Omicron

The real question is: are we going to be living with COVID, or living from COVID?

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Are you suggesting there’s real risk we’ll all die from it? Because that ship sailed 18 months ago.

Yes, “with covid” hospitalizations (and deaths) is all most of us ever had (see below). This is not new with Omicron. I don’t think it is really much less useful as a proxy - it’s just important to realize what those numbers mean. Since this has been the reporting basis all along, it might still be useful for evaluating trends in the data.

North Dakota was the only state I am aware of that was tracking their hospitalizations ‘with’ vs ‘from.’ I’m not familiar enough with their dashboards to direct you to the right place to see it, though, and I don’t know if they have a convenient time series of that data.

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No I’m just making a silly.

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Oh my bad, please proceed :slight_smile:

This appears to be their dashboard: Coronavirus Cases | Health and Human Services North Dakota

I no longer see the ‘with’ vs ‘from’ distinction that they used to track but their dashboard makes it abundantly clear that they are tracking hospitalizations “due to” Covid, not total “covid hospitalizations” the way other states count them.

Basically.

A youth relative is vaxxed and recovered (mild case, over in like 2.5 days) and his school district only started requiring masks for grades 7-12 today, so guess where he probably caught it? Yet “out of an abundance of caution” they are forcing him to isolate for 10 days, which has him missing an extra 5 days of school needlessly. :enraged_face:

CDC guidance is isolate for 5 days then go out masked for 5 more days. School district policy is isolate for 10 days. They are aware of the discrepancy, but since the CDC did not specify “this guidance is for everyone, including schools” they are asserting that it doesn’t apply to schools.

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CDC recently updated their school guidance to match their general guidance.

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The innumerate leading the blind

ND looks to be late to the omicron party. I’ll add this to my bookmarks.

I don’t have a data source. But vaccinations, prior infection, and probably features of omicron make it less serious on average, so you would expect an enormous increase in the fraction of “hospitalized with, not from”.

That is, in the initial surge, no one had any prior immunity, and while there were a few people who happened to test positive when they showed up with a broken arm, most of the hospitalizations were from covid. I’m going to go out on a limb and say 100% of the covid cases on ventilators, or even on supplemental oxygen, were suffering from covid.

But now we have this variant that is incredibly infectious among those with prior immunity, but usually not very serious among those with prior immunity. If 10% of the population has covid, you’d expect 10% of the people in the hospital with other stuff to also have covid. Plus however many are there from covid.

fwiw, I just looked up the # of people hospitalized with covid and the number of hospital beds in my state (they are conveniently published on the same page of the state dashboard) and 32% of all hospital beds currently hold people with covid. Unless you think it’s plausible that 32% of the population has covid, I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of those people are there because of covid. Even if some aren’t.

Just under 39% of those in intensive care have covid. 22% of those in intensive care are intubated and have covid. Pretty sure they are all there from covid.

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That’s an interesting cut of data, thanks.

Hmm, the dashboard actually says “hospitalized for covid”.

Also, more than half of those hospitalized for covid weren’t fully vaccinated. More than 80% of those over 12 years old have been fully vaccinated in my state, and the numbers only get higher if you look at older cohorts. So there’s an enormous bias in the likelihood of being hospitalized if you haven’t been vaccinated. I’m thinking most of those people are are hospitalized FOR covid.

The UK published the thing below as an preliminary view of vaccine effectiveness against omicron (amongst other things). Anecdotally, I’ve looked at a number of hospitals who report data, which is just raw unadjusted counts. It appears ~90% of those admitted are unvaxxed, and ICU beds are occupied by about 95% unvaxxed folks. So nothing new, it appears the vaccines will likely prevent you from dying.

Speaking of, did Rickson get banned? I’d like an update on when the vaccines are gonna start killing us all.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1044481/Technical-Briefing-31-Dec-2021-Omicron_severity_update.pdf

They’re piling those bodies next to the ones who died of hypoxia/carbon dioxide poisoning from wearing masks.

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Have you been talking to my father-in-law?

Have I told you about my one mask that I think is a little small and hurts the backs of my ears a bit!?

Video:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1287150464505712640

I’m glad doctors can help explain how overwhelmed the medical systems are through the medium of highly edited scripted tiktok videos.

Wut?

ETA: if this is in reference to the video I linked above, it was made in mid-2020 as satire, with most of his followers being HCWs.

He does do some educational videos, though.