I forgot to check the CDC's latest estimate of Omicron prevalence in the US back when it was released, but better late than never. Here it is:
Two weeks ago the CDC estimated a skyrocketing Omicron proportion that would have reached 100% by mid-December. Last week they cut their estimate way back. This week, like Goldilocks, they've settled on something in between.
As always, note that recent estimates are just that: a "nowcast" model of the proportion of Omicron. Only the older data points, the ones marked with a circle, are based on actual surveillance data.
In any case, all three projections suggest that we're now pretty close to 100% Omicron only four weeks after it was introduced. That's an unbelievably fast spread.
and....
Cases are well over highest levels we say about a year ago.
Hospitalizations getting back up to their highest levels.
The hard part is that hospitals are fraying, and not just at the seems:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/omicron-mild-hospital-strain-health-care-workers/621193/
Omicron may be less dangerous on an individual level, but with so many people being affected, hospitals are being over run again. And since it's hitting everywhere, there no feel good stories of people coming from across the country to help a stricken area.
Nope on hospitalization.
Pretty clear cases have peaked and likely have begun to fall. In the Northeast to Midwest, I expect a nice drop by Valentine's day with hospitalization below the early December levels. By April first, I suspect victories will be declared. State governments will withdrawal testing support. Most commercial business will stop testing. All sports leagues will go back to nontesting. I suspect by June Biden will declare victory and start scuttling future testing capabilities.
Any future variants will be weaker than omicron further diluting the virus. Very similar evolution to OC43. I suspect endemic outbreaks until 2030.
You’ve been saying cases are falling for going on 6 months now. And yet, they are at a peak now. I guess sooner or later they will fall. And then… rise again. So is there a point to all your wishful thinking?
Skip the vaccine? Go hug a sick person? What?
It's a semi-literate anti-semitic troll. It only leaves its droppings here to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
Lol, cases had long fallen from summer highs. YrY totals were down in endemic areas before Omicron. Got it fool???
Cases, hospitalization, and deaths are all headed down in NYC. Even though the 7-day average of cases was 4x higher than Jan 2021, Omicron in NYC has produced 2x the number of hospitalizations and about 1/2 the deaths as Jan 2021.
Yes, hospitalizations are soaring in places where Omicron is surging, but, the vast majority are *NOT* ending up in the ICU and only half of those in the ICU are needing mechanical ventilation.
Maybe the story is different in the South owing to low vaccination rates, but there it is.
But the problem is, if jurisdictions didn't shut down things due to a significantly more deadly variant -- Delta -- they're not going to shut down things for Omicron. People can yell, bitch, bemoan, and gesticulate over the disinterest to control Omicron, but the fact of the matter is, most places will not lift a finger to shut things down.
I hope that's the case for NYC. I thought NY (state) would have turned the corners in cases by now, but numbers are still creeping up, even with some dips happening. It does look like hospitalizations have paused for a bit in NY, and maybe even in PA, IL and FL. Or we may just be seeing some reporting artifacts due to the holidays. This week will clear that up.
However, caseloads high enough to cause backups in the ER. And though ICU usage is about half of earlier peaks, hospitals are still dealing with shortage of workers. Local conditions can vary by a lot
Hawaii Omicron wave:
7-day total infections: 24,071
Current hospitalized: 302
Current ICU: 31
Current mechanical ventilation: 13
Hawaii Delta wave:
7-day total infections (peak): 5,721
Hospitalized at peak: 473
ICU at peak: 102
Mechanical ventilation at peak: 90
“Cases have increased recently and are extremely high. The numbers of hospitalized Covid patients and deaths in the New York City area have also risen. The test positivity rate in New York City is very high, suggesting that cases are being significantly undercounted.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/new-york-city-new-york-covid-cases.html
Also says 14 day change is +159% for hospitalizations.
Nope. A bunch of that isn't real "hospitalization" . Your not even trying. Finger snaps would do you well.
Yes, hospitalizations are soaring in places where Omicron is surging, but, the vast majority are *NOT* ending up in the ICU and only half of those in the ICU are needing mechanical ventilation.
