effect - we were close to zero cases until this most recent outbreak.

So it's definitely possible that Omicron simply didn't have to compete with Delta at all, giving it a free run to take over in SA and hence be all of the cases. In Europe though, Delta has a firm grip. I think genome sequencing in Europe is done on c1% of cases, so it's very possible Omicron was effectively a variant of interest in Europe before the SA outbreak, but the SA outbreak has become the epicentre as it can infect everyone here.
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That’s definitely possible. And, if so, means either one or both of the following are true.

a) Omicron is less transmissible than Delta
b) It evades immunity from prior infection very well but vaccination less well

All pure speculation of course!
 
11101 said:
By 1920 everybody had either developed immunity or died. Just like Covid will probably always be around in some form but the German chap was right, everybody will either be dead or immune to it.
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Definitely. Although there’s an important different between the viruses in that influenza is much less genetically stable (antigenic drift) which makes it harder to vaccinate against but quicker to mutate to less virulent forms.
 
Pogue Mahone said:


So this news has triggered predictably frantic virtue signalling on Twitter about racist policies intended to ‘punish’ South Africa. Is there anything to that?

Is it not likely that there was also some delay in South Africa picking up the extent of the rise of this new variant? i.e. South Africa has always been the epicentre and it started to spread to other countries before the variant was identified and notified to the rest of the world.

Not a criticism of South Africa for the great work in identifying this variant, obviously. I doubt they could have done what they did any quicker.

I guess it’s possible that Omicron is behind the recent massive surge in Europe but that seems very unlikely. It would have surely been picked up much sooner.
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The Kent variant was only identified as a problematic variant in December even though the first test case was captured in September, and the UK only looked at this variant beause of some interesting findings about a similar but different variant in South Africa in November. These things just sit in databases picking up dust until there's a particular real-world trigger that causes them to zoom in on it, we can track thousands of them but we can't thoroughly analyse thousands of them. It's not the kind of thing that jumps out in the data, despite all the talk about it being 50% more transmissible than the last. It was just a coincidental email that made them look.

Soon, his lab was analyzing swabs, shipped on ice by courier overnight. On Dec. 1, he emailed a British scientist, Andrew Rambaut, and asked him to review some of his early findings: a series of strange mutations on the virus’s outer surface.

Dr. de Oliveira, a Brazilian-South African scientist who sports long hair and a surfer vibe, shared his findings at a Dec. 4 meeting of the World Health Organization working group. All took notice because of the variants’ potential to disrupt the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Days later, Dr. de Oliveira recalled, Dr. Rambaut emailed him with a discovery of his own: British scientists had scoured their databases and found a similar but unrelated mutation that appeared linked to a cluster of infections in the county of Kent.

Coming two weeks before Christmas, Dr. de Oliveira immediately thought of the Lunar New Year early in the pandemic, when millions of people in China traveled far and wide for the holiday, some carrying the virus.

“It was crystal clear,” Dr. de Oliveira said in an interview. “These variants will spread nationally, regionally and globally.”

Dr. Rambaut and colleagues released a paper on the variant discovered in Britain on Dec. 19 — the same day that British officials announced new measures. The variant had apparently been circulating undetected as early as September. Dr. Rambaut has since credited the South Africa team with the tip that led to the discovery of the variant surging in Britain.
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It doesn't make any sense to descibe South Africa as the country of origin for this variant, IMO. It's just the country of identification. For most big variants we never identify patient zero, and we continually discover it being identified in a completely different region at a much earlier point in the timeline. There's far too many gaps in international sequencing capabilities and far too much lag in genomic sequencing identification to have even a fuzzy picture of how it originated.

I don't think the policies are based on the assumption that South Africa was where it was originated, they're based on the assumption that it's much more prevalent and a much higher risk than in their own countries. That's a perfectly reasonable assumption based on the evidence available at the time. But the WHO have repeatedly said that closing borders is not a particularly effective method at preventing exposure because inevitably it's already in your country before you knew it. That's proven true every time. It's just a political decision.
 
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Pogue Mahone said:
Random personal fact. Spanish flu orphaned my grandmother when she was living in South Africa (her dad was blown up a year earlier, working on the railways) and she had to take a 6 month boat trip all on her own to live with a grand-aunt in Ireland. Aged 11.
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That's an incredible coincidence. My grandmother was 2-years-old when she was also orphaned by Spanish Flu.
 
Pogue Mahone said:


So this news has triggered predictably frantic virtue signalling on Twitter about racist policies intended to ‘punish’ South Africa. Is there anything to that?

Is it not likely that there was also some delay in South Africa picking up the extent of the rise of this new variant? i.e. South Africa has always been the epicentre and it started to spread to other countries before the variant was identified and notified to the rest of the world.

Not a criticism of South Africa for the great work in identifying this variant, obviously. I doubt they could have done what they did any quicker.

I guess it’s possible that Omicron is behind the recent massive surge in Europe but that seems very unlikely. It would have surely been picked up much sooner.
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It isn't possible. Even if it wasn't picked up in time and the chance of that is probably less than 1 in a million, they would be finding hundreds of thousands cases now looking back, not dozens. And well over 50% of all cases would have to be omicron. It is totally impossible.
 
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golden_blunder said:
That’s staggering
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Wouldn’t worry too much. Same thing happened with delta. You probably remember the headlines about delta making kids much sicker than previous variants. A new variant scares the shit out of everyone and the paediatricians err on the side of caution, admitting not very sick kids for observation.
 
Early indications suggest most Omicron coronavirus cases are mild, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

An official, speaking on behalf of the organisation, said there is no evidence to suggest the efficacy of vaccines has been reduced by the new strain - but did say some mutations of the virus indicate an increased risk of quicker transmission.


They added more than 40 different mutations have been identified with the Omicron variant.
 
Breaking new on Sky

Early indications suggest most Omicron coronavirus cases are mild, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

An official, speaking on behalf of the organisation, said there is no evidence to suggest the efficacy of vaccines has been reduced by the new strain- but did say some mutations of the virus indicate an increased risk of quicker transmission.


They added more than 40 different mutations have been identified with the Omicron variant.
 
choccy77 said:
Breaking new on Sky

Early indications suggest most Omicron coronavirus cases are mild, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

An official, speaking on behalf of the organisation, said there is no evidence to suggest the efficacy of vaccines has been reduced by the new strain- but did say some mutations of the virus indicate an increased risk of quicker transmission.


They added more than 40 different mutations have been identified with the Omicron variant.
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Sounds like a series where Walt JR follows in his daddies footsteps.
 
More a question or a theory.

There have been suggestions that these huge mutated versions are created from immunocompromised people (HIV etc) now if the virus is staying in their system for a lot longer then a "healthy" person but it's not killing them does this make it more likely it will become a mild variant with less severe disease.

Makes sense from a logical view to me but was interested if there is actually any science to that or just pure luck.
 
choccy77 said:
Early indications suggest most Omicron coronavirus cases are mild, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

An official, speaking on behalf of the organisation, said there is no evidence to suggest the efficacy of vaccines has been reduced by the new strain - but did say some mutations of the virus indicate an increased risk of quicker transmission.


They added more than 40 different mutations have been identified with the Omicron variant.
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This could turn out to be the end of the pandemic with covid 19 becoming like other coronaviruses with increased transmissibility minus the serious disease i.e. like the common cold/flu. We shall see
 
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