Main Coronavirus / Covid-19 Discussion Thread

[dsr-burnley]

The media wasting no time to create scare headlines about something they don't really understand: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/pfizer-vaccine-omicron-variant-covid-b1971679.html

This seems like a fairly clear description of what "40x reduction" means. It suggests that it isn't panic-panic-panic time, regardless of what newspapers may think.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/03/omicron-and-immune-protection-how-to-interpret-the-data/

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

WHO says vaccines should still work against Omicron variant
The World Health Organisation said existing COVID vaccines should still be effective against severe cases of infection from Omicron, according to the BBC.
Initial tests concerning the new variant in South Africa have suggested antibodies from the Pfizer vaccine may be up to 40 times less effective against it.
But Dr Mike Ryan, the WHO's emergencies director, said there is "no reason" Omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other coronavirus mutations.
He said: "We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be so."
Dr Ryan added the latest reports suggest Omicron does not create more severe disease than other strains of the coronavirus.
Instead, he said: "If anything, the direction is towards less severity."

 

[dazzer6666]

Interesting thread with some early data analysis from SA…….

[tweet]1468310548609744904[/tweet]

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

[tweet]1468526001646981127[/tweet]

Looks like passports and WFH coming in.

 

[LamieRobertson]

I’ll break my self imposed break from this forum for the one post ..a year to the day..

https://www.england.nhs.uk/2020/12/...st-nhs-patient-receives-covid-19-vaccination/

 

[Bozza]

Third study in which includes data on boosted vaccinations...

"Those results suggests that a large proportion of the population globally is at risk of (re-)infection by the omicron variant over the coming months."

"The silver lining is that the far milder omicron symptoms observed to date in SA point to immunisation retaining its efficacy against severe disease through non-neutralising antibodies and cellular immunity (T-cells) and/or intrinsically lower virulence of the omicron variant."

[tweet]1468493362688925700[/tweet]

The theme of the three studies to date seems to be...

- Omicron very good at breaking through immunity and causing infection or re-infection.
- Hope remains that vaccines will still provide decent protection against serious illness and death.

Which, given we know vaccines aren't a suit of armour, still leaves us with "a small percentage of a very large number equals a large number" potential problem of a lot of folk requiring hospital care.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

Third study in which includes data on boosted vaccinations...

"Those results suggests that a large proportion of the population globally is at risk of (re-)infection by the omicron variant over the coming months."

"The silver lining is that the far milder omicron symptoms observed to date in SA point to immunisation retaining its efficacy against severe disease through non-neutralising antibodies and cellular immunity (T-cells) and/or intrinsically lower virulence of the omicron variant."

[tweet]1468493362688925700[/tweet]

The theme of the three studies to date seems to be...

- Omicron very good at breaking through immunity and causing infection or re-infection.
- Hope remains that vaccines will still provide decent protection against serious illness and death.

Which, given we know vaccines aren't a suit of armour, still leaves us with "a small percentage of a very large number equals a large number" potential problem of a lot of folk requiring hospital care.

Countries with low infection rates could be in trouble.

 

[dazzer6666]

Which, given we know vaccines aren't a suit of armour, still leaves us with "a small percentage of a very large number equals a large number" potential problem of a lot of folk requiring hospital care.

Yep, this is definitely the issue for the time being - hence the possible 'Plan B' step at least until we know the effects and have the data to support.

 

[Bozza]

Might be a good time to pick up some FFP2 masks before they become difficult to find and/or prohibitively expensive. The things most of us have probably been using won't be much good against Omicron.

£8.99 for 20 was about the best I could see from a quick search - https://amzn.to/3rMWg9Q

 

[crodonilson]

Plan B button to be pushed at some point today or tomorrow, hoping the government consider what Plan C looks like if Plan B fails to arrest increase in cases and hospitalisations, hopefully it won't be needed and Plan B does the job but we need to be prepared.

 

[beorhthelm]

Might be a good time to pick up some FFP2 masks before they become difficult to find and/or prohibitively expensive. The things most of us have probably been using won't be much good against Omicron.

£8.99 for 20 was about the best I could see from a quick search - https://amzn.to/3rMWg9Q

havent seen anything to hint that Omicron made the virus more prone to aerosol transmission.

 

[Bozza]

"The places I've highlighted [UK and Denmark} are seeing the Omicron wave first, but that's because they're set up to find it. A very big wave of cases is coming everywhere; probably this month."

The South Northamptonshire case growth illustrated in this thread of tweets shows where this is heading...

[tweet]1468545443177115651[/tweet]

 

[Bozza]

Pfizer have just released their own study >>> https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-r...r-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant

- Preliminary laboratory studies demonstrate that three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine neutralize the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529 lineage) while two doses show significantly reduced neutralization titers

- Data indicate that a third dose of BNT162b2 increases the neutralizing antibody titers by 25-fold compared to two doses against the Omicron variant; titers after the booster dose are comparable to titers observed after two doses against the wild-type virus which are associated with high levels of protection

- As 80% of epitopes in the spike protein recognized by CD8+ T cells are not affected by the mutations in the Omicron variant, two doses may still induce protection against severe disease

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

Sam Bowman
@s8mb
·
37m
Wow, great news – Pfizer says three doses is just as good against omicron as two doses were against the OG Covid (ie, extremely good). https://pfizer.com/news/press-relea...-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant…
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[Bozza]

Sam Bowman
@s8mb
·
37m
Wow, great news – Pfizer says three doses is just as good against omicron as two doses were against the OG Covid (ie, extremely good). https://pfizer.com/news/press-relea...-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant…
12
36
101

You've literally posted what I posted in the previous post.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

You've literally posted what I posted in the previous post.

Didn’t see, feel free to delete it

 

[Bozza]

Didn’t see, feel free to delete it

No, it's OK - you get thumbs up from #TeamNothingToWorryAbout whilst I don't, so I'll leave yours there to harvest those.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

No, it's OK - you get thumbs up from #TeamNothingToWorryAbout whilst I don't, so I'll leave yours there to harvest those.

Well if it is true and the booster goes well we won’t have anything to worry about

 

[carlzeiss]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/hea...nditions-covid-london-physicians-b969436.html

Up to 300,000 people facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder, warn physicians

 

[Notters]

It's lucky she stopped the growth at Christmas. Because that projection extended to New Year's Day rises to 250k per day, by 8th January we're over 1 million per day, 8th January it's 4.6m, and it only takes until 20th January before everyone in the country is catching this disease every day.

When will they realise that graphs illustrating growth like this, without giving any clue as to when the growth will slow down and what the peak might be, are pointless. It's not science, it's just a way of spreading fear. If, as she claims, it is just a way of illustrating how exponential growth works, then why not draw a graph showing how exponential growth works, as opposed to one showing that there might be 100,000 cases per day at Christmas.

The other thing - she says it's a "very conservative" assumption to say that delta variant will continue at zero growth, as it has done for the past 5 months or so. Even if you carefully select the dates to get the very highest possible rise in cases, you don't get close to 1% growth per day. She seems to be assuming that omicron will supplant delta as the dominant variant while at the same time delta will not be affected by omicron - that isn't what normally happens. as a new dominant variant appears, the old one fizzles out. That isn't what happened with delta/alpha. If she wants to assume that there is statistical independence between the numbers infected by delta and the number infected by omicron - ie. that the new omicron variant has no effect whatsoever on delta - then she ought at least to give her reasons.

This was the first thing to leap out at me, and surely suggests she is scaremongering? At the very least she should have highlighted this.
I understand it's possible for this to happen, but the evidence from South Africa seems to be that it is replacing Delta, not additional.