Plus, a number of those cases (I've seen figures something like 10-20%) are people who were admitted to the hospital for reasons other than Covid illness, but tested positive once they were there. They still get counted as Covid hospitalizations.
The people I know (all vaccinated) who’ve been sick since before Christmas have all recovered after 5 days at the most. I keep hoping the willfully unvaccinated suffer terrible illness or death. There’s still a chance omicron will do that. Come on omicron!
Looking at The NY Times tracker… cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all still going up. This wave started in August and it’s been up and up ever since. Delta plus omicron I suppose.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/michigan-covid-cases.html
Tracker lags. Cases are going down now.
This is crazy
Round one and two many people were looking at it as "old folks" disease. "oh their life was just about over anyway". We cheered when vaccines came out, at first. Then the anti vaxxers said it's an old folkds disease so I'm not getting vaccinated.
Then it was Delta and people started seeing break through cases that made them even MORE convinced that vaccines were not effective enough to be worth the effort. NOT EVEN REALIZING that there was also a big surge in previously in fected people getting Delta as well.
Now we have Omicron which seems MILDER but is affecting a totally new age group - children. "Oh but Vog they couldn't get vaccinated". Very true but why is Omicron affecting them when Wuhan, Alpha, Beta and Delta did NOT? After 45 waves you would EXPECT many children to have been exposed so why Omicron? Kids have had the flu, colds and other viruses. Why are THEIR immune systems not protecting them?
And this argument really cracks me up. Oh but Vog kids are not in ICU or in serious trouble.
Since when is lack of deaths the barometer of how serious a disease is?
How many times are the anti vax crowd to move the goal posts?
There is NO EVIDENCE that Omicron is "the end". NONE.
Individual responses to illnesses are just that INDIVIDUAL. This is why you cannot rely on post infection immunity to help you because the strength of that response varies from individual to individual and the amount of time it takes to weaken also varies.
But while all of this is going on the virus itself is mutating around the world (a fact that is ignored by anti vaxxers). In order to get to the endemic stage WE have to protect ourselves and other by masking and getting vaccinated and we certainly should be helping he world get vaccinated. We NEED to stop this virus from ping ponging around or at least slow it down.
We may be seeing wave upon wave of illness and hospitalizations for the next couple of years until we can see this slow down happen.
This is great news, right? For most people (at least those of us that are vaxxed) Omicron isn't much more than a cold, if you have any symptoms at all. Best case scenario is Omicron spreads to everyone, wipes out delta or whatever other more severe strands are out there, and helps the population build up immunity.
Perhaps not Atticus
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/12/02/omicron-origins/?sh=3f2b1a141bc1
{snips}
The advent of Omicron is ample evidence that we are not yet done with Covid, and Covid is not yet done with us. To look forward and understand where the virus is heading, we need to understand the origin of Omicron. One thing we can be relatively certain of: where this variant came from, more will come.
Omicron is unlike any other variant currently in circulation. The variant carries 60 (50 nonsynonymous, 8 synonymous, and 2 noncoding) mutations compared to the original Wuhan strain..................................................
......Viral variants are well documented to arise in persistently infected immunocompromised Covid-19 patients treated by antiviral drugs and antibodies — the London patient, the Boston patient, Pittsburgh and Italian patients. In the face of our best weaponry of the time, the virus not only prevailed but became ever stronger, learning how to evade our immune defenses..............
First, until we can say with certainty that molnupiravir did not and could not create a highly infectious and highly mutated variant like Omicron, it should be pulled from the market and any debate over approval of the drug should be paused.
Second, we need to finally acknowledge the broad range of tools known and unknown that this virus has at its disposal, across its viral genome. While Omicron may be bad, future variants could be far worse. The United States and many other countries are still far behind where they should be when it comes to testing and genomic sequencing of viruses in circulation among humans and in other populations. Until we do better on this front — until we understand what the virus has already achieved and how it succeeded — we will never have a full understanding of what more this virus can do and what is ahead in this pandemic. Omicron tells us that now, more than ever, we need to institute a systematic multimodal approach to Covid control, including public health measures, vaccines, therapeutic and prophylactic drugs, and collaborative global engagement.
