My sense is that a public health policy of allowing everyone to get infected is a cruel method of dealing with the pandemic. As noted above, even if the covid variant is relatively mild, then tens of thousands of people will still die.
What's more cruel? As I wrote, everyone who is not immune will be infected. Now or later.
Do we get this done with this mild variant or do we stretch it out forever? A future of yearly COVID culling due to possibly new and maybe more deadly variants?
Do you want the rest of your life to be wearing a mask, skipping social events, while worrying that you may still get infected?
What's more cruel? As I wrote, everyone who is not immune will be infected. Now or later.
Do we get this done with this mild variant or do we stretch it out forever? A future of yearly COVID culling due to possibly new and maybe more deadly variants?
Do you want the rest of your life to be wearing a mask, skipping social events, while worrying that you may still get infected?
Let's say that Omicron is a whole lot less severe than Delta etc. We all sure hope so!*
But let's say that it is as contagious as you are thinking about and literally everyone gets it.
If that's the case - even if a small percentage of Omicron cases are "severe" we'll see a huge number of hospitalizations & deaths. Basic arithmetic at work.
Of course if no cases of Omicron are severe then the above logic works - but what are the odds of that, do you think? Re Spanish flu - sure, it got milder, but people die of flu every year. If literally everyone got the flu in a given year, the death toll would be staggering.
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*But those data are still preliminary - we need to wait a couple of weeks before we can breathe a sigh of relief. We need to see what happens when older / sicker people get it, and what happens 10-14 days out.
To work as you are positing, we'd have to assume a situation where Omicron literally never causes severe symptoms. I think the odds of that are about zero. So if "everybody" caught it, then quite a few - indeed a staggering number - would still die.
I also think that the odds that "everybody" catches this in a reasonable time frame are about zero.
You can certainly dream this way if it reassures you, but it's no basis for any sort of reasonable policy.
Starting to think that Omicron is nature's covid vaccine for the anti-vaxxers.
If the infections are mild, though, how durable and strong is the immune response? On of the confounding attributes in looking at vaccine-induced immunity vs infection-acquired immunity, IIUC, is that infection-acquired immunity can be extremely variable given the lack of control over the "dose" one receives.
The severity of illness an infection may cause does not necessarily correlate with the induced immune response to subsequent exposure. The immune system targets accessible characteristics of a microbe. If those are easily recognized and the individual's immune system is capable (as in not immunosuppressed like in a cancer patient, etc.) they can fight it off.
That organism might not be harmful in and of itself though. This stuff runs on a continuum of mixed factors and we just don't know. For example:
A really harmful pathogen <---> Mostly benign pathogen (but still who knows?)
Plus
An easily detected and eradicated pathogen <---> Viruses like HIV and herpetiform viruses that can "hide" inside cells, like neurons. These f***ers are able to physically evade antibodies inside cells and come out later, like shingles.
To work as you are positing, we'd have to assume a situation where Omicron literally never causes severe symptoms. I think the odds of that are about zero. So if "everybody" caught it, then quite a few - indeed a staggering number - would still die.
I also think that the odds that "everybody" catches this in a reasonable time frame are about zero.
You can certainly dream this way if it reassures you, but it's no basis for any sort of reasonable policy.
Yup, we'll have to wait a while for sufficient data in real-world experiences rather than laboratory findings. Hopefully, we won't learn the hard way that more isolation is in our future. Good policy decisions require as good a foundation of evidence we can get. Political rancor messes with that and it's a bummer.
That biology stuff don't give a **** what happens in someone's lab - even the best scientists with the most funding and modern equipment still only provide evidence for making the best guesses we can. It's only after the fact that we find out if we're on the right track. That's why we normally wait for Phase I, II, and III clinical trials to conclude and be evaluated before a drug is fully FDA-approved. In COVIDworld, the public health emergency warranted the granting of emergency use authorizations but even then, we had to wait for Phase II trial results.
whose to say that as we let omicron infect everyone, that it doesn't mutate into something more serious? the more we let it reproduce, the more mutations will occur, over which we have no control.
I have gotten my three vaccinations and I now feel a whole lot safer in going to social events and visiting a lot of friends and family. I pretty much only wear my mask when I go into a public place and there is a sign on the door requesting that masks be worn. If even a higher percentage of our population (and worldwide) were vaccinated, we all will be safer and be more able to return to normal activities as we all wish.
I still cannot fully fathom why too many people oppose the covid vaccination. Remember recently one prominent US Senator from Texas was critical of Big Bird because Big Bird told kids to get vaccinated. The Senator called this propaganda. This anti-vaccination false logic is a large direct cause of why we are still having to limit our social interactions with masks.
