# Omicron **URL:** \ **Category:** Covid19\ **Created:** [December 4, 2021, 2:58pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683 "2021-12-04T14:58:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![SpaceLobster](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/spacelobster/32/38216_2.png) [@SpaceLobster](https://community.goactuary.com/u/SpaceLobster)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 2:46am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/41 "2021-12-05T02:46:00Z")
I’m also hearing that the next push needs to not be boosters, but getting parts of Africa vaccinated. I read that there’s countries where rates are as low as 10 percent. ---
**Author:** ![John.S.Mill](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/john.s.mill/32/9771_2.png) [@John.S.Mill](https://community.goactuary.com/u/John.S.Mill)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 2:56am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/42 "2021-12-05T02:56:28Z")
I think everyone is against lockdowns at this point. Most people probably won’t be vaxxed beyond this third booster. We also know a lot more about the virus now, and people are both tired and not as scared (or they don’t care enough to be scared anymore). The government overreach will eventually end, because more and more people will be against it. ---
**Author:** ![Snikelfritz](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/snikelfritz/32/5728_2.png) [@Snikelfritz](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Snikelfritz)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 2:56am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/43 "2021-12-05T02:56:43Z")
The issue with Africa is building a cold distribution network, it’s not as simple as shipping doses. Also for the average African Covid is less of a risk than other diseases like malaria, typhoid, cholera etc. ---
**Author:** ![ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/ao_fan/32/143_2.png) [@ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/u/ao_fan)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 3:13am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/44 "2021-12-05T03:13:45Z")
I’m against lockdowns, but if they determine that Omicron is resistant to the current vaccines, I’d be for another booster. ---
**Author:** ![Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/lucy/32/8802_2.png) [@Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Lucy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 3:46am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/45 "2021-12-05T03:46:35Z")
> [@Snikelfritz](#): > > My “privilege” to travel out of the country. > > My “privilege” to have a private gathering (still limited to 25 people) > > My “privilege” to go to a gym, there are still capacity limits. Are you in Canada? Because in America we have all those privileges. One friend just returned from two weeks in Ireland. Another is organizing a weekend-long event in two weeks at which he expects 90 people. There may be capacity limits at the gyms, but they are all open, and the only issue i know of locally is that one closed because it wasn’t getting enough business. But a lot of gyms are open. And i don’t expect any of that to change. Yeah, we will have some vaccine mandates, and some mask mandates. But no significant government restrictions on doing stuff. And i don’t expect we will have many more restrictions going forward. ---
**Author:** ![John.S.Mill](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/john.s.mill/32/9771_2.png) [@John.S.Mill](https://community.goactuary.com/u/John.S.Mill)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 4:02am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/46 "2021-12-05T04:02:00Z")
Yeah, I’ve been out to the bars every other weekend for months now. Insanely crowded. Saw two movies at the theater. Gyms have lifted capacity limits for months now too. Lots of people traveling to Mexico for vacations. ---
**Author:** ![magillaG](https://community.goactuary.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/e79b87/32.png) [@magillaG](https://community.goactuary.com/u/magillaG)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 4:35am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/47 "2021-12-05T04:35:48Z")
I was never subjected to a real lockdown like you are describing, so my experience seems to have been different than yours. I think there were things to be scared of. If people are told to evacuate from an incoming hurricane, or shelter from a tornado, we don’t call that scare tactics. There has been discussion. In particular at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about shutting down the economy, as compared to simply protecting the most vulnerable, eg the elderly. Public health experts said that was basically going to be impossible, and several models showed many people would die without a shutdown. So there was a shutdown. The next logical part of the discussion was balancing reopening with mask mandates and, again, death. I think that discussion happened too. Remember when the texas lieutenant governor said he was willing to die to keep the economy going, and thought other people should be willing, too? That was honest discussion. Seriously. He wasn’t making up facts. That’s the political decision we faced. Vaccination was the next step. There continues to be a great deal of discussion about that. Much of it had been in the courts, and i believe that has been fact based. There has been a lot of lying and misdirection about vaccines, especially by many republicans in the US, and that has made the discussion harder. There has also been a concerted effort to turn the discussion from one about facts and risk mitigation to one about feelings and values. Masks and vaccines become a “personal choice”, as if we were having a religious disagreement about transubstantiation or eating pork. Politicians sell merchandise to make money off the controversy. ---
**Author:** ![ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/ao_fan/32/143_2.png) [@ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/u/ao_fan)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 4:36am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/48 "2021-12-05T04:36:52Z")
Yeah snik’s complaints just don’t apply to people in the US. Funny how people in the US whine about their freedoms being taken away just because they are required to get vaccinated when the restrictions are way worse in canada. I’ve seen anti vaxxers in the US comparing a mask mandate to nazi Germany. Its insane. ---
