I am less concerned about the infection of the lungs but there are now several reports out that omicron shows actually a higher level of “brain fog” than for example delta. Brain fog is something we have seen quite often with the original covid strain and it could be shown that the original virus was crossing the BBB. There is a good chance that omicron might be less infectious on the lungs but has more severe effects on other part of the body than delta
That’s a pretty incoherent excuse for a news article. Supposedly it’s based on ZOE data, but their own report says nothing about Omicron having a higher level of brain fog.
I don’t have time yet to go through the report in detail but on the zoe webpage about omicron - “ Contributor reports also identified loss of appetite and brain fog as common symptoms.”
There are also reports about brain fog from other organizations
When there are individuals, groups, and organizations predicting one thing and other individuals, groups, and organizations predicting the opposite, one is always going to be right.
The winter season didn’t evolve the way that any model predicted: Omicron came along and changed everything. But the late summer declines in cases had already ended in colder parts of the country before late November when the first known cases of Omicron first appeared in the US.
Here’s a quote from the September 20 article that you posted, in the context of the potential for a decline in cases through the winter months:
“Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism”
That was said before Omicron had been heard of, anywhere. There was no shortage of others predicting a new winter surge (in delta) at that same time.
Sure but than you might also not say “ lots of people were predicting a winter surge in cases.” which is also not true
The Omicron coronavirus variant is better at circumventing vaccinated peoples’ immunity than the Delta variant, according to a Danish study published last week, helping explain why Omicron is spreading more rapidly.
They’re talking about immunity due to antibodies. T-cell immunity is not so easily evaded by omicron, it appears.
Another quote from the same article:
“This may be what is going to lift us out of the pandemic, so that this becomes the last wave of corona,”
I agree and hope that proves to be the case.
Doesn’t take much time:
This analysis found no clear difference in the symptom profile of Delta and Omicron, with only 50% of people experiencing the classic three symptoms of fever, cough, or loss of sense of smell or taste.
The top 5 symptoms in both periods were:
Contributor reports also identified loss of appetite and brain fog as common symptoms.
This list of symptoms could just as easily point to a cold. I don’t know if there are any colds going around, but people with any or all of these symptoms might be pouring into hospital emergency rooms out of sheer panic, with presumably most being tested and sent home.
Loss of smell/taste is another thing. But fever is also a symptom of the flu. And coughs are common with common colds.
Actually 12+ hours of reoccurring headaches are quite specific to covid.
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I haven’t had a cold in so long that frankly, I can’t remember the headache part. You do see ads on TV (a highly reliable source, of course) for cold medicines showing the classic ice bag on top of the miserable person’s head. Which I think is referring to a headache.
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It’s good to hear that antibody shipments are resuming.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/03/world/omicron-covid-vaccine-tests#doctors-omicron
Yeah, great, they’ll try to treat Omicron with the ones for Delta.
If they don’t know which it is and it’s a region that still has a lot of Delta, better that than to just let a struggling patient lie there on a ventilator and die. I doubt that the resumed shipments are going to places where Omicron is thought to be 90% of all new hospital cases.
If there’s no response to either of the two antibody treatments that are known to be ineffective against Omicron, hospitals can switch to the third one that does work in an attempt to prevent a death – if that’s possible due to the extremely limited supply.
Here’s the latest CDC estimated proportions of Omicron vs. Delta in the US (as of Jan. 1). Omicron is purple. Delta is orange.
What a huge change in just one week. Still some non-trivial percentages of Delta in regions 1 and 7, but elsewhere quite low.
Just more “incompetent bullshit”?
In my view this is good news, as the more worrisome Delta is even more quickly than expected being ushered out the door. There’s still a way to go, but not far. By the end of January, Delta will be pretty much in the rear-view mirror, much like alpha and the original strain have been since last spring.
One thing to bear in mind, though, is that while the percentages shown on the map reflect high proportions of omicron vs. delta, the total number of all new Covid cases is also very high, meaning that the actual number of delta infections in regions with a high proportion of omicron cases can still be large.
In other words, it’s the number of cases that counts with each variant, and for Delta to really be “gone”, the proportion of Omicron would likely have to be higher than 95%. For example, if there are 40,000 new cases of Covid-19 in a given location on a given day (like NYC experienced recently) and 5% are Delta, that translates into 2000 new Delta cases. Some fraction of those 2000 people will end up in a hospital bed – hoping for a monoclonal antibody infusion.
The variants that are truly “gone” have proportion percentages on the order of 0.1%, not 5%.
I can’t find any explanation of the pie charts. The detailed data at the bottom of the page is for the four weeks ending December 11.
Clicking Download Data gives me a CSV with the following information for 2022 with no column for the chart regions. No details of how many data points. No indication of which row relates to which region. There are 22 rows which suggests there should be 11 pie charts. I can see that the confidence intervals are wide and the high end for Omicron in many cases matches the daily case spikes we’re seeing from real data. This is shameful.
| Day of Week Ending | Variant | 95CI | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 94.7-99.5% | 0.98 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 95.7-99.1% | 0.98 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 94.2-99.0% | 0.97 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 77.8-99.6% | 0.95 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 92.9-97.0% | 0.95 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 92.3-96.8% | 0.95 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 82.5-99.0% | 0.95 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 88.1-97.0% | 0.94 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 86.7-97.3% | 0.94 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 72.6-89.3% | 0.82 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.1.529 | 58.5-89.7% | 0.77 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 10.2-41.3% | 0.22 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 10.7-27.3% | 0.18 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 2.7-13.2% | 0.06 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 3.0-11.9% | 0.06 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 1.0-17.4% | 0.05 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 3.2-7.6% | 0.05 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 2.9-7.0% | 0.05 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 0.4-22.1% | 0.05 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 1.0-5.7% | 0.03 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 0.9-4.3% | 0.02 |
| January 1, 2022 | B.1.617.2 | 0.5-5.2% | 0.02 |
I hadn’t noticed this data breakdown with confidence intervals, which are indeed very wide. And your observation is a very strange anomaly.
The CDC numbers for Omicron the US as a whole have swung from 75% to 59% to 95% in the past couple of weeks. A great deal of vacillation going on there.
In reality, the percentage of cases due to Omicron has only gone up.
The CDC has been consistently incompetent, behind, and full of shit throughout the pandemic. They shipped contaminated tests that didn’t work. They stuck to the story that Covid was not spread by aerosols for months after analysis of multiple real-world clusters proved it did. When they finally dialed back their insistence that it was spread by surfaces they said at least 90% of infections were not, which is true, but pretty misleading given that to date there has not been a single verified case.
A bunch of Republican legislators complained about Omicron-useless medications being pulled from the market, which surely had no influence on the CDC announcing that there was a lot more Delta still around than they’d said at first.
The only thing that could possibly explain the actual percentage of Omicron in the US being high (73%), then dropping much lower (59%), then greatly increasing again (95%) in the space of a couple of weeks, other than analysis flaws, would be a huge surge in Delta in the middle of the overall sampling period. Which is possible, I suppose, but it would be extraordinary. Otherwise, these whipsaw numbers are hard to digest.
When they finally dialed back their insistence that it was spread by surfaces they said at least 90% of infections were not, which is true, but pretty misleading given that to date there has not been a single verified case.
The surface-spread falsehood led to the disappearance of buffets, salad bars, condiment bars, and in some places, bulk spices and other foods. Many people still believe it spreads on surfaces.
They shipped contaminated tests that didn’t work.
This has been largely forgotten by most, but it’s truly unforgivable and led to a delay in controlling the early spread of the original virus.
It’s not actually possible for Delta to surge when competing with Omicron.