The new Netflix documentary on "The First Wave." has some really interesting aspects. First, it shows how sick people were getting and dying and how hard the medical staff at hospitals had to work. The film showed Police and Firefighters in NY cheering the bravery of the hospital staff. Now for some unknown reason, too many of these NY Police and Firefighters now do want to be vaccinated and are fighting the vaccine mandates. What bizarre logic has now affected them and much of the American public?
I don't know about the assumption that everyone will get Covid or this variant of it. I've never had the flu in my life and I do not think that is so unusual. I also know people, pre-vaccine, who lived with/slept with Covid sufferers and did not contract the disease. Not everyone gets every communicable disease.
I don't understand the logic of this approach either. It assumes among other things that Omicron will become and remain the dominant strain of COVID - 19 worldwide. There are numerous other strains out there, some of which are proving to be far more deadly. Vaccination still seems to be the best defense.
Bub, the point is that even if you don’t personally contract the illness, you can ‘silently’ transmit it to someone else - you’re the delivery mechanism for robust bacteria and virii.
Go back and think about how many people with cancer you know. Think about how many people with severe asthma you know, and many people have allergies (yes, even just seasonal ones, or just allergic to bee stings or shellfish). People aged over 70years. These are your first rank of immuno-compromised people. So they’re most at risk for the unpredictable with this set of coronaviruses, because they’re vulnerable to everything. EVERYTHING. Now people are used to seeing masks, we’re going to wear them every flu season. Every measles and mono season. When whooping cough and bronchitis break out. Or else we’ll just stay home, again. Because we can’t afford to get sick and vaccines don’t always work with us. (Some of us take medications, as part of our therapy, to suppress the immune system - most chemo, for example)
Here in Australia, even though I’m most at risk, I’m being told by our federal govt and national health authorities NOT to have a booster. That really fills me with confidence. Not.
whose to say that as we let omicron infect everyone, that it doesn't mutate into something more serious? the more we let it reproduce, the more mutations will occur, over which we have no control.
Did you read what I wrote?
The idiocy is letting it continue as we are.
It seems a weak variant and if everybody who is not immune gets it at the same time we will have herd immunity causing the virus to spread out. I agree this may not be feasible if we find this variant is not weak.
You'll never get herd immunity when we have less than 80% of the population immune. That requires 90% to be vaccinated assuming there will 10% breakthroughs. And actually that 80% may now be too low. The herd immunity percentage is based upon how many get infected by every spreader.
What you have now, is no control. There are too many who are not immune and consequently we get constant mutations. Yes, Omicron can mutate. But over time you will get more mutations from Omicron and the other variations.
Get it done with or spend the rest of your life living with masks and mutations.
whose to say that as we let omicron infect everyone, that it doesn't mutate into something more serious? the more we let it reproduce, the more mutations will occur, over which we have no control.
Did you read what I wrote?
The idiocy is letting it continue as we are.
It seems a weak variant and if everybody who is not immune gets it at the same time we will have herd immunity causing the virus to spread out. I agree this may not be feasible if we find this variant is not weak.
You'll never get herd immunity when we have less than 80% of the population immune. That requires 90% to be vaccinated assuming there will 10% breakthroughs. And actually that 80% may now be too low. The herd immunity percentage is based upon how many get infected by every spreader.
What you have now, is no control. There are too many who are not immune and consequently we get constant mutations. Yes, Omicron can mutate. But over time you will get more mutations from Omicron and the other variations.
Get it done with or spend the rest of your life living with masks and mutations.
no.
already we have a lot of evidence that omicron is infecting people that already had covid.
My sense is that a public health policy of allowing everyone to get infected is a cruel method of dealing with the pandemic. As noted above, even if the covid variant is relatively mild, then tens of thousands of people will still die.
What's more cruel? As I wrote, everyone who is not immune will be infected. Now or later.
Do we get this done with this mild variant or do we stretch it out forever? A future of yearly COVID culling due to possibly new and maybe more deadly variants?
Do you want the rest of your life to be wearing a mask, skipping social events, while worrying that you may still get infected?
I'd prefer to see things progress more slowly, so that if someone I love has a heart attack, a car accident, or cancer, there is actually space in the ER or the OR for them to get the care they need, when they need it. (I'd also hope that we keep increasing the percentage of the world vaccinated)
I find a bit more mask wearing to be an acceptable tradeoff for not going out of our way to have a larger crisis than our systems can handle in the near future.
That was true last year when the right wing was arguing for a rapid quest for herd immunity, and I think it is still true, although the magnitude of possible disaster is significantly lower.
I agree with those asserting that vaccination is the best path forward. It is too bad that vaccine resistance is an illogical politically motivated stance but that in and of itself is not going to go away, maybe never. Antivaxxers will always fall back on citing something or other to say it is wrong.
