Originally published at: Half of Europe will be infected with Omicron in 6-8 weeks, says Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation | Boing Boing
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All one can do now is try to reduce the probability that the coin flip will go against you and make sure that if it does that you don’t die or get permanently disabled. But probability and mitigation are reality-based concepts that a lot of people just don’t grasp.
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Oh come on, literally days after I got my booster shot
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Luckily, humans invented vaccines that greatly push the odds in our favor.
We are still seeing a huge protective effect, even with omicron - not as protective from infection alone, but protective from hospitalization, needing mechanical ventilation, and death.
Science!
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look on the bright side, if you get a breakthrough infection that booster will help keep you from getting seriously ill, hospitalized, and dying.
( do just remember it takes a week or two for the effects of vaccination and boosting to kick in )
eta: looks like i owe @fiatrn a carbonated sugar drink. and in a thread only 7 posts long! eep.
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Getting vaccinated and not immediately dying (or ending up on oxygen/ventilator) is very good, but unfortunately there’s not much to be done, beyond not getting infected at all, to prevent the potential impacts covid infections have on even the vaccinated. “Brain fog,” long covid… we really don’t know what kind of long-term effects covid is going to have on the nervous system, immune system, cardio vascular system, metabolic system, etc. There’s even a real possibility that decades from now everyone who got covid could end up with (or be at high risk of developing) a devastating condition.
I’m vaccinated and boosted, and with a lack of comorbidities I’m feeling pretty assured I’d not get seriously ill, but really don’t want to get it, based on some of things I’m reading. I feel like people being vaccinated (and either having been previously infected, or having avoided previous infection) has made people sloppy in the face of a much more contagious variant. I’m seeing restrictions fall away, people getting even more sloppy with mask wearing (that were insufficient a year ago, and wildly insufficient now), people pretending it’s all over (until they need to go to a hospital for any reason and find they can’t get care).
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Keep your distance, wear masks, get your booster and don´t go where many people are, if not necessary.
Thats still the best we can do for now.
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Good advice.
Still: SSDD, I’ve been doing that all along.
*sighs
Fuck, I am so tired of this shit; all due to others’ willful stupidity.
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A lot of the sloppiness is also coming from people who have felt ill at some time in the last two years and decided for themselves that they had COVID, but were never actually tested for it. My nephew spent a year believing he was immune because he’d already had it, lived recklessly, then spent a week in the hospital (and gave it to his wife and his daughter).
I’m glad that breakthrough COVID is usually minor, but it’s still horribly contagious, and still pretty damned dangerous for the elderly - even if they are boosted. I, for one, would kinda like to keep my parents around for a few more years.
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Oof.
I mean, even if that was true (and it very well could have been), it’s one of the deadly assumptions people are making - despite the fact that was disproven back in early 2020. We saw re-infections then, so we’ve always known Infection provides variable protection at best, not immunity, and essentially no protection against sufficiently different strains like omicron. The problem is not people assuming they were previously infected when they weren’t, but still assuming that there was any meaningful difference between being previously infected or not.
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There is some good in the Covid news lately. The omnipresence of omicron strain in the US means there’s been a diminution of delta. And at the front lines it appears that omicron infections aren’t as severe, even for the non-vaccinated. A study pre-released today using data from kaiser patients in California shows a great big decrease in the percentage of hospitalizations, percentage of folks needing ICU & ventilation, and in the percentage deaths. This supports what we’ve been “feeling” at work.
It is too early to be sure this will hold up across other demographics, and there’s no published knowledge I have stumbled upon if omicron infection actively immunizes against infection by other strains. But if everyone running around coughing omicron on each other (I’m talking to you, maskelss non-boingers!) impedes or stops the spread of delta, that could make a huge difference in our long term prognosis as a society.
Sadly, even if half the percent of people are hospitalized, if 4 times as many people are getting infected, the gross number of infections will still overwhelm our hospitalization capabilities. And so far, that does seem to be happening on a short term. The other good news we need to hope for is a greatly reduced Lenght of Stay for hospitalized patients - if people can spend 1-3 days in patient instead of 7-12, if could open up a lot of hospital beds.
Could. Might. Maybe.
Right now, the statistics appear to be improving on several fronts (though not on the raw numbers of infected). There’s a tinge of hope in the air. But that hope has proven fruitless the past few times it has seemed to show up at my ER. I am almost afraid to taste it.
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We’ve already surpassed the hospitalization daily average of the other major waves in the US. That happened yesterday, and we’re still not two weeks from New Years Day. Lagging indicators are behaving very similarly to how they behaved with the other two spikes ,but we won’t know more about ICU usage for another 3-4 days and deaths for another week or two.
Hopefully you’re right and things don’t get as severe as the previous did, but the sheer number of infected and hospitalizations are not looking good. It’d be a bad time to get into a car accident or have a heart attack or stroke.
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