(2021-12-31) ZviM Omicron Post #11

Zvi Mowshowitz: Omicron variant Post #11. South Africa, the UK and Denmark are no longer uniquely informative places, so I’m combining all the areas into one section now.... There are a few cities where we may have peaked, but otherwise outside of South Africa? Not so much.

21% of the NYPD was out sick Thursday. When you look at March 2020 we peaked at 19.8%, we hit 21% today,

30% of EMS and 17% FDNY were on medical leave.

Vaccine Effectiveness

It’s still a pandemic of the unvaccinated when it comes to hospitalization and death.

Test Sensitivity

Mina’s prior seems right to me, but that interpretation doesn’t mean everything is fine. This still means that a rapid test is less effectively sensitive for knowing if you’re infectious. Which is what they’re for, so there’s still a problem whether or not the test is technically less sensitive. What matters is the practical utility of the test, and what it tells you.

Severity

Reaction

One can see this as the ‘less action’ camp versus the ‘more action’ camp, and there’s something to that. But it’s also important to notice that different actions make sense in different circumstances.

Some of the confusion is that ‘collapse society’ is not a well-formed concept here. There are different levels of sacred value, and things we are and aren’t prepared to accept, as things get more dire, and trade-offs are being made. If the situation were different and worse, it would require different trade-offs.

perhaps we really are a society on the brink of collapse, that can no longer be resilient in the face of threats, and we’re now dodging civilizational collapse on a rolling basis until at some point we fail to dodge it. In this model, the close calls we’ve had recently were actually remarkably close and could easily have gone in other ways.

What about if we go to the next hypothetical? What if Omicron was more infectious by default and had also rendered the vaccines completely ineffective on all levels? At that point, I do think we have a real crisis where all the choices seem impossible

At that point, the correct reaction really would be a ‘protect the vulnerable as best we can’ style reaction, while actively letting things go as quickly as possible otherwise to give that strategy a chance. I don’t think we’re capable of implementing that

Threads and Posts

The current shortage in hospitals, WaPo reports (no paywall), is not equipment or beds but health care workers, because so many are sick and everyone is burnt out and stretched to the limit already after two years

Abbott flat out denies the FDA’s claim of potential lowered test sensitivity, says their tests are as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants. This is at least some actual preliminary data suggesting that reduced sensitivity, but it has enough caveats and low enough sample size I’m not updating much on it.

Focus on vaccination still seems like the best approach. I agree that it’s less good at ‘stopping it from spreading’ but that’s no longer on the table.

Other Omicron News

Probability Updates

Chance we are broadly looking at a future crisis situation with widely overwhelmed American hospitals, new large American lockdowns and things like that: 15% → 10%.