That would be great news if it’s true, but given that south African officials are also saying things like
Though the sample size is still small, Sanne said physicians have seen a higher rate of breakthrough infections among those previously vaccinated in South Africa. But he added that initial data indicates the vaccines are still proving effective, with the majority of hospitalizations being among those who hadn’t gotten the shot.
I’m dubious. Mild illnesses don’t generally send people to the the hospital.
This may be the same text as @Marcie’s post, but her link didn’t work on my phone, letters were all higgelty-jiggelty over the page. This one renders on my phone
The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild.
Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.
…
She said, in total, about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for Covid-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated.
…
Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder.
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.
South African demographics are very different from those in the UK. Only about six per cent of the population are over the age of 65. This means that older individuals who are more vulnerable to the virus may take some time to present.
I saw that, too, after posting. Definitely some mixed messaging coming out of South Africa.
Thanks for posting the Telegraph link. I think that’s reporting the same statement that was in my link, but probably works better for more people than the Times of India, which was just the first link I saw.
I don’t think so. I think that a doctor spoke about her cluster of patients, and what she saw. And like all real data, that was a narrow view. But in this case, it has some interesting features, like, “none of them lost their sense of smell”.
And then journalists, who want a conclusion, or “news”, selectively edited her statement to invent a conclusion. When that simply wasn’t in the source material. Except the not very exciting, “symptoms were a little different than typical”.
I think there are maybe 2 news sources for the new variant. A WHO statement and a short statement from a S. African Dr. Somehow that has become 100 news stories this week using this like its clickbait.
to your point, I saw many headlines such as “new variant only causes mild symptoms” that clearly do not tell a full story.
do we really know anything other than - “new strain, could be really contagious, brace for impact”
Yes, we know how many mutations there are in the spike, how many in the nucleocapsid, and what they are. We know how it reacts to some of the PCR tests. (It triggers most of them, but doesn’t trigger one common one, making it relatively cheap to test for without fully sequencing the virus.) We know that it’s pretty much replaced Delta in South Africa.
But we don’t know how well it evades immunity from either infection with a prior strain or vaccination for the Wuhan strain, nor do we know how well it evades immunity from vaccination with with the beta strain’s spike, nor how well the antigen tests on the market detect it (although they mostly look for the less-changed nucleocapsid protein, so odds are decent they will pick it up). All these are being tested and will probably be known in about two weeks. We’ll probably have some preliminary info on an RNA vaccine tailored to it in not too much longer.
It will take a while to know how serious an illness it produces as compared to Delta or Wuhan, especially in older people.
I have both primary does, a booster scheduled for next week and a confirmed COVID exposure. So my immune system has been exposed to this dumb-ass virus 4 times. I feel personally safe to do whatever I want to do, including crowded concerts and sporting events. But, I still can get infected and still can infect other people. So I will continue to get tested and isolate as necessary with any known exposure.
In a world where almost anything can be done remotely and wearing a mask is normalized, there is no reason for COVID or any other respiratory virus to be widely spread.
What does this mean, and why do you think that’s enough to immunize you? (It might be, depending on the exposure (and your definition of “immunity”).)
OK, Zoomer. Might wanna check your privilege there, hoss, and remember to tip your UberEats driver.
Given masks don’t stop aerosol respiratory viruses but people keep insisting they do, and that there are animal reservoirs, there are very strong reasons respiratory viruses are widespread.
Your example South Korea managed to keep COVID from killing a lot of people for over a year until they could be vaccinated using mitigation efforts that included high mask compliance. They had about 20% of the deaths of your favorite Sweden despite having 6x the population.
Masks are only part of the story, but with the original Wuhan strain, mitigations that included masking appear to have kept R0 below 1. That no longer seems to be the case with more contagious variants, where it appears very little including even high vaccine rates keeps it below 1. Unlike the US where a large share of the unvaccinated have probably had COVID, the 12M in SK that are unvaccinated are going to have almost no natural immunity.
I imagine the nice thing about going to political think tanks for your science is that you can shop around and find whatever results your favorite politician needs.
I’ve given you a bunch of links to studies that find masks work. Some that do theory. Some that do experiments. Some that look at results – like the one you inadvertently gave me a link to that was a crowdsourced thing where schools reported what they did and rates of covid, and schools with mask mandates had less transmission.
I’m not going to keep doing it. It’s hard work, and you just keep spouting off about how the hairdressers don’t mean anything.
Also, now that
there’s no shortage of good masks and
we have more contagious variants
there’s really no reason people should be using crappy fabric masks. You can buy really nice KF94 masks for about a buck a piece, and despite being sold as disposable, if you treat them gently they are good for something like a couple hundred hours of wear. You can get decent surgical masks for even less.
There’s even a dorky-looking N95 mask available for about a buck a pop, and it’s highly breathable.
Here’s some data from a guy who tests masks on youtube
I’ve asked you multiple times to show your work on this one you keep claiming, because the authors who collected that data (if it’s the Emily Oster research I think it is, you haven’t clarified) came to the conclusion that their data didn’t support masks making a difference. But in your 5 minute review you analyzed it better than they did, I guess.
I linked it at the time, and no, you didn’t ask for clarification, you ignored me. It was one of hundreds of links in a rant about masks. And if you opened the page to the default, it looked like masks didn’t help, but if you followed the advice on the page, and compared high schools to high schools, and elementary schools to elementary schools, it was pretty clear.