**Author:** ![Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/lucy/32/8802_2.png) [@Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Lucy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 5:12am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/49 "2021-12-05T05:12:01Z")
> [@Lucy](#): > > Another is organizing a weekend-long event in two weeks at which he expects 90 people. By the way, I think this friend is crazy. I was invited, and I won’t be there, despite it being an event I have enjoyed in the past. They will all be eating together, and hanging out unmasked together. He’s not even requiring that everyone be vaccinated. But everything he’s doing is completely legal. ---
**Author:** ![Serena](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/serena/32/10_2.png) [@Serena](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Serena)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 5:35am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/50 "2021-12-05T05:35:08Z")
We are going to a concert tomorrow night. Vaccination and masks are required. ---
**Author:** ![IPD](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/ipd/32/179_2.png) [@IPD](https://community.goactuary.com/u/IPD)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 6:10am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/51 "2021-12-05T06:10:31Z")
I dont know if this was a early hope or not but I thought I saw Omicron was a variant that could end our covid worries. Essentially it was super contagious and somewhat vaccine resistent and tons of people would get it. But it also didn’t cause severe symptoms, so it was a sign it was evolving into a basic cold. Or was I dreaming ---
**Author:** ![soyleche](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/soyleche/32/42_2.png) [@soyleche](https://community.goactuary.com/u/soyleche)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 6:12am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/52 "2021-12-05T06:12:36Z")
I probably shouldn’t admit to what I’ve been doing the last few days. It involves a 1600 seat venue, 4 sold out shows (plus a dress rehearsal with an audience of about 1000), and 1200-ish performers… No vaccinations or masks required ---
**Author:** ![Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/lucy/32/8802_2.png) [@Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Lucy)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 12:49pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/53 "2021-12-05T12:49:15Z")
There were early descriptions of many of the people having it having mild illness. But most people with other covid variants have mild illness, and South Africa also has a surge in hospitalizations. So it’s possible, but i think it’s a bit early to be expecting that. ---
**Author:** ![ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/ao_fan/32/143_2.png) [@ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/u/ao_fan)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2021, 4:12pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/54 "2021-12-05T16:12:20Z")
now i’m wondering if my uncle’s bout with covid really was any worse than my father’s bout with covid. I think the only reason my father stayed in the nursing home rather than go to the hospital was because it was early 2020 and the hospital wasn’t really any better equipped to deal with covid than nursing homes were as long as you didn’t need a ventilator. I suspect my uncle wound up in the ICU because of his age and because he had a small amount of covid pneumonia. my father similarly had a small amount of covid pneumonia in March/April 2020. So maybe it would have been worse without the vaccine. No way to know. My uncle was only in ICU for a day and then moved to a regular covid area of the hospital. That seems like a really short amount of time to me if he was in really bad shape. I don’t want to jinx him by saying all this since he still is in the hospital with covid, but doing better. He’s also really frail, so he likely won’t live that much longer regardless, but it seems the drugs rid him of covid. Seems like the people we most want to protect from this virus are just the people who contract this virus, at least in my family, and those like me who are relatively low risk, don’t get it. So far, my mother has managed to avoid covid. fan family members are adding up. ---
**Author:** ![Maphistos\_Sidekick](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/maphistos_sidekick/32/84973_2.png) [@Maphistos\_Sidekick](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Maphistos_Sidekick)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2021, 12:32am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/55 "2021-12-06T00:32:49Z")
Looks like many cases of Omicron in the US have ties to an anime convention in New York City, where proof of vaccination would have been required to attend. ---
**Author:** ![dr\_t\_non-fan](https://community.goactuary.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a8b319/32.png) [@dr\_t\_non-fan](https://community.goactuary.com/u/dr_t_non-fan)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2021, 10:39pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/56 "2021-12-10T22:39:29Z")
Q: How much additional work is needed on a COVID test to determine the variant? Asking, because I see a surge in Michigan (surprisingly(/s) a couple of weeks after “The Game” with 100,000 tightly packed fans), but only one case of Omicron has been detected. Now, maybe there is only one case, but I suspect that not all tests are trying to detect variants. ---
**Author:** ![ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/ao_fan/32/143_2.png) [@ao\_fan](https://community.goactuary.com/u/ao_fan)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2021, 10:42pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/57 "2021-12-10T22:42:49Z")
I assume they aren’t checking for the variant most of the time. My uncle recently contracted covid. No clue what variant it is. ---
