omicron is so hard to pronounce, so people is calling it moronic.
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The knee jerk response to it certainly is moronic.
Are we going to shut down the world every time a new variant pops up? Sooner or later (sooner preferably) we need to just accept that a constantly mutating Covid is here to stay. Humanity accepted many far worse diseases for most of its existence.
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Another take on this. Skip down to the data.
Great interview with Eric Topol. This guy is a paper reading machine. Follow him on Twitter and you get digest summary of all the latest literature almost in real time.
True I follow him. Shares informative stuff.
Noah’s followup. Good summary of what we know so far. It’s still early and we don’t know a whole lot. Regardless, getting a booster shot is the best protection we can have right now on a personal level.
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It’s time to stop trying to vaccinate our way out of this and start focussing on multiple antivirals that treat the disease… Otherwise it’s endless boosters chasing the tail of the last variant.
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"The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild.
Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense."
Different and mild is good… let’s hope there’s not some dark side that shows up 3 months later.
…
Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder."
So again…maybe we should have a discussion about diet and exercise and losing weight.
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With Omicron, re-infection risk is much higher than with Delta. People with prior Covid infection should still get vaccinated.
Do you have evidence for recommending vaccination? When one develops natural immunity, different parts of the immune system latch on to different parts of the full virus making it more likely that the immune system will be able to recognize a variant. With the vaccine, it’s just the spike protein, and from what I’ve heard Delta is only marginally related in that aspect. Would need to see data specifically on vaccine effectiveness, how many doses and how long ago.
Yup, I have seen evidence posted by Topol. You can go thru his twitter stream to fish out those papers. My recollection is that, with Delta, prior infection is somewhere between 1 and 2 doses in terms of protection. So prior infection + 2 shots would give that person the best protection. Otherwise get 3 shots.
Yeah, but we’re not talking Delta. We’re talking Omicron (sorry if that wasn’t clear). Post links the next time you come across them.
I was thinking of buying guns too. Look like these guys beat me to that.
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Lots of anecdotes saying breakthrough cases result in mild infections.
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Another one:
Nebraska, Maryland and Pennsylvania all confirm omicron cases as Covid variant spreads to eight U.S. states
An “Omicron Christmas present” would be a highly transmissible variant that causes mild symptoms. Herd immunity without the deaths.
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German doc says stigmatizing the unvaccinated is unjustified.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02243-1/fulltext
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