The Omicron variant

Even if Omicron is mild (and it looks like it is 🤞) Delta is still the dominant variant here and there's no reason someone couldn't be infected by both simultaneously. So maybe in a month or so everyone can (hopefully) chill out, but in the mean time people who are elderly or vulnerable (and those in contact with them) still need to be careful.

You really have to take anything an English politician says with a truck load of salt.

Dominic Raab on sky, 250 people in hospital with Omicron.

Dominic Raab 30 minutes later on the BBC - 9 people in hospital with Omicron.

I have to correct you here. You cannot have two variants in a person with different cell attack rates without a winner and a loser (anomalies aside). You can already see that in the rise of Omicron, replacing Delta. It does NOT add up unlike some of the headlines suggest. The two variants may live side by side in the community for a while until one outpaces the other. Delta goes down, Omicron up. It is a matter of scale.

Contradicting almost everything I've posted in the last few days (it's that kinda pandemic) I now think Omicron is actually about to go exponential in the UK and just run riot there, and short after here, in the next few weeks. Hopefully it's very mild in which case this could be a good thing long term. It may be so transmissible too that things like lockdowns and even PCR testing become pointless - hospitals just deal as best they can with whoever turns up.

Am I getting this wrong? That's my read this morning anyway..... currently have Delta myself. Will be a bit pissed off if I get Omicron within weeks. Thought there was an upside to getting delta....

The rate of hospitalisations should largely increase with the rate of transmission regardless of severity, so it’s not unexpected. What we need to understand is the ratio of hospitalisations to cases.

Looks that way, pretty serious **** is about to hit the fan everywhere. Hopefully the boosters do the trick and it is not as harmful as it could be.

Exactly. Another death being twisted to feed the narrative required to keep the emergency in place. Without the emergency reason for the Conditional Marketing Authorisation dissapears and the jabs would have to be withdrawn.

There's a bit of a hospitalisation paradox with Omicron; assuming it has a lower hospitalisation rate but a higher vaccine escape rate than Delta. In a largely unvaccinated country like ZA, an Omicron surge will see hospital numbers grow, but at a slower rate than a comparable Delta surge. Which is a big relief to such a country.

In a highly vaccinated country - like Denmark or Ireland - then an Omicron surge may see hospital numbers increase despite in general a milder illness, because the vaccine escape is higher. Which is a cause for concern for such countries.

However, if it is a milder illness, then the translation of those cases to ICU and deaths will be lower, which should mean no need for panic. We, for example, typically cite 2,000 patients in hospital as being our "limit" but that's only when you consider a 10:1 ratio for patients going to ICU. If Omicron has a 20:1 ratio then we can handle 4,000 covid patients in hospital. And we have the bed capacity for that afaik.

Since we know that the booster jab is highly effective here, then it once more tells us that boosters are the only game in town. Forget restrictions and crowd capacity limits, get boosters in arms.

If it’s mild and hopefully it is, we might be able to get back to some level of normality. Maybe in Spring? If there’s high levels of infection among healthcare workers and they are absent from work, I wonder how that would play out in a couple of months. We know NPHET are conservative and their emphasis would be to protect the health service but government would be under enormous pressure to open up (if it turns out to be mild).

That looks pointless to me. It's spreading fast, genie back in bottle stuff. SA data promising though.

Hopium is a real phenomenon.

The words talking and the words butthole spring to mind, not sure why.

Some Right Said Fred Maths starting to appear.