Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmistoffelees
The breaking point won’t be cases it will be the number of hospitalisations/deaths that triggers.
We’re on for an ‘interesting’ few weeks whilst the formal data comes in, anything at the moment is pretty much anecdotal.
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Anything largely comes into the "suspected but not known" or "not enough data to prove" category at the moment as this variant has been only known for a couple of weeks.
Now, chances are this was around much longer. It may well be that a fair amount have had colds or something and just dismissed it as such when actually that was covid.
Dr Fauci has I believe joined the "it's a milder illness than the other variants" camp today, but that surely isn't known yet, given that it takes a week or two to see the effect on hospitalisations.
I really don't think it will be this month we will know on that count in any real detail, by which point vaccinating adults with 3rd doses should be much more under way, schools will have been off, I think a lot will put their own breaks on Christmas mixing, a lot will choose to work from home, which will reduce the numbers of contacts people have, and it's little surprising that those are two of the places where transmission of any virus is high.
Let's also not forget as JVT and others have recently said any vaccine escape is going to be partial not complete, is still likely to protect against severe disease, and is likely to be increased the more vaccines you have. There is no suggestion that there will be total escape from Omicron and the vaccines were never designed to stop people getting covid.
And let's be fair a lot of what was said here (more transmissible, more people getting it, vaccine escape) was said about Delta too. And there were various estimates initially which did fluctuate as to how bad that was, and it turned out the vaccines largely still worked.
If hospital admissions do stay down, then it's likely this will just blow over, and that's where the Government have always really thought with restrictions. Cases can be misleading, even the PCR test inventor said that it doesn't detect whether someone is infectious, it just shows that the sample had the same sample they are looking for from the virus. And even with the way we measure hospital admissions it doesn't necessarily include just people who have presented with a severe covid infection, it could be someone who broke their arm playing football and registered a +ve covid test on arrival without any covid related issues, or not serious ones. From what I saw the other day that seems to be the issue in Gauteng too.
So it's important not to draw too many conclusions at this stage, and not to assume that it will either be OK or the end of the world or probably any stance in between. You can be sure that the scientists who matter are looking at it.
---------- Post added at 18:44 ---------- Previous post was at 18:43 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmistoffelees
Right now imho we should have wfh where possible introduced asap
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I would have done that
way before masks in shops.