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An Omicron Hypothesis
Omicron doesn’t kill people nearly as much as earlier variants of Covid. But does it kill people much at all? Not long ago, you could look at global data or country-specific data for places that have a lot of cases of Omicron at Worldometer and see something interesting: Despite epic spikes in the case numbers, deaths were fewer than for any previous spike.
That seems like it would be a big deal: The rates skyrocketing in these Omicron waves with the death numbers falling in absolute terms and the death rates plummeting dramatically.
But deaths are a lagging indicator, and we needed a few more weeks to confirm that Omicron is killing fewer people overall despite its massive transmissibility. And we still need a few weeks.
It sure looks good in the UK: The Omicron wave seems to be receding, and the death numbers are nowhere near the numbers for the last wave. Likewise South Africa, ahead of the UK. And in some other places that appear to be a bit earlier in the Omicron wave, it sure looks promising. Turkey. Italy. Brazil.
Enter the USA: If I’m reading this chart right, death rates look like they’re just about to pass the Delta wave death rates.
Dang.
So maybe Omicron is still killing people, and killing them in numbers enough that its dominance is not a good thing in absolute terms: massive transmission rates, massive case numbers, much lower death rate, and still more deaths overall.
Or . . . maybe not that exactly.
Suppose for a moment that the way things look just now is the way they are: In the UK and South Africa, Omicron killed fewer people than any previous version of the virus, even while spreading to more people and, conveniently, giving them the best immunity so far; but in the USA it actually killed more people!
Why would that be?
Is it because the USA has a lower vaccination rate? Not likely. Check the NY Times vaccination tracker: In the second-dose and third-dose numbers, the UK is significantly leading the US, but it only leads 78 percent to 75 percent in first-dose numbers. More importantly, South Africa’s rates are much lower than the USA.
But here’s something that fits that data, something that the USA has more of than either the UK or South Africa:
America is a very fat country.
So here is an Omicron hypothesis for your consideration: Maybe Omicron has massive transmission rates and case numbers, a much lower death rate, and lower deaths overall–except for where obesity rates are high.
If that’s the truth, things are still worse than I’d hoped. But still a lot better than they were.
But I don’t know what’s true. We could look at the numbers over the next few weeks and compare them to this Wikipedia chart of countries by obesity rates: Find countries with obesity rates comparable to the USA, wait until their Omicron waves come and go, and then look over the death rates. And watch various countries now having Omicron spikes, see if they follow the pattern of the UK and South Africa, and then check to see if they are significantly less obese than the USA.
In the meantime, and speaking of not knowing things, I don’t know how the CIA figures out obesity rates; but that’s where the Wikipedia chart comes from–the CIA World Factbook. And I don’t know if the USA is overreporting in some way that makes its data largely useless–deaths with Covid reported as deaths from Covid, that sort of thing.
And I didn’t know, in a previous post drawing in part from Worldometer numbers, how much the case rates were going to go up and down again and again and again. (An updated post, including a partial retraction of the earlier one, is in the works.)
Hello, my name is Socrates, and I don’t know anything. But here is a plausible hypothesis about Omicron. What do you think?
Published in General
Can you elaborate on this view?
The US si not likely capturing all the positive Omicron case data. Many people are not going to the “free” test sites that report data. They are, like my brother, his wife and daughter, going to Walgreens for a home test when they have symptoms, testing positive and then self quarantining. We are a rich country and can afford to do our own tests. This practice would skew the “death rate” statistics.
And, now that free tests are limited, more folks are likely resorting to home tests and self quarantining.
Got mine from Amazon. Need more Ivermectin, might only have one course stashed.
Edit: It occurs to me we might be a rich country because we’d rather do our own tests.
lol – you keep grasping at straws, dear.
Hopefully saner voices will prevail. The idea of quarantining for a virus that is widely circulating is not just unprecedented, it is idiotic (which, of course, is why it is unprecedented). It would have gotten you laughed out of the room just a few short years ago, until it became politically expedient to begin recommending things that have no basis in actual science. But, as I said, people are waking up. If all of us are still around in a few years, it will be interesting to hear all of the backpedaling and revisionist history. Fortunately, much of “the conversation” is saved.
Well, we don’t want to be pariahs or accused of infecting some innocent contact whose 91 year old Meemaw later contracted the COVID and died.
In real life, my brother contracted COVID two weeks after visiting my home in AZ just before Thanksgiving. We care for my father (in-home hospice with final stage Parkinson’s) and this was my brother’s farewell visit. My brother’s wife contracted COVID one the day after they left AZ. I also contracted COVID about two weeks after his visit. Later, my wife and youngest daughter fell ill and tested positive. We all self-quarantined. We tossed the virus back and forth but our care in self isolating kept two very old and immunocompromised grandparents from a last straw infection. My oldest daughter and father both dodged the disease. My brother’s MIL, 91 with CHF, lives with him and his family and she survived without contracting COVID. So there is that.
Maybe. In that case you’d “quarantine” if you had the flu or even a cold. But that’s not really a quarantine, it is just staying away from a particular individual who you don’t want to give anything to. As for “being accused” of infecting someone… What a load of nonsense. Covid is endemic, and it is widespread. Don’t cough in anyone’s face, but beyond that, live your life. Anyone who would make you a pariah isn’t worth a second thought.
