EVNow
Well-Known Member
Germany is close to being the country with highest # of cases. How did that happen ?!
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Coronavirus
- Thread starter Wenche
- Start date
Curse for delaying Giga-Berlin.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Oktoberfest?
Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and even Switzerland are worse per capita. But they all had a serious spike. For some it was their worst yet.
Not Oktoberfest (which is long over).
Looking at the CDC website for the daily data, we see cases on Thanksgiving and Black Friday even lower than recent weekends. We had 4 consecutive days of low reporting. Look for a catch-up on Monday and perhaps into Tuesday. The US transmission rate did not drop that quickly.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
But Germany's spike started around Oktoberfest.
What makes this interesting / sad is that almost every country had smaller peak in the beginning of the epidemic in H1'20 compared to peak/s later on - except China. So, the countries simply refused to learn or they just accepted a large number of deaths to keep the economy going.
Or China is lying about their case numbers.
FunkInMyFrunk
Member
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
I don’t understand why people think this. They report numbers to the WHO. Could they be off by a factor of 2 or 3 or something? Maybe (this would still be an incredibly low number). But it’s really hard - you can’t hide cases very easily. If you start trying to hide cases, this will eventually lead to spread, because it will require complicity at the local level which will lead to incorrect local responses to prevent further spread. Uncontrolled spread will become very noticeable. There is no way to hide it (we have an example of this from December 2019).
I’ve been to China a few times. There’s no question it is a state with ample surveillance and very little true freedom to say and do whatever you want. And they’ll definitely fudge things if they can. However, keeping something like this completely hidden on a mass scale, across the country, would be pretty difficult (impossible).
I’d be shocked if China’s numbers were way off these days. In the early days of course they missed tons of cases. But so did everyone else.
I’d also be surprised if they can keep this up indefinitely. They really need to figure out their end game, but they are in an enviable position.
I tend to think their approach has been the best for economic activity. It does require extreme inconvenience and loss of freedom at an individual level (people who have to travel have to quarantine in isolation for weeks). We’ll see if they can keep it up. It is quite a struggle.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Moderna says vaccines will likely be less effective against Omicron
www.yahoo.com
UPDATE 1-Moderna CEO says vaccines likely less effective against Omicron - FT
The head of drugmaker Moderna said COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to be as effective against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus as they have been previously, sparking fresh worry in financial markets about the trajectory of the pandemic. Fear of the new variant, despite a lack of...
Perhaps you could help me interpret the data more accurately. I can't perfectly align the dates with the bars shown given the resolution we have at this end. Oktoberfest was 9/17 to 10/3 this year. But the rise in cases seems to start almost 3 weeks later. Am I reading that correctly? If so, that is a rather longer incubation period than would be expected. Am I reading that right?
There was no Oktoberfest this year, it was canceled because of Covid-19, just like last year.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Yes, you can't easily hide pandemic numbers. As any number of governments from India to New York to Russia to Iran to Florida have found out.
Zero tolerance is exactly what is needed if you value life & economy. If politics is what you care about - you get the mess we are in.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
If anyone could hide case numbers it's China. But they have no reason to.
There's a hell of a lot more loss of freedom there than just two weeks quarantine for travellers.
Yes, western governments completely blew their chance to install an Orwellian surveillance state. /s
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Yes, this was just an example, specifically related to impact on economic activity. There is also forced testing, extreme lockdowns, etc.
But in terms of economic impact, they were really the envy of the world during most of the pandemic (that balance is now starting to change, perhaps). Yes it restricted human travel, but within the country things have been largely quite normal. Crushing the virus has proven to be the best economic choice. It’s not possible in democracies with individual freedoms, unfortunately. Individual freedom is more important than optimal outcomes.
Yeah, I think if anyone could they could. But that being said, I still think it would be virtually impossible to hide uncontrolled spread. Only in a place like North Korea do we really have no idea what is happening. China is too connected, in spite of the Great Firewall, to hide what is happening.
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EVNow
Well-Known Member
Or for that matter New Zealand type zero tolerance.
ps : If we are talking about ethics - its a tricky question whether Orwellian surveillance is worse than
BTW, I also think people in the western world think Chinese have far fewer rights than they actually do in practice. Reminds me of US soldiers in Iraq thinking the Iraqi people have been brainwashed by Saddam.
Later in the evening, a report by Channel 12 said the Pfizer vaccine is just slightly less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta – 90% as opposed to 95% – while it is as effective – around 93% – in preventing serious symptoms at least for those vaccinated with a booster.
According to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared – around 1.3 times higher.
At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chance of developing serious symptoms, a significant figure.
COVID: First signs that vaccines protect against Omicron
We have a combination of a rapidly spreading variant, which gives serious symptoms to a higher share of the unvaccinated. Expect to see very busy hospitals in many places, which might lead to a lack of oxygen and people who could have survived in ICU dying. One could hope the world has taken the last 2 years to prepare for this eventuality.
According to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared – around 1.3 times higher.
At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chance of developing serious symptoms, a significant figure.
COVID: First signs that vaccines protect against Omicron
We have a combination of a rapidly spreading variant, which gives serious symptoms to a higher share of the unvaccinated. Expect to see very busy hospitals in many places, which might lead to a lack of oxygen and people who could have survived in ICU dying. One could hope the world has taken the last 2 years to prepare for this eventuality.
How are things in Sweden? Here in the US, in some areas hospitals are already being filled again with Delta patients thanks to a Winter wave.
It’s not too bad, better than most of Europe and our neighbouring countries right now. But cases are increasing rapidly the last few weeks so the next few months might be bad.
I guess the virus has a component of spreading from socially active people to other socially active people. Thanks to Sweden having been relatively open, many of our socially active people have had the virus already(with the less deadly early variants). With a decent 70% vaccination rate(mostly pfizer), average person living in a sparse household and a social distant culture, Sweden has been doing alright as a control group in this global experiment.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Infection-acquired natural immunity seems to be about as good as one dose of vaccine-acquired natural immunity.
So I think once everyone unvaccinated has had COVID three times they should be pretty good! So easy!
More details on these efficacies would be nice. Seems like a very imprecise statement. The efficacy of a booster is about ~95% when compared to a double-vaccinated individual, against delta (meaning it reduces chance of infection by Delta by ~20x when you get a booster). So I’d like to know the efficacy against omicron with the same metric. I think it will be hard to get this data any time soon though!
It seems like neutralizing antibody titers have been a good proxy though. Lots of plots of that around at this point to establish a correlate of protection. Based on those plots, with sky-high nAbs, I think even omicron should be reasonably well dealt with unless there is major escape from the wide breadth of boosted Abs. So those nAbs titers are probably going to be the best predictive value we have, and hopefully when available they’ll show a comparison of double vax vs. triple vax, etc.
I’m a bit skeptical about the reliability of these reports. It’s hard to imagine how these results have already been generated within just a few days since the variant was identified as a concern.
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