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the more contagious = less deadly thing is mostly a myth, op. it's true that if a disease kills you before you can even visit the applebee's salad bar once, that is an evolutionary disadvantage, but it does not apply to covid19 since it's (so far) not that deadly and you can spread it for a few days before you start to feel bad. delta out-competed earlier dominant strains with significantly higher transmission but wasn't less deadly (if anything, IFR was higher). omicron being less deadly is lucky, although it's still gonna kill a lot of people. whether the raw numbers will be higher or lower than the prior delta wave remains to be seen, but in the US we just broke the prior hospitalization with covid record: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#hospitalizations anyway, calling it a cold is just wrong. even if it's 5x less deadly than delta, that still makes it more dangerous than the average seasonal flu and much more transmissible.
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Jan 16, 2022 20:30
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mkvltra posted:How do you qualify this, doctor? i give it my golden seal
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Jan 16, 2022 20:43
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Bula Vinaka posted:Isn't Spanish Flu basically still with us, in a greatly mutated form from the original strain? it was an H1N1 influenza, if that's what you mean, and a good example that mutations can and do occur that make a virus more dangerous without being less transmissible.
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Jan 16, 2022 20:57
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Bula Vinaka posted:It's not a common cold now, but shouldn't it eventually mutate into the equivalent of one? (Which is what I'm wondering about!) what mechanism do you believe is forcing this to occur? i mean, sure, given enough dice rolls you could end up with a covid19 variant that is about as sever as a "common cold" (which is also hard to pin down, since there are so many different cold viruses, some of which are other coronaviruses). it could also mutate to be more like SARS or MERS, or some completely new thing. usually when you hear someone say that viruses always mutate over time to be less deadly, the rationale they use is that it's an evolutionary disadvantage to kill the infected before they can spread the virus. that's true, but covid takes weeks to kill you right now and it's highly transmissible before you feel too bad to go out in public. it has a lot of headroom to get worse before patient behavior begins to work against transmission rates. if you are implying some other biological mechanism, what is it?
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Jan 16, 2022 21:12
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Methanar posted:lol I wonder if any of the giant pharmaceutical corporations have been sponsoring politicans to write all of the regulations requiring vaccines to access every day life. dont worry though because it will be the government legislating itself into a forever subscription to purchase the vaccines and paying the bill for you. if you want to go full  , vaccines aren't a great investment for big pharma. governments buy vaccines at something like $15/dose. compare that to new antiviral treatments or monoclonal antibodies -- they bill hundreds or thousands per treatment. they'd be much better off backing the Florida approach, where regulations prevent businesses and public spaces from enforcing vaccine and mask requirements, and the state buys all of the monoclonal antibody treatment they can pump out at ridiculous prices (about $2k per dose) and give it to the unvaccinated.Last I saw, FL had spent $244M on monoclonal antibodies (and had reserved another ~$600M for the rest of the year). That bought a few hundred thousand doses of antibodies, but would've been enough to buy vaccines for about half the state's population.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:29
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yoloer420 posted:It hasn't even started to happen so far. Compared to alpha, omicron is: the first bullet is not really relevant to op's question -- the vaccine was made for a different version of the virus. it would be like saying that the flu is more dangerous than polio because it's not affected by the polio vaccine. eventually we'll probably get a covid vaccine that covers more variants. do you have good sources for the 2nd and 3rd bullet? so far, the peak of the omicron wave is like 3 or 4x higher in case count, but hospitalizations and deaths are not up by that much. they are, of course, lagging indicators and there's a lot more people vaccinated or who have some immunity from a prior infection now, which makes it very difficult to directly compare numbers from prior waves. i think it is too soon to say with certainty whether, in a vacuum, omicron less dangerous than the original or alpha strain. in practice, it does look like omicron is less severe (if nothing else, due to a more hardened population). the fourth bullet is obviously true.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:42
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Methanar posted:I'd be very surprised if the vaccines were only $15/dose considering the bidding wars over them, between countries even US states themselves. you missed the point, but ok, you're not wrong that huge corporations are amoral and profit driven and it would've been better if governments had forced them to sell the vaccines at cost. but a vaccine isn't bad just because it was produced through the system of capitalism, and vaccinating a population against a dangerous disease isn't a bad thing just because the ceo of pfizer gets rich in the process. a $15, or $20, or $30 (or whatever price quibbling you seem to want to do) investment once or twice per year per person is basically nothing. even if only 1 out of ~100 of those shots prevents the need for a monoclonal antibody dose that year, it was a good investment. if even 1 out of 1000 of those shots prevents a hospitalization, it was a good investment. and that's just looking at the basic economics. there are also a lot of lives that have been and will be saved by vaccination, which is even more valuable and important.
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Jan 16, 2022 22:15
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Bula Vinaka posted:But... it is encouraging, but there's a 2-3 week lag from infection to death (at least with prior variants), and then there is also reporting lag that adds another week or two for death metrics to trickle out and get backfilled into these charts. the US omicron wave heated up right around christmas, so we are just now at the 3 week point where we should begin to see the death chart curve up if it's going to (as hospitalizations did this week). i expect the US will have a small bump in death rate, but not nearly as dramatic as the case bump (similar to what the UK experienced -- their omicron wave appears to have started about a week ahead of the US's).
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Jan 16, 2022 23:35
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:did this really need to be a new thread? how many covid threads do we need on this website, jesus this thread is the less deadly variant
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Jan 17, 2022 21:36
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