Here is a great explanation of why those who know better yet persist. Everyone else, it’s just stupidity, ignorance, blind trust in “medical authority” (gone are the med schools that teach actual critical thinking, it seems), or all three.
https://thecritic.co.uk/lets-face-it/
Credentialism Rules!
The sneeze.
All my life it has been well-known that the common cold, rhinoviruses and coronaviruses, etc., cause so much productivity-dropping time off work that they’ve consistently been trying to find a vaccine for these viruses. Unfortunately, they mutate so fast that today’s vaccine doesn’t work on tomorrow’s viruses. This is just common knowledge. And Facui et al knew this when they boosted for the covid vaccine.
So you just mean no successful vaccines?
That sounds like a distinction without a difference.
Any facts to share sweetie? I hope your legal skills vastly out shadow your medical ones.
For fast-mutating RNA viruses, that seems to be true.
Yes.
Your understanding of vaccines is more sophisticated, nuanced, and thus not typical. Nor is it the perspective that Fauci was selling. He expressly said that infection waves and surges would not occur once we hit 70% vaccination rate. A reasonable person would infer that Dr. Fauci was telling us that vaccines would function like herd immunity. (Remember when we called them “breakthrough” infections and thought them to be atypical?)
What Fauci knew or should have known was not what he sold. It is simply silly to pretend that there was not a conscious, concerted effort to create expectations for the vaccines that ultimately failed to materialize. I would like to see a single statement, email, cite or interview by a CDC, NAIAD, White House or FDA official in late 2020 or early 2021 that we should not expect the vaccines to significantly prevent infection or spread.
Dr. Fauci was also very late to dispel the widely held expectation that we could dispense with the mask mandates and closures once vaccines were deployed precisely because the vaccinated would be neither susceptible nor infectious.
It does seem that so-called leaky vaccines that don’t lead to the immune system killing off the virus but only slowing it’s replication and mitigating symptoms, and in the process leaving the virus to survive and to mutate more successfully and spread more quickly and for a longer period brought about a queer outcome. It caused cases to increase, creating the circumstances that further foster covid hysteria, and creating a demand for more new vaccines, without mitigating the use of masks, physical distancing, lockdowns, lock outs, mandatory vaccination, vaccine certification papers, quarantines and forced quarantine camps.
This seems like planned obsolescence in which the rescuers make unheard of fortunes and the powerful increase their control of the masses.
Considering the fact that these measures were never justified to begin with, I am not terribly concerned with how quick Fauci was to continue lying to people.
But it does show the breadth of his lies.
So you have never heard of staying home if you are sick with the flu? That is self-quarantine right there for a widely circulated virus. That’s been the medical recommendation since as long as I can remember. No one wants sick people at work.
If you test COVID-negative but continually spew micro-loogies full of non-COVID viruses then that is no longer a reason to stay home. If you go to work infected but don’t know you are infected, that’s also OK because you can’t infect others unless you know you are COVID-positive in which case you must stay home. And in any event, masks totally will prevent spread so the infection probably didn’t happen anyway.
This has been a PSA from an inpatient at a mental hospital or a public health official.
Are the flu shots not vaccines? Seems like they’re about as non-succesful. Are they not vaccines?
I reckon there’s quarantine, and then there’s quarantine.
There is a big difference between staying home when you are actively sick (which will also enable you to recover faster!) and “quarantining.” Have you ever heard of mass testing for the flu? Getting a flu test in order to enter a theater, or to get on a plane? Testing weekly just to continue working? Now, we’re not talking about “staying home when you’re sick,” we’re talking about isolating yourself for a set number of days regardless of whether you are sick or not.
Then again, the whole thing does cause a person to re-consider what was once considered polite. If you’re sick, and someone goes to shake your hand, you say “oh, I’m not feeling well and may be contagious,” and that person understands. But why even stay home when you’re sick? True that nobody wants to get sick, but nobody can really avoid exposure to viruses, either. When something is spreading in a community, your decision to stay home results in zero utility for anyone (except if you’re sleeping). It is an illusion that we play along with in order to be polite. And if you’re the sort of person who really does go to extreme lengths to avoid ever being exposed to viruses, it is highly likely that your immune system suffers because of it. When you finally are exposed, it may very well be considerably worse for you than if you simply accepted having a handful of colds each year.
That’s why parents are constantly “getting sick,” but never really slowing down. Who do you know who is most dramatic about illness? It’s always the single people, the ones who avoid exposure and then it’s like the end of the world when they get a cold.
So yeah – legitimately quarantining for a virus that is widely circulating is idiotic, but you may have just convinced me that staying home when you’re sick is kind of stupid, too…
Nice Simpsons episode about that.
A vaccine can be called a vaccine, but if it doesn’t immunize, it’s not a vaccine. So, no an unsuccessful vaccine should not be identified as a vaccine.
And no such vaccines have been “successful” at immunizing against coronaviruses to be brought to market. So, no these vaccines are not vaccines. Flu vaccines may actually immunize against anticipated viruses that never show up. But I guess they’re still vaccines, just useless vaccines.
Now that Biden is giving away tests for free, they’ve become scarcer and more expensive.
Somebody once said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see how much it costs when it’s free!”
Already signed up for my free ones. Let’s see how long it takes to get. Sign up is via USPS