{snips}
Repeat:
Omicron is unlike any other variant currently in circulation. The variant carries 60 (50 nonsynonymous, 8 synonymous, and 2 noncoding) mutations compared to the original Wuhan strain
60 different mutations opposed to Wuhan. We need to accept this fact
Considering that each of us possesses a different level of virus response, a different level of maintaining that level of response and the sheer NUMBERS of people in the U.S. with immuno compromising diseases and you can see the problem.
Yes, if you're fully vaxxed and boosted, omicron isn't going to be a big deal. Unfortunately, there are still so many unvaxxed (and unboosted) people out there that if you don't do something to slow the spread in the meantime, it's going to kill tens of thousands of people on its way to creating herd immunity, while also possibly mutating in a more virulent form. Which those who had omicron *won't* be protected from. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If we do do something to slow down the spread in the meantime, it will still kill those same thousands on the way to herd immunity, it will just take a few weeks or so longer. Nothing we can possibly do now will change that . In fact, restrictions slowing the spread while a wave is going up might actually increase infections and deaths , especially if they are relaxed as soon as cases go down.
But restrictions after the peak of the wave , when you have already reached herd immunity where R is below 1.0, can help marginally, because they can reduce the number of infections on the downside of the wave , which are effectively " excess" infections - more than you need to have herd immunity.
Best strategy to reduce total infections in the total wave is to NOT try to slow infections while going up and then impose them hard right as you peak, to smash R as fat below 1.0 and cut off the tail.
Realistically now most everything is already baked in . We are probably at or psst peak infections in most of usa right now . This wave will mostly be over before any new vaccination or booster can become effective.
A new sub-variant (BA.2) of omicron (BA.1) is being monitored by Norwegian scientists. They say it has been detected mostly in Denmark as well as in Sweden, Norway, India, and the Philippines at least, but this could be due to its special characteristics regarding how it can be detected.
Apparently BA.2 has differences to the original omicron BA.1, which can be identified in a PCR test as being omicron, i.e. not requiring full genome sequencing to differentiate from other variants.
This new variant BA.2 cannot be identified in a PCR test but only by complete genome sequencing (to be clear, of course PCR will catch it as covid, but not as being this particular variant). Since sequencing takes much more time the reporting of prevalence of BA.2 will be lagging more. This could also be the reason most of the identified cases are Danish, since Denmark sequences much more than other countries.
They see indications that this variant may be even more contagious than the original omicron, although nothing seems to indicate more severe illness.
I found a somewhat old article on this variant in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/07/scientists-find-stealth-version-of-omicron-not-identifiable-with-pcr-test-covid-variant
so, 45 days since Omicron became"big" and we already have subvariants?
That is exceedingly fast
So, how to they even KNOW? Is every reported case of COVID DNA-sequenced? All hospitalized cases? Do the mail-in COVID tests detail-check the DNA? How good are those "% omicron" numbers?
(Of course, this would also apply to delta and mu etc...)
I was wondering this myself, so i checked. Here's the CDC explanation, but without any discussion of how accurate their estimates might be.
Monitoring Variant Proportions
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is constantly changing and accumulating mutations in its genetic code over time. New variants of SARS-CoV-2 are expected to continue to emerge. Some variants will emerge and disappear, while others will emerge and continue to spread and may replace previous variants.
To identify and track SARS-CoV-2 variants, CDC uses genomic surveillance. CDC’s national genomic surveillance system collects SARS-CoV-2 specimens for sequencing through the National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance (NS3) program, as well as SARS-CoV-2 sequences generated by commercial or academic laboratories contracted by CDC and state or local public health laboratories. Virus genetic sequences are analyzed and classified as a particular variant. The proportion of variants in a population are calculated nationally, by HHS region, and by jurisdiction. The thousands of sequences analyzed every week through CDC’s national genomic sequencing and bioinformatics efforts fuel the comprehensive and population-based U.S. surveillance system established to identify and monitor the spread of variants.
