Infects 70 times faster:
Now, not sure what this means; you are infected, and instead of taking three days to manifest it takes 3/70 days? So, an hour?
Quote from your article:
(emphasis added)
Would the bold mean that Omicron is not even COVID, but just incidentally triggers COVID tests? Or have viruses started cross-breeding?
e^(k2 * 24) = 70 * e^(k1 * 24)?
This.
Nference, a biomedical company, released data revealing that omicron shares similar genetic material to HCoV-229E, a human coronavirus that causes common cold symptoms. Researchers posit that omicron evolved from an individual who was “co-infected” with Sars-CoV-2 and HCoV-229E.
The authors of the study found both viruses inside gastrointestinal and respiratory tissues of infected individuals. They wrote that “genomic interplay,” or the exchange of genetic material, could have led to omicron’s emergence.
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I think I’m too young to be reading that.
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I know that bacteria can trade genes with each other.
A quick google seems to say that viruses can exchange genes when they infect the same cell.
I don’t think we can use mortality risk alone.
In particular, we have to consider the risk of long covid. This seems to be not well understood. And hard to measure, due to “background” of people feeling bad over a long period of time for all sorts of reasons.
If covid can bring the health care system to its knees, then it is also much riskier than a cold, even if the risk to any single individual isn’t that great. My hope is that this new pfizer pill can help with that. Most vaccine hesitant people seem willing to take the monoclonal antibodies, so hopefully would take these pills as well.
I disagree. I think people are forgetting just how exposed humans are/have been to viruses, bacteria and other microscopic things for the history of our existence.
If the person has COVID then we should treat them for COVID. If he no longer has COVID but is experiencing symptoms we can treat his symptoms but in no way should we be restricting/locking down society over that if the COVID itself is not of material mortality risk.
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There are a lot of people who can’t work for several weeks after covid. Some for months. They can’t concentrate and get exhausted. That’s a really big deal. You may not want to consider that risk, but i sure as hell plan to continue considering it.
“Long covid” is messy because there seem to be several different possible “long” outcomes.
There’s brain damage (“brain fog”), lung damage, lack of sense of smell, chronic fatigue syndrome (which is also triggered by other viruses, and sometimes happens for no known cause), Ave possibly sudden-onset diabetes. There are a lot of other forms of morbidity, like myocarditis (much more common after covid than after immunization, in every age group), strokes, heart attacks, and kidney damage, but they usually manifest in an obvious way during the acute phase of the disease, so they aren’t generally lumped in with “long covid”.
In many studies, losing your sense of taste for 4 weeks is “long covid”, but that’s obviously less severe than losing so much brain function that you can’t perform your job for months. So yes, the data is a mess. And yes, it will take a while to get a handle on it.
It’s “a cold” when it doesn’t do those things. Or it does them extremely rarely.
Maybe omicron will be a cold for people with some prior immunity. That’s certainly possible, and would be great news. But it’s a little early to declare victory.
This isn’t necessarily true. It all depends on the specifics of the long term symptoms.
If I “recover” from polio, but i’m in an iron lung for the rest of my life, then it’s absurd to use mortality as a proxy for the damage done by polio.
Whether your argument is correct depends on the details of long covid, which are not known in part because “long covid” is not a well defined term. But as lucy points out, some people have severe effects.
just scheduled my booster (3rd) shot. will get it today. Damn it was hard to find an appointment.
Getting it cuz I’m visiting the bf’s parents in a different state
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Is long-covid a significant risk for the vaccinated? I’m wondering if the long-covid cases began pre-vaccine.
I’ve read mixed reports. Obviously, if you don’t catch covid at all you don’t develop long covid.
This study shows that breakthrough cases among those who had two doses of vaccine were about half as likely to have symptoms after 28 days than unvaccinated cases:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext
This study found no reduction in the incidence of long covid among those who had breakthrough infections compared to those who were unvaccinated when infected:
So… it’s not a huge reduction like the reduction in the risk of hospitalization. On the other hand, there’s some extremely preliminary suggestions that omicron may be less likely to lead to long covid.
Personally, I’m in “wait and see” mode.
New bf!!! DEEEEEEEEEETZ!!! 
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Update, the government is now restricting Christmas gatherings to 10 people max here.
A couple I know was going to have a 25th anniversary dinner early in January; they called today to say it has been postponed.
I was thinking they’d wait till after Christmas for new restrictions, they probably safely assumed most people planning on gatherings of more than 10 didn’t really want to see those distant relatives anyway.
long-covid could be worse than death, so if the vaccine doesn’t protect against long-covid, that’s not good.
sure, it supposedly protects against getting covid, but i keep hearing about vaccinated people getting covid.
No such government restrictions here. So… Maybe a lot more government intrusion into your life? When you say “our” on a chat site that’s largely US based i expect you to be including the US members.
Fwiw, my family is limiting Christmas gatherings to about 10, not because the law says so, but because it seems like a good idea.
we had these restrictions last year, but they have long since been lifted.