**Author:** ![Marcie](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/marcie/32/8789_2.png) [@Marcie](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Marcie)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2021, 11:16pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/58 "2021-12-10T23:16:26Z")
They sample positive tests to sequence for variants, at a fairly low sample rate, I think; however, Omicron’s mutations make it easier to detect without fully sequencing because it registers positive on one type of PCR test but not another one. I thought Lucy posted something about that somewhere around here. ---
**Author:** ![Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/lucy/32/8802_2.png) [@Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Lucy)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2021, 12:37am UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/59 "2021-12-11T00:37:57Z")
Different states test at greatly different rates. CA sequences a fairly high fraction of positive samples. NY is a distant second, iirc. Some states basically don’t sequence. Most are in between. But yes, due to a quirk of how one of the common PCR tests reacts to omicron, it can be detected without fully sequencing the sample, making it relatively cheap to monitor. I don’t have a good sense of what fraction of positive samples are being tested in each state, though. ---
**Author:** ![Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/user_avatar/community.goactuary.com/lucy/32/8802_2.png) [@Lucy](https://community.goactuary.com/u/Lucy)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2021, 5:03pm UTC](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683/60 "2021-12-12T17:03:18Z")
This post probably belongs here: > [@Will you get the vaccine as soon as available to you?](https://community.goactuary.com/t/will-you-get-the-vaccine-as-soon-as-available-to-you/706/4210): > > > [@Will you get the vaccine as soon as available to you?](https://community.goactuary.com/t/will-you-get-the-vaccine-as-soon-as-available-to-you/706/4205): > > > > The initial messaging was “get a vaccine, we’ll get back to normal soon!”. > > > > Then it was “get two shots of vaccine to fight delta, we’ll get back to normal soon!”. > > > > Now it’s, “get two shots and a booster to fight omicron, we’ll get back to normal soon!”. > > > > In 6 months it’ll be “get this omicron vaccine, we’ll get back to normal soon!”. I’m fine skipping the non omicron booster. > > The initial message was “get fully vaccinated, and we’ll hopefully get back to normal soon.” It’s true that a single dose was pretty good (although the protection was probably short-lived) but there was never official advice to get a single dose of anything but J&J. It was always 2. > > When Delta came around, they said “a single dose no longer gives much protection. But two doses recently, or two doses a while ago plus a booster, gives excellent protection”. > > A small South African study showed that neutralization was 40-fold less effective against omicron than against wild-type. That’s a big reduction in effectiveness, but vaccination still provides a real benefit. So more antibodies are likely to help > > [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.08.21267417v1?ijkey=a3df161dedeb78f6f26f9f357538b9a07ad417bb&keytype2=tf\_ipsecsha](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.08.21267417v1?ijkey=a3df161dedeb78f6f26f9f357538b9a07ad417bb&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha) > > Pfizer found that a third dose increases antibodies 25-fold > [Pfizer and BioNTech Provide Update on Omicron Variant | Pfizer](https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant) > > (Note that a factor of 2 is a fairly small difference in effectiveness, typically.) So a third dose restores a lot of the lost effectiveness. > > The best data I’ve seen on boosters for Omicron at the moment is from the UK, which spaced the first two doses. (No doubt better data will emerge; there’s very little data on omicron just yet.) This is actual infection data, not just counting antibodies. The immune system is a lot more complex than just antibodies, so this is superior to the antibody studies above, although preliminary, of course: > > [https://khub.net/documents/135939561/430986542/Effectiveness+of+COVID-19+vaccines+against+Omicron+variant+of+concern.pdf/f423c9f4-91cb-0274-c8c5-70e8fad50074](https://khub.net/documents/135939561/430986542/Effectiveness+of+COVID-19+vaccines+against+Omicron+variant+of+concern.pdf/f423c9f4-91cb-0274-c8c5-70e8fad50074) > > And here’s the primary result: > > > Among those who had received 2 doses of ChAdOx1 [Oxford-AstraZeneca], there was no protective effect of vaccination against symptomatic disease with Omicron from 15 weeks after the second dose. Among those who had received 2 doses of BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech], vaccine effectiveness was 88.0% (95%CI 65.9 to 95.8%) 2-9 weeks after dose 2, dropping to 48.5% (95%CI: 24.3 to 65.0%) at 10- 14 weeks post dose 2 and dropping further to between 34 and 37% from 15 weeks post dose 2. Among those who received ChAdOx1 as the primary course, from 2 weeks after a BNT162b2 booster dose, vaccine effectiveness increased to 71.4% (95%CI: 41.8 to 86.0%). Vaccine effectiveness increased to 75.5% (95%CI: 56.1 to 86.3%) after the booster among those who had received BNT162b2 as the primary course. > > Summary: Protection from symptomatic Omicron is decent from recent completion of two doses of Pfizer, or from recent boosting with a third dose of Pfizer (75%+). Protection from AZ more than 15 weeks ago was nil, but that increased to 71% after a Pfizer booster. > > They only analyzed 581 total cases of omicron, so they didn’t have enough data to determine the efficacy of Moderna, nor the efficacy of any vaccine against serious illness. > > All that being said, the theory predicts that vaccine (and prior infection) should protect better against serious disease than against symptomatic disease. You need neutralizing antibodies to protect against symptomatic disease, but trained T-cells protect against serious disease, and T-cell responses tend to be less specialized and more flexible in the face of viral mutations than the antibodies you have knocking around. > > So if you are low-risk, and don’t have anyone in your life you are trying to protect from catching covid from you, you can probably wait until we get an omicrom-specific vaccine. Me, I’m old. I will take all the protection I can get. (And I care for my immune-compromised mother.) [Previous page](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683.md?page=2) [Next page](https://community.goactuary.com/t/omicron/4683.md?page=4)