Rapid virus genomic sequencing data combined with phenotypic data are further used to determine whether COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines authorized or approved for use in the United States will work against emerging variants.
Thanks to both you and glipsnort! Also, now I know where to look for additional info.
No, every case is not sequenced. A roughly representative fraction of cases is sequenced, which takes a couple of weeks, and the current state is projected from those results. The surveillance sequencing samples come from a variety of sources -- commercial labs, academic labs, state health labs -- and include both symptomatic cases and the kind of screening test done by universities. How good the projections are varies. The early projections of Omicron were very uncertain, which was reflected in the uncertainties provided by the CDC. Their current stated 95% confidence interval is 96.9% - 99.9%.
(Note: the viruses have RNA, not DNA.)
Apart from being identified using sequencing, some variants including the omicron have some genetic characteristics that make them distinguishable in PCR tests, which therefore can be used to give an estimate on prevalence. This gives much faster results than waiting for sequencing which takes much longer, but is less exact. Nonetheless it contributes to estimating prevalence of variants.
Note though that there apparently is a variant of omicron that doesn't have such a genetic characteristic (see my comment above), hence cannot be identified this way.
According to the latest sequencing results, the measured (not estimated) Omicron fraction for last week was a little under 94%.
According to GISAID sequence data 64% of the sequences submitted from the US have been Omicron over the past four weeks. I can't figure out how to get the percentages by day out off the GISAID site, but assuming we're still on a positive incline curve, it seems reasonable that we're close to 100% Omi now.
We're about a week behind UK and Denmark in our Omi outbreak. Both those countries cases may have peaked (but it will take another week of case numbers to be sure). If that's the case I'm guessing we'll peak in the US in the next two weeks.
Apologies for the bad formatting, but the columns L to R are:
1. Country; 2. Total #Omicron detected (so far); 3. Total #Omicron in past 4 weeks; 4. %Omicron in past 4 weeks; Total number PCR tests past 4 weeks (extrapolated)
United Kingdom 118,033 101,134 0.7920 127,694
USA 77,506 71,521 0.6420 111,403
Denmark 13,748 11,770 0.7330 16,057
France 4,105 2,734 0.4860 5,626
Germany 3,512 2,740 0.1830 14,973
Australia 3,491 3,038 0.7920 3,836
Israel 3,296 3,017 0.6710 4,496
Canada 2,287 1,280 0.6620 1,934
South Africa 2,223 218 1.0000 218
We'll next time I try to post a table I'll delimit it with commas.
It was fine and perfectly readable to me. And gave info i had not seen yet. Thanks.
I was especially interested in Germany and Australia.
Germany's low percentage explains why their case numbers have been dropping while others going up. Seems their delta decline is still offsetting omicron rise. And the delta wave hit Germany last building up very recent delta immunity. Still looks to me like delta natural immunity works decently to control omicron spread and might be helping Germany control omicron. But only for a short period. You can see in usa last holdouts for rapid omicron spread were where delta wave went down last and had very recent delta immunity, Rockies and Alaska. But fla , with more total delta infections and better vaccination, got omicron hard and fast, just maybe because their delta immunity was 3 months old .
So I wonder if Germany will have yet a final omicron wave start in a month or so when their delta immunity hits the " best used by" date .
And Australia right near top with USA in omicron dominance. Looks like their harsh restrictions and isolation held out just long enough to hold delta barely at bay until omicron was too much and overwhelmed them and they gave up. And now Australia case rate higher than usa after being so low for so long.
Australia had idea maybe they could control things long enough until entire world had covid herd immunity and never have to get it. That was stupid plan. Or to delay long enough to get everyone vaccinated which they only did an iffy job at as were not quick on vaccination ( and now omicron can break through vaccine). So semi failure there.
But what Australia did accomplish was delaying things long enough that , now , even if they end up with as many total covid infections as anyone, they still will be mostly omicron and far less deaths .
The Australia plan was not that harsh restrictions were worth it in order to wait for the final less deadly variant to arise. But, hell, if it worked out for them that way , great. Nice to see anyone get some lucky break here.