DB's reminder that a unvaccinated reservoir for omicron to infect is still a nightmare scares me. Just like this variant seems like a paper tiger next week we could find a more dangerous strain has popped up. The NYC mayor has similar feelings and sent word of the mandate for even private companies. That hit my wife's email early this morning and she has been dealing with the outcry all day with her company's Manhattan office.
Put yourself in the decision-making seat of a President, or Governor, or a large city Mayor. You take your duty very seriously to protect the public and you know that tens of thousands of people are being infected and dying. There is also a sizable portion of the population that refuses to get vaccinated with a vaccine that is safe and effective. So, even though you know it will cause strong opposition, as much as the law allows, you promulgate mandates. This is an ethical decision to protect the public against a deadly communicable disease.
Life is complicated. But you make the hard decision to mandate vaccinations to protect as much of the public as you can.
Here in Australia, even though I’m most at risk, I’m being told by our federal govt and national health authorities NOT to have a booster. That really fills me with confidence. Not.
! !
Joanne: WHICH (Specific) federal govt and national health authorities are advising this?
I ask because I saw ATAGI’s recommendations from late Oct., and the update a few days ago.
(CNN) — The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has put five places in Europe -- including one of the world's biggest tourism powerhouses -- on its list of destinations for "very high" Covid-19 travel risk. France and four of its European neighbors moved to Level 4, the CDC's highest-risk category, on Monday. France was the world's top destination for international tourist arrivals pre-pandemic, according to 2019 figures from the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Two other places -- one in the Middle East, the other in East Africa -- were also moved to Level 4. Those seven nations are:
• Andorra • Cyprus • France • Jordan • Liechtenstein • Portugal • Tanzania
Destinations that fall into the CDC's "Covid-19 Very High" Level 4 category have had more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 28 days. People should avoid traveling to locations designated with a "Level 4" notice, the CDC recommends. Anyone who must travel should be fully vaccinated first, the agency advises.
In fact it’s ATAGI itself that says if you’re severely immune compromised, don’t have the booster. (Advice published our yesterday, Monday 6 December, also delivered in a letter posted to every household from the PM and federal Minister for Health) ETA just re-read and it seems that, true to form, PM’s publicity team have made conflicting statements over past several months as to whether folk like me should have 2 or 3 routine rounds, hence the bigger debate re the booster. They reckon 2 ‘provide adequate coverage’ however…
Part of the reason this worries me is that I’m double-vaxed AZ but severely allergic to Pfizer ingredients. Pfizer is currently our endorsed booster, Moderna the alternative. It has similar allergens (for me), and by the time I’m ready for the booster, we won’t have AZ any more. At the same time, each week I take meds to actively suppress my immune system, plus other anti-inflammatories. And an anti-cancer tablet. I have 3 auto-immune conditions (I don’t count one, usually) - so everything is working against my covid vaccinations. Do I just lock myself in the house forever? Or sacrifice myself?
Part of the reason this worries me is that I’m double-vaxed AZ but severely allergic to Pfizer ingredients. Pfizer is currently our endorsed booster, Moderna the alternative. It has similar allergens (for me), and by the time I’m ready for the booster, we won’t have AZ any more. At the same time, each week I take meds to actively suppress my immune system, plus other anti-inflammatories. And an anti-cancer tablet. I have 3 auto-immune conditions (I don’t count one, usually) - so everything is working against my covid vaccinations. Do I just lock myself in the house forever? Or sacrifice myself?
What does your doctor recommend? Can you reduce risk by masking, maintaining social distancing, avoiding crowds, maintaining sanitary recommendations, and asking others you interact with in person on a regular basis to do likewise?
Currently, my family doctor (who’s administering the vaccinations) is advising that we wait closer to Feb/March when I’m supposedly due(unless they change timelines again, as they’re debating). At that point she’ll call a conference with my allergist and the other specialists to hear their best pharmacological advice, and then she’ll tell me what my options are. Luckily, my specialists are all highly regarded teaching and research docs so I trust them.
Meantime I constantly wear a mask when I leave home and am in a group or a public situation. Go through bottles of sanitiser, and boxes of disposable gloves (depends what I’m doing, where I am, for glove use). And I try to maintain a fair distance from others - trouble is, no-one can hear my voice, and when I’m migrainey, I can’t walk straight We’re v lucky so far not to have had a big covid issue on the Gold Coast; most people have stopped wearing masks and are crowding into lifts, trains etc. It’s scary.
What does your doctor recommend? Can you reduce risk by masking, maintaining social distancing, avoiding crowds, maintaining sanitary recommendations, and asking others you interact with in person on a regular basis to do likewise?
