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Removed (Banned)Jan 4, 2022
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I'm in Colorado, and looking at these numbers: https://covid19.colorado.gov/data . About halfway down the page there are stats about "variants of concern." They seem to show that there's virtually no Omicron in CO. Can that possibly be true?

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While a delta hospital patient had difficulty in breathing, what are the problems of a omicron hospital patient?

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What is your take on Mantic Markets? No real money yet, but they got an AXC grant, and have an operational website that when I was playing around worked well enough for me with their play money.

They already have gone and made questions for many of your predictions, and I made $95 mantic bucks trusting your confidence level over the "market".

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Hold on, what are these TSA scanners (and how do I opt out)!? I may have heard them mentioned in some ACX or adjacent FDA piece.

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So could we just move to no testing and stay home if you have symptoms for everything in society beyond hospitals and elder care facilities? They are threatening to go virtual for school where I am. I don't get the point. We were just all home for the holidays and everyone go Omicron. Wouldn't wearing a mask for 6 hours in school be better than your exposure while living life at home which means going to friends houses? Even if it isn't the costs just can't be worth it for a population that doesn't get sick.

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I started wondering whether it's even a positive to try avoiding omicron right now. And I mean ignoring the obvious costs like having to hunker down.

Seems not implausible we might never get omicron-specific booster. If new variant which might get more severe riffs off omicron, being omicron infected would give some additional protection.

If the model of a steady state is like common cold coronaviri where everyone gets infected a few times over with a range of strains as a kid thus getting a pretty robust immunity, then "skipping a strain" especially one this mild sounds counterproductive.

By now I mean in this wave, waiting few weeks for hospital capacity reasons might of course be prudent.

So, would be curious to hear about: 1) chances of omicron specific booster in 2022 2) current status and timelines of pan-coronavirus vaccines 3) any data on impact of cross-variant exposure on protection (ie, how is say beta which I thought had some of the key omicron non-delta mutations so how did beta-exposed fare for omicron.. doubt we have enough data, but wonder if all those people working with sequencing data and tracking covid evolutionary tree are saying anything relevant at all; maybe simpler even, what's the status on say past immunity vs vaccine vs combo against omicron and/or delta)

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