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

Kaos said:
How would they further narrow the prioritisation though? As far as I recall, the guidelines state that to be eligible for a PCR you should either display symptoms, have been in contact with someone who's tested positive, or you need one done for travel reasons. All of them seem pretty sensible criteria.
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They also use them to check positive LFTs etc. LFTs aren't perfect but a LFT positive taken seriously is better than waiting for a late PCR. The contact bit is the other bit of the picture. If the observations are right about Omicron then the sheer volume of contacts will make it impossible to do the test quickly enough to do anything useful with the result.

The criteria are sensible but the tests are only useful at all if people can get a test as soon as they need it and can get the result the next day. We can do roughly 800k PCR tests/day - that's a huge number but not huge enough. Something has to give.

I know which bits I'd drop, but the NHS/public health lot will be doing a proper analysis of what they find most useful. Who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and it'll stop spreading before they have to choose.
 
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groovyalbert said:
I got covid after being double vaxxed and lost my sense of smell/taste massively impaired. Within a week both were back.

I've heard of others who regained these senses very quickly, presumably due to having been vaccinated.
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My girlfriend and I both had covid last summer and lost sense of smell/taste, hers came back after four days and mine after six days. This was before vaccines, obviously.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
True but SA have already gone through that with their second and third waves (also on graph)
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Sure, but their second to third waves only see a marginal improvement. We saw a massive improvement in the UK.

Still fingers crossed it'll be party hats all round next week.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Correct.

Based on lab data with omicron. Needs to be confirmed with real life data before we can be certain.

EDIT: presume sars-cov-1 is a typo?
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No typo. I can’t remember where I was reading it, but a single mRNA dose combined with previous SARS-cov1 apparently produced the highest protection against older strains and antibody production compared to any other combination. (Something to do with binding to intake vectors of sarbecoviruses which tbh I didn’t understand. But they had minimal protection vs cov2 to start, but one mRNA dose really boosted it up past 2 dose levels on others )
 
Cancelled my christmas plans. We’ll do a family gathering in April.
 
jojojo said:
Sure, but their second to third waves only see a marginal improvement. We saw a massive improvement in the UK.

Still fingers crossed it'll be party hats all round next week.
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The SA picture is hard to understand alright. Why didn’t they get this same drop between waves 2 and 3? Is it because they didn’t get a decent level of population immunity until after delta hit?

So much speculation!
 
Smores said:
We can't keep what up exactly?

Vaccines and masks in limited circumstances and periods is hardly some huge societal pressure we can't sustain for a few years.
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Don't you just love those halfwits who choose to wear their mask around their stupid chins....
 
Heardy said:
Got my booster later this morning. My pregnant wife is booked in too.

I hope she’s ok after getting it - the tin foil hat posts re pregnant women have got under my skin and I feel a bit sick about it all.
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"Should have waited for your first baby and then vaccinate" was my favourite comment wife and I got from our neighbour.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
The SA picture is hard to understand alright. Why didn’t they get this same drop between waves 2 and 3? Is it because they didn’t get a decent level of population immunity until after delta hit?

So much speculation!
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The obvious answer its milder considerably omicron but no one wants to say it just in case they are wrong.
 
I’d say we will be back to normal in the UK in March with the majority having built up immunity for further waves with the remaining majority, unfortunately, dead.

Just a thought though.
 
dal said:
I’d say we will be back to normal in the UK in March with the majority having built up immunity for further waves with the remaining minority unfortunately, dead.

Just a thought though.
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Somebody in the comments on that twitter thread is suggesting SA has a unique immunoprofile (learned that word from Twitter!) due to their high prevalence of beta variant before, which may be driving omicron to be less deadly there.
 
dal said:
I’d say we will be back to normal in the UK in March with the majority having built up immunity for further waves with the remaining majority, unfortunately, dead.

Just a thought though.
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Optimistic, I hope you are right. Given that approx 1/6th of the UK population over the full length of this pandemic have had covid and that very roughly 1 in 4 of those dont develop antibodies Im guessing it might take longer. Hope Im completely wrong.
 
Stack said:
Optimistic, I hope you are right. Given that approx 1/6th of the UK population over the full length of this pandemic have had covid and that very roughly 1 in 4 of those dont develop antibodies Im guessing it might take longer. Hope Im completely wrong.
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You are wrong. I mean, it's been almost 2 years and you are still looking at reported cases.
 
