16 Comments

Confused by why you think there's only a 45% chance that Omicron has a transmission advantage over Delta, unless I'm misinterpreting what that means?

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Not advantage, 100% or bigger advantage. I'm very convinced it's >70% advantage.

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This throws me for a second like every other week. Not ‘omicron has >100% of the transmissibility of delta’, but > 100% transmission advantage, so ‘omicron has > 200% of the transmissibility of delta’

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I know the difference between median and mode, but I don't understand at all what it means for the peak day to have medians or modes.

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I guess Zvi is reporting the median and mode of his probability distribution of days. So there's a 50% chance it peaks after the 18th but the likeliest single day for the peak is the 17th. That means his distribution is a bit more skewed in the future direction, which makes sense since the 17th is pretty soon.

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Thank you for these awesome posts. Love them. It would be cool if you added to your probability section a date on which infections will have considerably dropped -- e.g., from previous graphs, it seems like cases will be comparatively quite low by, say, Feb 1. This would help me set a date to look forward to, maybe, safely returning to a more normal life ;)

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Yeah, it's a good idea. I hope to do that next time.

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"The people who answer ‘nothing’ here are either interpreting the question differently, they have very strange preferences"

I'd pick that; I don't think my preferences are very strange. Definitively a minority view, but there's got to be at least 5% who think the same. Mainly its about remote work. I'd pay a lot for things staying the same as now (except if it involved literally paying for worsening the pandemic, that'd be basically equivalent of qntm.org/button )

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In Arizona hospitalization and ICU numbers are barely 60% of what they were last winter so I'm not sure how they can be red (at capacity) in map figure. Staff shortages can't make up that gap.

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I'm surprised you are optimistic about the mask mandates being dropped, I'm curious why? Regulators have a long and storied history of doing ineffective things that are highly visible a long time after its common knowledge that its dumb (see: removing shoes at the airport).

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I mean this is me updating to be *more* optimistic. Doesn't feel all that optimistic.

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should have asked why more optimistic - sloppy wording on my part

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"I simply can’t take seriously, as someone who might want a physically better and healthier world, anyone who restricts travel in such ways. "

Would it make sense to impede travel to areas with high spread since that's where new variants are most likely to emerge, and thus buy time to deal with new variants that emerge?

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author

No.

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Maybe the Canada-US border is pretty porous anyway, but do we really need intercontinental non-essential travel? Sure would be less painful to cut down on safari trips rather than trying to keep viruses out of every school, workplace etc.

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Jan 17, 2022·edited Jan 17, 2022

>throat swab

Looks like the best available evidence for that comes from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v1.full.

The specific instructions are located in the "Swab collection" subsection of "Supplementary methods".

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