How “mild” Omicron is depends upon how much you lag the data
Coronavirus dashboard for January 10: how “mild” Omicron is depends upon how much you lag the data
So, how “mild” or not, is Omicron? It depends on whether you lag the data on hospitalizations and deaths or not.
The original story out of South Africa was that Omicron was extremely mild. Despite a huge spike in infections, deaths barely budged. As Omicron took hold in Europe and the US, South Africa disappeared from the picture. Which is too bad, because here is what has been happening with deaths:
In the past week, deaths in South Africa tripled. Mind you, deaths – so far, anyway – at 13x their pre-Omicron low, are nowhere near the 80x+ increase in cases. But the point is, deaths lag cases, and until you wait about a month to see how deaths play out, you really don’t know how “mild” Omicron is.
And the bad news for the US is, compared with South Africa and even the UK, Omicron hasn’t been as “mild” so far, as shown in the below set of graphs comparing cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths (again, so far):
A week ago, the story in the US was still how “mild” Omicron has been, as shown in this graph of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from New York City (perhaps the earliest hard hit metro area):
There’s just one problem with the above graph: hospitalizations and deaths aren’t shown with any sort of lag. Deaths on January 2 are compared with hospitalizations on January 2 and new cases on January 2.
But when you put in an appropriate lag, the situation looks much different, as in the below graph in which deaths are lagged 21 days for NYC and two other metros:
Or the below graph, including ICU patients with a 14 day lag compared with infections:
All of a sudden, Omicron doesn’t appear that much milder at all.
This is something I’ve been following since the onset of the Omicron wave. Since hospitalizations started to spike about 10 days after the onset of the wave, i crunched data with a 10 day lag. While I don’t have a graph to show you, I can tell you that each time I have done this, it gives me a result of hospitalizations increasing at a rate of between 65% to 80% of cases. ICU admissions lag hospitalizations by only a day or two and have gone up at about 50% of the rate of cases. Because the Omicron wave only started in earnest on December 15, 3 1/2 weeks ago, we are only beginning to see the trend in deaths.
But we already have more hospitalizations for COVID than we have ever had before in the US, and the system is beginning to break down – and we haven’t even reached the peak yet. As a society, the US seems to have just given up.
Since I hate only passing on gloom and doom, let me give you a few rays of daylight.
First, the Omicron wave seems to have already peaked in several places where it hit early: Puerto Rico, DC, and New Jersey. In two other places, New York and Hawaii, it hasn’t peaked yet:
Finally, Omicron is infecting so many people that within a month or two it is going to be difficult for COVID to find a victim who doesn’t have at least some resistance via vaccinations or prior infection:
About 62% of the US population has been fully vaccinated (but only about 36% being boosted as well, according to the CDC). Another 12% have received at least one dose. And over 18% have had *confirmed* cases. The likelihood is that, including asymptomatic infections or infections of people who didn’t bother to get tested, at least double that percentage, somewhere on the order of 40% of all Americans, have been infected.
If we just randomly assign that 40% of infected people among all those vaccinated and unvaccinated, that’s roughly 85% of the US population that should have at least *some* resistance to renewed infection. Another month of Omicron is probably going to take that up to 90%.
It’s possible there is a doomsday variant out there, but it’s more likely that, as COVID becomes endemic, each wave displays less and less virulence, not because they are inherently “milder,” but simply because the vast majority of the population has some, increasing, level of immune resistance.
we’ve finally decided that Covid is no longer a problem in the US, because most of those dying are old and infirm anyhow….
http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Where_Civic_Republicanism_and_Deliberative_Democracy_Meet.pdf
November, 1996
Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Is there a relationship between defects in our medical ethics and the reason the United States has repeatedly failed to enact universal health coverage? I will begin to suggest an answer to this question by clarifying the locus of allocating decisions. The allocation of health care resources can occur on three levels. The social or, in the economist’s language, the macro level entails the proportion of the gross national product (GNP) allocated to health care. The patient, or micro, level entails determining which individual patients will receive specific medical services; that is, whether Mrs. White should receive this available liver for transplantation. Finally, there is an intermediate level called the service or medical level that entails determining what health care services will be guaranteed to each citizen….
