ahmetdouas

Well obviously at some point it runs out of ppl to infect! Unless it’s a SAGE projection of course, numbers can only go to infinity with them

Silver Fox

Disable JS for the telegraph.co.uk domain. It's not a real paywall.

Silver Fox

And you do realise you are now going to be branded as a heretic even though you are the messenger? Be strong....

KARFA

What a load of rubbish. There can't possibly be 200,000 omicron infections per day. It would be the most incredible testing phenomenon in history since there were only about 1,500 cases reported today so we "missed" 198,500 cases and we are picking up only 1 in 133 cases by testing despite still having a positivity rate of 4.39% and it has been consistently in the 3-5% range for months now.

Even if you assume 200,000 is correct, using the stupid model released by UKHSA last week which showed cases doubling every 2-3 days would mean by Christmas day the daily infection rate would be 12 million - it simply isn't physically possible that many people can be infected in one day unless the whole population of the UK squeezes on the Isle of Wight and we spend the whole day coughing on each other. The whole model we are basing these current restrictions on is just complete garbage.

I am sorry but this is utter madness is not even worthy of someone doing gcse maths.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politi...cting-25689142

Silver Fox

First it was Diane Abbott, then Prof. Neil Ferguson, now it's Javid. There's only so much bad maths we can stomach.

13901

I’ve been doing some work in Italy and in France in the last few days and to be honest there isn’t much emphasis here on Omicron, at least in the public discourse I hear or read about. So in my tinfoil hat moment, considering how Johnson behaved in the past (“let the bodies pile high”, remember that), I wonder if we’d be having such a focus on this variant had BoJo not landed himself in hot water with the Xmas parties, the wallpaper and so on.

fransknorge

Definitely a weird statement and hard to assess its veracity.
Data from Denmark are interesting: 27 people in hospitals but most were positive 48h after admissions (so admitted for a different motif) and half are already out.
There are three big "if" there but we might be very very lucky: if the exponential rise is really this quick and if the IFR and admission rate is really this low and if Omicron displaces Delta for good, then Omicron will effectively act as a vaccine jab, greatly increasing immunization rate every where, including in countries with poor access (not due to their fault) to vaccines or with countries with high anti-vax proportion (Bulgaria, Ukraine, etc ...). But even that it means some control on infections because even if the admission rate is very very low (still not fully proven), a full tsunami on a country will poor vaccination rate and a poor healthcare infrastructure will be a disaster. However it can actually help the situation by immunizing. That assumes that there are no long term sequel we do not know about (and there are some for the original strain of SARS-COV-2 so ...).

DaveS

Today's foot in mouth winner Dominic Raab:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-59646151

Full credit to the NHS for curing 241 cases in the time it took me to eat my croissant.

lhrsfo

With our omnishambles Government obsessed with Omnicron variants, and also the birth of the omnipotent Lord (ie Christmas), I think we can safely assume that, whatever data emerges in the next two weeks, we can safely assume that significantly harsher measures will be introduced to stop New Year's Eve partying. If we get good news on the disease it will be put down to abundance of caution and rapid growth in cases, but it will come anyway.

KARFA

It just doesn't matter what comes out now. Day by day we get more evidence that omicron is much more milder and less deadly than any previous variant - the South Africans have been saying this for weeks until they are blue in the face but no one is listening. Or they will make absurd claims to justify it - such as the South Africans are somehow incredibly healthy and resistant so their experience won't translate here. And it is not spreading at anything like the "doubling every 2/3 days" rate the models suggested either here or in South Africa. Yet we continue our unstoppable rush towards more restrictions.

Yesterday's announcement by the government that one person has died with omicron (they don't want to clarify was it with omicron or because of omicron) and therefore you need to set aside it is a milder variant is as scientifically illiterate as saying smoking doesn't cause cancer because my gran smoked all her life and she is 93 now and still well.

As you say, if it pans out to be much less of a problem than the models used suggested of course it must be due to the prompt action by the government and quick implementation of restrictions - and no one will actually ask it is possible the models were actually wrong and all this damage was just completely unnecessary.

I noted before, but I think we are now destined to repeat this madness each time a new dodgy variant appears every six months or so.

DaveS

The telegraph is reporting what is claimed to be the first real world data on omicron compared with earlier variants:


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...ine-jabs-give/

This story is not paywalled.

Professor Yaffle

I actually genuinely think this is the 'beginning of the end' of the Covid saga. This variant is clearly highly infectious, but also much milder - so it will clearly become dominant worldwide very quickly, buliding up social immunity with (hopefully minimal) loss of life. BoJo and the mainstream press will eventually have to acknowledge this, and the current testing and restrictions will have to be put to bed as pointless. From my little scientific knowledge it would then be highly unusual for any future variant to be just as infectious whilst presenting worse symptoms??

I am putting the over/under on this as end March 2022 (though we will actually be at that stage here in around 6 weeks or less...

DYKWIA

He’s a Tory politician. That might explain it

fransknorge

No it is not, there are plenty of examples of variants being significantly deadlier/with worse symptoms and be as or more infectious: several flu strain including the famed Spanish Flu, West Nile, Ebola. The entire idea that as a virus mutates it became milder and less deadly is a sort of urban legend with no root in evolution, epidemiology or biology. There are no proof, no actual real example except one and the past evolution of other COV is uncertain.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...lve-180975343/

Internaut

Which leaves us with the interesting question of how many people will be catching it and ending up in hospital in the coming weeks, bearing in mind "other wards" can also be overwhelmed.

At the moment, it looks like a triply jabbed individual has somewhat more to fear from a call from test and trace than from the disease itself...