Stack said:
Optimistic, I hope you are right. Given that approx 1/6th of the UK population over the full length of this pandemic have had covid and that very roughly 1 in 4 of those dont develop antibodies Im guessing it might take longer. Hope Im completely wrong.
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I doubt a figure of 25% is remotely accurate. Where did you get that from?
 
owlo said:
Somebody in the comments on that twitter thread is suggesting SA has a unique immunoprofile (learned that word from Twitter!) due to their high prevalence of beta variant before, which may be driving omicron to be less deadly there.
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Yes. That’s the worry. Especially considering that omicron shares spike protein mutations with beta (large wave in SA, no previous wave in uk) that it doesn’t share with dellta.
 

What I meant was the majority of the remaining minority dead, with some unfortunately stuck with lifelong symptoms, I truly hope though there isn’t a harsh long covid with Omicron because that would be devastating.
 
owlo said:
Somebody in the comments on that twitter thread is suggesting SA has a unique immunoprofile (learned that word from Twitter!) due to their high prevalence of beta variant before, which may be driving omicron to be less deadly there.
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Have a point if the beta wave wasn't hugely smaller then then delta and didn't even get close to what omicron/delta is.

So i'd be sceptical.
 
Over the past month daily COVID19 cases have doubled from a daily average of around 38000 to about 80000. But hospitalisations and deaths have remained the same. Is this the an early sign that Omicron might really be much less deadly, and we are seeing the beginning of the end of covid dominating the world?
 
Ferguson’s Hairdryer said:
Over the past month daily COVID19 cases have doubled from a daily average of around 38000 to about 80000. But hospitalisations and deaths have remained the same. Is this the an early sign that Omicron might really be much less deadly, and we are seeing the beginning of the end of covid dominating the world?
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Unfortunately - that’s more to do with the impact of the booster drive on Delta. Omicron has only been around for a few weeks - the impact on hospitalisation (in the UK) is only coming through now and the impact on deaths is probably a few weeks away.

Having said that there is some data in South Africa suggesting it is more mild. But for a huge variety of reasons, it’s not yet clear decisively how much of that is due to omicron itself being less severe and other factors. That is one of a handful of critical questions which scientists are working to answer.
 
Ferguson’s Hairdryer said:
Over the past month daily COVID19 cases have doubled from a daily average of around 38000 to about 80000. But hospitalisations and deaths have remained the same. Is this the an early sign that Omicron might really be much less deadly, and we are seeing the beginning of the end of covid dominating the world?
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That's the big hope - the evidence is limited though. Maybe, if we all cross our fingers reeeeaaaallly hard.

 
Ferguson’s Hairdryer said:
Over the past month daily COVID19 cases have doubled from a daily average of around 38000 to about 80000. But hospitalisations and deaths have remained the same. Is this the an early sign that Omicron might really be much less deadly, and we are seeing the beginning of the end of covid dominating the world?
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Next week, if Omicron follows past SARS2 patterns, we'll see that leap in hospitalisations, a week after that we'll see what happens to deaths. Meanwhile we're just trying to guess which bits of SA's experience apply to the UK, plus looking at the first scraps of data from London. We're all going that the boosters will keep the over 70s out of hospital, but we really have no idea of that's true.
 
jojojo said:
Next week, if Omicron follows past SARS2 patterns, we'll see that leap in hospitalisations, a week after that we'll see what happens to deaths. Meanwhile we're just trying to guess which bits of SA's experience apply to the UK, plus looking at the first scraps of data from London. We're all going that the boosters will keep the over 70s out of hospital, but we really have no idea of that's true.
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Will definitely see an increase, but hopefully and I don’t think it’s blind faith to think it we won’t see an hospitalisations escalation in line with previous rates of infection to hospitalisations rates.
 
Pogue Mahone said:


Worth reading the full report. Has a table comparing outcomes with delta cases over the same time period. Approximately the same hospitalisation rates (1.2% vs 1.5%) Ditto for ITU admissions.
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Same rate as Delta? Sorry Twitter gets angry if I click anything. That wouldn’t be ideal - but then again it’s still a very small population
 
lynchie said:
Same. Although I worry how much is influenced by "No way am I taking an LFT on the 16th December"
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Numbers will be lower "officially" because people will be resisting reporting in these next few days to save their parties, jobs and Christmas.

But having been in London today, I can say it was very quiet.
 
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