With Christmas around the corner, this variant cannot have better timing. I really expect that this variant takes over Delta before New Years, no matter what we do, unless a complete lockdown for Christmas.
I have trouble taking Dr. Feigl-Ding seriously given that it seems like he's called roughly 30 of the last 3 legitimate reasons for concern, but maybe that's just my bias.
Just something I'd like to point out: when you wrote "We all agreed on Omicron and now we have to type Omicron all the time?", you probably meant "We all agreed on Nu and now we have to type Omicron all the time?", but that reference to Nu got caught up in your Find and Replace sweep you talked about at the start of the post.
There is one thing that I'll predict: natural immunity from previous infection only wanes much, much more than vaccine-induced immunity. The reason is that the recent variants have already been headed this way. Also, I've been right about every awful thing I've predicted (it's all in Coronavirus Updates on FB.) I still can't figure out how to get this psychic ability to work on Powerball numbers, though.
Hmm, I think the reason they passed over Xi is to avoid offending the PRC, who would be understandably annoyed if everyone associated a new and deadly variant with their leader.
>I think this final graph is a bit confused here, unless āthe original strainā here means Delta. Delta had about a 120% advantage over 'the original strainā or 70% over Alpha.
These kinds of transmissibility advantage numbers need to be taken with a mountain of salt. First of all, there are good reasons to think that if strain A has X times the transmissibility of strain B, and strain B has Y times the transmissibility to strain C, that strain C may *not* have XY times the transmissibility of strain A. First of all, there's the obvious fact that transmissibility depends on a host of ambient factors, and these kinds of "transmissibility advantage" calculations are never taken at the same time. Secondly, I wonder if stochastic factors could also play a role, think e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intransitive_dice . But most importantly, we see this in the data. Different strains don't behave as if they had a fixed transmissibility advantage, even if it seems so initially, and one variant consistently "displaces" another one.
The market reaction is more worrying, but the market reaction is probably more based on measures instituted by various governments, and less on quantificaiton of individual risk.
So, if omicron really could be as vaccine evading as some fear it may be, shouldnāt we see evidence of it really soon? After all, in the original detection countries, not many are vacced ā so type the virus of any vaccinated case presenting in the hospital, and see how many are omicron.
Put another way, shouldnāt each 24 hour period we _donāt_ have clinical evidence of vaccine breakthroughs at scale from omicron give us some additional confidence that it isnāt fully vaccine evading?
(I recognize there can be lots of reasons that this approach could be selecting on the dependent variable, but still think it tells us something)
I considerably prefer Substack to Wordpress because I never got into the RSS habit, but check emails regularly, so getting email notifications when new posts are up is helpful. I consume your posts via Firefox's inbuilt TTS reader, so other formatting considerations are irrelevant to me (though, and I realize this would be a lot of work for a niche audience, so I mention it only for completeness' sake, it would be nice if tweets and other text-heavy images had their contents copied in plain text).
With Christmas around the corner, this variant cannot have better timing. I really expect that this variant takes over Delta before New Years, no matter what we do, unless a complete lockdown for Christmas.
Thoughts on this Carl Bergstrom thread? https://mobile.twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1464058581502738435
I have trouble taking Dr. Feigl-Ding seriously given that it seems like he's called roughly 30 of the last 3 legitimate reasons for concern, but maybe that's just my bias.
Just something I'd like to point out: when you wrote "We all agreed on Omicron and now we have to type Omicron all the time?", you probably meant "We all agreed on Nu and now we have to type Omicron all the time?", but that reference to Nu got caught up in your Find and Replace sweep you talked about at the start of the post.
There is one thing that I'll predict: natural immunity from previous infection only wanes much, much more than vaccine-induced immunity. The reason is that the recent variants have already been headed this way. Also, I've been right about every awful thing I've predicted (it's all in Coronavirus Updates on FB.) I still can't figure out how to get this psychic ability to work on Powerball numbers, though.
Hmm, I think the reason they passed over Xi is to avoid offending the PRC, who would be understandably annoyed if everyone associated a new and deadly variant with their leader.
BNOnews is great. They also have a map tracking spread of omicron: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2021/11/omicron-tracker/
>I think this final graph is a bit confused here, unless āthe original strainā here means Delta. Delta had about a 120% advantage over 'the original strainā or 70% over Alpha.
These kinds of transmissibility advantage numbers need to be taken with a mountain of salt. First of all, there are good reasons to think that if strain A has X times the transmissibility of strain B, and strain B has Y times the transmissibility to strain C, that strain C may *not* have XY times the transmissibility of strain A. First of all, there's the obvious fact that transmissibility depends on a host of ambient factors, and these kinds of "transmissibility advantage" calculations are never taken at the same time. Secondly, I wonder if stochastic factors could also play a role, think e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intransitive_dice . But most importantly, we see this in the data. Different strains don't behave as if they had a fixed transmissibility advantage, even if it seems so initially, and one variant consistently "displaces" another one.
See e.g. https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/is-the-delta-variant-really-more-than-twice-as-transmissible-as-the-original-strain-of-the-virus/ and https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/the-british-variant-of-sars-cov-2-and-the-poverty-of-epidemiology/ on two blog posts by the excellent Philippe Lemoine on this theme.
The market reaction is more worrying, but the market reaction is probably more based on measures instituted by various governments, and less on quantificaiton of individual risk.
So, if omicron really could be as vaccine evading as some fear it may be, shouldnāt we see evidence of it really soon? After all, in the original detection countries, not many are vacced ā so type the virus of any vaccinated case presenting in the hospital, and see how many are omicron.
Put another way, shouldnāt each 24 hour period we _donāt_ have clinical evidence of vaccine breakthroughs at scale from omicron give us some additional confidence that it isnāt fully vaccine evading?
(I recognize there can be lots of reasons that this approach could be selecting on the dependent variable, but still think it tells us something)
I considerably prefer Substack to Wordpress because I never got into the RSS habit, but check emails regularly, so getting email notifications when new posts are up is helpful. I consume your posts via Firefox's inbuilt TTS reader, so other formatting considerations are irrelevant to me (though, and I realize this would be a lot of work for a niche audience, so I mention it only for completeness' sake, it would be nice if tweets and other text-heavy images had their contents copied in plain text).