The traditional action for New Year’s Eve is to go to a party, stay up until midnight and watch the bell drop, and the traditional song is Auld Lang Syne.
That's the biggest potential reason why things might not end, but if everyone gets Omicron, then everyone will have a prior infection, so any subsequent waves from the Omega Variants won't be that bad.
I think the link on "Abbot flat out denies the FDA’s claim of potential lowered test sensitivity, says their tests are as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants." is wrong.
at face value, population adjusted might be expecting UK to be peaking right about now, and then US maybe later this week.
interestingly, among the relatively few coworkers not off for the holidays, not many took the offer to wfh for the next few days like me, quite a few continued to work from the admittedly quite depopulated office. let's see what people do next week, and whether daily rapid testing policy is good enough versus omicron.
was thinking about how much it binds as in how to proxy how much we're over - didn't come up with anything better than wishing nyc/london had sf style incidental positivity rates so we can interpolate.. now looking at Nate Silver's Google searches tweet feel it's a neat idea.
Thank you for your updates. I feel that all these statistics have to do with 20-30% of the world. I am very very curious to know what is the majority of the population of the world doing, thinking about covid!!!
Agreed that I'm not making a real effort to cover areas outside the West, and I plead 'only so much time' combined with having almost no readership elsewhere.
Hold on a minute... Omicron seems to be mainly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, unlike Delta and the original Wuhan strain.
Evidence that Omicron is displacing Delta comes mainly from sequencing done on PCR tests - but PCR tests are done based on taking swabs from the nose and tonsils, i.e. the upper respiratory tract. So how do we know that there aren't many patients that have BOTH Omicron AND Delta, but with the Delta concentrated in their lungs and the Omicron concentrated in their upper respiratory tract? Couldn't that be the case?
And how do we know that deaths attributed to Omicron aren't actually deaths due to Delta having been in the victim's lungs? Particularly since, as I understand it, previous strains, when they cause fatalities, typically end up killing the patient AFTER the virus has already been pretty much cleared from the body - it's an immune system overreaction!
The number of people with Delta at any given time wasn't all that high, and most of them already didn't die, so this seems unlikely to be a large effect.
Thanks Zvi. How do you think, if at all, about mutations post Omicron?
That's the biggest potential reason why things might not end, but if everyone gets Omicron, then everyone will have a prior infection, so any subsequent waves from the Omega Variants won't be that bad.
I think the link on "Abbot flat out denies the FDA’s claim of potential lowered test sensitivity, says their tests are as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants." is wrong.
Should be fixed now.
I wanted to signal boost this: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/new-york-is-using-race-to-determine . It strikes me as really bad
On my stack. I did know about the policy in question. In practice I'm guessing it's not a big deal, but in principle it's not great.
unclear to what extent testing constraint binds, but guess if we take London peaking few days back
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases
at face value, population adjusted might be expecting UK to be peaking right about now, and then US maybe later this week.
interestingly, among the relatively few coworkers not off for the holidays, not many took the offer to wfh for the next few days like me, quite a few continued to work from the admittedly quite depopulated office. let's see what people do next week, and whether daily rapid testing policy is good enough versus omicron.
I'm interpreting this mostly as the constraint binding and thus we don't know the real situation.
was thinking about how much it binds as in how to proxy how much we're over - didn't come up with anything better than wishing nyc/london had sf style incidental positivity rates so we can interpolate.. now looking at Nate Silver's Google searches tweet feel it's a neat idea.
do you buy "flat nyc positivity => peaking"?
If I saw another week of it, I would, but I worry about back-to-school tests driving down percentages for now.
Happy new year 2022!
Thank you for your updates. I feel that all these statistics have to do with 20-30% of the world. I am very very curious to know what is the majority of the population of the world doing, thinking about covid!!!
Agreed that I'm not making a real effort to cover areas outside the West, and I plead 'only so much time' combined with having almost no readership elsewhere.
What would you estimate is the probability of the CDC identifying Omicron as a Variant of High Consequence?
Eventually? Probably not high. That would be doing a thing, and there's no sign of it.
Hold on a minute... Omicron seems to be mainly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, unlike Delta and the original Wuhan strain.
Evidence that Omicron is displacing Delta comes mainly from sequencing done on PCR tests - but PCR tests are done based on taking swabs from the nose and tonsils, i.e. the upper respiratory tract. So how do we know that there aren't many patients that have BOTH Omicron AND Delta, but with the Delta concentrated in their lungs and the Omicron concentrated in their upper respiratory tract? Couldn't that be the case?
And how do we know that deaths attributed to Omicron aren't actually deaths due to Delta having been in the victim's lungs? Particularly since, as I understand it, previous strains, when they cause fatalities, typically end up killing the patient AFTER the virus has already been pretty much cleared from the body - it's an immune system overreaction!
The number of people with Delta at any given time wasn't all that high, and most of them already didn't die, so this seems unlikely to be a large effect.