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posted by
janrinok
on Thursday January 13 2022, @04:32AM
from the I-hope-it's-only-the-legs-half dept.
from the I-hope-it's-only-the-legs-half dept.
Omicron May Infect Half of Europeans Within Weeks, WHO Says:
More than half of Europe's population could become infected with omicron within weeks at current transmission speeds, a World Health Organization official said.
The fast-spreading variant represents a "west-to-east tsunami sweeping the region," Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said in a briefing Tuesday.
He cited the Institute for Metrics and Health Assessment forecast that most Europeans could take it within the next six to eight weeks. The latest Covid surge has resulted in fewer symptomatic cases and lower death rates than in previous waves, fueling optimism that the pandemic may subside.
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Omicron May Infect Half of Europeans Within Weeks, WHO Says
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 13 2022, @06:39AM (4 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @08:16AM (3 children)
I believe there's no data suggesting lower Long COVID rates for Omicron. Provide a citation if you have one, please. That would be good to know.
Vaccination (actually, probably, blood Ab titer, though possibly also cell response) does seem to drop Long COVID impact significantly - maybe decreasing odds of a person reporting each specific symptom by about 1/2!
BUT 20% IS for a mostly-vaccinated population! At 3 at 6 months post acute, unvaccinated survivors have 30-50% rates of one or more Long COVID symptoms. Citation: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003773 [plos.org]
Plenty of other large-N studies backing this up. The statistics are pretty irrefutable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:10PM (1 child)
Not that I would trust evolution very far here. The flu is far more evolved for humans and it typically has a high long symptom occurrence as well (as described in the study which attributed a 16% lower chance of long term symptoms from the flu than from covid over that time period).
Not for a study that ends in February 2021! I note also that people got in the sample by either exhibiting symptoms or testing positive for covid. That won't generate an accurate sampling of asymptomatic covid cases for that time frame.
Let's see those studies then (peculiar that you're saying these studies exist when you were claiming "no data" earlier). My take is that a significantly less severe disease over a more vaccinated population will result in significantly lower long term symptoms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 14 2022, @12:36AM
Then the burden of proof is on you. When my abusive uncle shows up drunk and swears this time it'll be different, today he drank beer not whiskey, the situation is too similar to a known danger.
Your hot take is not worth the time it took to read. Statistics or bust. Evidence or bust.
...right. Peer review takes a while. This is our best data. We have no reason to believe Omicron leads to less Long COVID.
Do you get it?
We have no reason to believe Omicron leads to less Long COVID.
We have no reason to believe Omicron leads to less Long COVID.
The burden of proof is on YOU to demonstrate that Omicron is less dangerous somehow, if you want to shift our well-based priors.
If you don't understand the difference between "we have no data indicating it's weaker" and "we have data indicating Long COVID is common", and why the two can simultaneously be true, then I don't want to try and talk with you, because anyone who claims 2+3=4 in the integer number system, can prove anything they want, and disprove anything they want.
If you bother to search, look at Nehme in AIM, Groff in JAMA, the USA's VA/mil numbers, etc etc etc. There's lots of strong results. They only meaningfully disagree in their definition of PASC.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 13 2022, @02:51PM
There's no data *proving* lower Long COVID rates for Omicron. There *is* data suggesting it. E.g. it seems to flourish in the bronchial tubes rather than in the blood stream, so the immune systems is already hyped up by the time it tries for a systematic invasion.
What's your theory for how "long covid" works? Mine is that it gets into the blood stream and starts lots of really small blood clots circulating, which occasionally clump together somewhere where they can cause a major disaster, and other times a minor disaster. This is separate from (though related to) the way it causes lung damage. And it gets avoided when the blood clots are cleaned out before they cause any real problem. Or if they only happen to clump in a place where it's easy to repair. The theory for what causes long covid is important in making predictions about what will cause it, and what won't. (IIRC warfarin had no effect on the clotting of blood by covid as it used a different mechanism.)
Caution: I'm a programmer, not a bioresearcher. Don't take my theories too seriously in this area.
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