As several people have noted, Walensky was specifically referring to the subcohort of vaccinated individuals discussed in this CDC study. That GMA did a shitty editing job of the interview and a lot of people with agendas push the bullshit above is not her fault.
That said–as a resident of NJ’s most affected County and with a daughter living in DC–I admire the optimism about possibly being on the downhill side of Omicron. Even if that’s true (five-day downward trend for cases, though not hospitalizations), we’re still around 2.5x the previous peak in cases. And that’s leaving out those (such as my aforereferenced daughter) who tested positive at home and therefore didn’t make the official stats, while the self-reporting Covid app is running about three times as many people feeling symptoms than at the peak of Delta here.
As Dr. Black noted earlier today, even those who don’t require hospitalization are losing multiple days (daughter lost three, fortunately between semesters) of life and work. If this is “less and less virulence,” 2022 is going to set a record for deaths.
Ken, to clear up any misconceptions generated by GMA’s editing of the Walensky interview and my cite of it, i’ll quote to key results from the CDC study that Walensky was referring to:
to paraphrase the results, the only vaccinated individuals dying from Covid were those over 65, the immunosuppressed, diabetics and those with heart, pulmonary, liver, or kidney problems to start with…
so with that context; here again is what she said:
i’m not sure how the study she was cited changes what she said much, but there is it…i would disagree with her in the context of the Omicron appendage to her comment, because the studies i’ve seen indicate that the original double vaccine dose does little to prevent Omicron infection, but that’s a discussion for another day…
i have no doubt that the World Socialists source i cited has an agenda, and i’m sure that the right wing sites around the web have their own agenda in quoting Walensky’s interview….however, my “agenda” is data driven and aligns with neither of them; with 4% of the world’s population, we have been recording over 30% of the new Covid cases over the past two weeks, and about 25% of the planet’s Covid deaths over the past week, up from 20% the week before…when i see numbers like that, my reaction is to ask what is it that we’re doing wrong? and since Walensky is in charge of an agency called “the Center for Disease Control” it shouldn’t be a surprise that i’m interested in what’s she’s been doing, even if she happens to be aligned with the political party that most readers of this blog support…
here’s excerpts from one of the studies i mentioned wherein they allege that two doses of vaccine don’t do much for you against Omicron:
my source for US cases and deaths vs the rest of the world is here:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#weekly_table
since India’s cases were up 402% week over week, we’ve slipped to just 29% of the world’s new cases….but we still account for more than 25% of the deaths over the last 7 days…
that website is continuously updated..
here’s another study, this one including the Moderna vaccine, with the same results:
No Omicron immunity without booster, study finds – Harvard Gazette -An additional “booster” dose of Moderna or Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine is needed to provide immunity against the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study by researchers at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. The results of this study, reported in the journal Cell, indicate that traditional dosing regimens of COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States do not produce antibodies capable of recognizing and neutralizing the Omicron variant.
US health officials defend the administration’s response to the Omicron variant
NY Times – Jan 11
U.S. health officials defend the administration’s response to the Omicron variant
NY Times – Jan 11
U.S. health officials defend the administration’s response to the Omicron variant
(Link to the posts above. Much of the article will not post,
including GOP criticism and Dem defense from Senators.)
(The Dem defense & GOP criticism did post after all.)
Of course this is the meat of the article.
“The Premonition” by Michael Lewis, describes the efforts of some people to prepare the United States for meeting and defeating a pandemic. Sounds to me like if their proposals were enacted in time, Covid would have been stopped before many people died, As it turned out, “the system” defeated their efforts.
Now we seem to have reached a point where “everyone has been, or will be, infected, but only those with “comorbidities” (like being old?) will die, “so that’s all right.”
But I don’t know of any reason why the virus remaining in the bodies of those who do not die of the disease will not continue to mutate until a more deadly variant emerges.
or is this the “normal” “after the plague” situation?
or, given “herd immunity” can we expect that people who are unvaccinated, or have not survived a non-lethal infection will eventually run into someone who is carrying the virus, become infected and die..but not in sufficient numbers to alarm the rest of us?