Oh - spitting, unprotected sneezing and unprotected coughing have just been declared forms of assault in Queensland. (Based on the old HIV spitting-with-intent law) The fines are well over $1k AUD
In fact it’s ATAGI itself that says if you’re severely immune compromised, don’t have the booster. (Advice published our yesterday, Monday 6 December, also delivered in a letter posted to every household from the PM and federal Minister for Health) ETA just re-read and it seems that, true to form, PM’s publicity team have made conflicting statements over past several months as to whether folk like me should have 2 or 3 routine rounds, hence the bigger debate re the booster. They reckon 2 ‘provide adequate coverage’ however…
Part of the reason this worries me is that I’m double-vaxed AZ but severely allergic to Pfizer ingredients. Pfizer is currently our endorsed booster, Moderna the alternative. It has similar allergens (for me), and by the time I’m ready for the booster, we won’t have AZ any more. At the same time, each week I take meds to actively suppress my immune system, plus other anti-inflammatories. And an anti-cancer tablet. I have 3 auto-immune conditions (I don’t count one, usually) - so everything is working against my covid vaccinations.
Joanne: are you sure you are are reading it right?
You say you are “double-vaxed AZ”. I take that to mean you’ve received 2 doses of AZ as your primary course.
As best as I can remember (having looked at this yesterday), ATAGI guidance indicates you (being severely immunocompromised) can receive your 3rd dose of AZ 8 weeks after you received your 2nd (last) dose.
So:if you received your second dose of AZ only 2 months ago, you can receive your 3rd dose today.
And, if you invoke “exceptional circumstances” (and you received your 2nd AZ dose 2 months ago), you could have received your 3rd AZ dose one month ago. Again, I must qualify this by ‘if memory serves me correctly”. I’ll try to find the document when I have more time.
And, out of curiosity, do you know what component(s) of the Pfizer product you are allergic to?
Note ATAGI properly terms the 3rd covid vaccine dose you will receive as being part of your (severely immunocompromised) primary series. Although conceivably you have already received that, as you refer to still waiting to receive your “booster”. “double-vaxxed AZ” was ambiguous, but I thought it likely meant you’ve received just 2 doses. Was I wrong - have you already received 3?
Any chance of providing, here, the pertinent passages in the letter from the PM? Did it contain guidance contravening that it the recommendations linked above?
There seems to be a belief that covid will mutate into less dangerous variants. But if it is like the flu, from time to time a more lethal variant will show up.
Dickf3, neither my allergy guy (Professor Peter Smith) nor my GP (who I saw today) have mentioned the routine third vaccination to me. It’s not the booster, it’s like everyone else’s 2nd ‘shot’. I react to various other injected medications including inoculations and vaccines; it might be the carrier fluid, colour, preservative or the base ingredients from the stuff is cultured. (In Pfizer, there are maybe 2 ingredients I won’t have a severe reaction to; the preservative will send me into anaphylaxis) While Moderna has been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Authority, ATAGI hasn’t yet said it can be used as a booster; its preservatives, colour and carrier fluids will cause me to have a severe reaction.
My GP said, last month, to wait the 12 weeks (for safety) then we’ll conference on what to do. Today I was told I need vitB12 injections and a course of anti-HepB, which frightens me because I have no immunity to it but the shots don’t look great. (So I have to super-dose my antihistamines before each treatment: A & B, plus the spray & drops)
The wonderful thing about Mast Cell Activation Disorder is that you never know what you’ll react to next, even if you’ve tolerated that substance (or noise etc) well before. Just - bliss!
And I was just thinking this thread could sink down as the omicron variant seemed as challenging as a 35 mph fastball. There's a new omicron type going around. No word yet on whether it is more dangerous or spreads faster.
This was originally published in Business Insider according to a note at the end of it. The implications of this are not clear, only that they've found this thing in Africa, Australia, and North America so far. The taxonomy discussion is definitely on the geeky level but suffice to say it is different. There's a dropped section that easily flags the "first" omicron variant but this one doesn't have it. There are many different mutations between them even though they're in the same lineage. So far, it looks like they will still be distinguishable by PCR testing.
Although the good news, if any, about Omicron seems to be more tentative than the bad news (highly transmissible), I think you can glean from the stories that the recovery from it seems to be lot faster than with the other variants. I've read about and know people who had symptoms from pre-Omicron cases for weeks on end. In contrast, the Omicron sufferers seem to improve in days, not weeks. One report out of a South African hospital, I think, seemed to confirm that Omicron sufferers were being discharged or recovering in a fraction of a time than pre-Omicron sufferers.
We’re v lucky so far not to have had a big covid issue on the Gold Coast; most people have stopped wearing masks and are crowding into lifts, trains etc. It’s scary. 
What's more cruel? As I wrote, everyone who is not immune will be infected. Now or later.
Do we get this done with this mild variant or do we stretch it out forever? A future of yearly COVID culling due to possibly new and maybe more deadly variants?
Do you want the rest of your life to be wearing a mask, skipping social events, while worrying that you may still get infected?