COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[DaleCooper]

This new CDC guidance and the all the places that are reimplementing masks mandates for vaccinated people are absolute disaters for the vaccine effort.  

If everyone agree that the problem entirely likes with unvaccinated people, why would you change policy in a way that specifically harms only the vaccinated???  

Why not just enforce the mandates we already have for the unvaccinated?

This is insane.

I'm certain that there's a concerted effort, especially by the media, to convince America that the vaccines are not protecting them. It's working, too. Even some of my vaccinated family are convinced they aren't safe.

[here2view]

This new CDC guidance and the all the places that are reimplementing masks mandates for vaccinated people are absolute disaters for the vaccine effort.  

If everyone agree that the problem entirely likes with unvaccinated people, why would you change policy in a way that specifically harms only the vaccinated???  

Why not just enforce the mandates we already have for the unvaccinated?

This is insane.

I'm certain that there's a concerted effort, especially by the media, to convince America that the vaccines are not protecting them. It's working, too. Even some of my vaccinated family are convinced they aren't safe.

I agree with this, I never heard people talking about the flu shot not working the way people talk about the COVID vaccines not working. And in a good year, the flu shot is 50-60% effective.

[Fargobison]

This new CDC guidance and the all the places that are reimplementing masks mandates for vaccinated people are absolute disaters for the vaccine effort.  

If everyone agree that the problem entirely likes with unvaccinated people, why would you change policy in a way that specifically harms only the vaccinated???  

Why not just enforce the mandates we already have for the unvaccinated?

This is insane.

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1420418231735566350

https://twitter.com/AstorAaron/status/1420413753741520899

[LabourJersey]

Right now the graph of new cases in Britain is pretty much a vertical line downward.

What's interesting there as well is the expected dramatic rise in deaths never materialized. The fact that you have nearly half the population (possibly more than that in the UK) vaccinated is vastly reducing the viral load that even the unvaccinated are exposed to.

I suppose you have to wait a couple weeks to know for sure the deaths hadn't materialized, but it's clear that the focus in the UK on getting virtually all people over 65 vaccinated has minimized deaths.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

St. Louis County Council just repealed the mask mandate, and it looks like the city is set to do the same.

[lfromnj]

St. Louis County Council just repealed the mask mandate, and it looks like the city is set to do the same.

4D 3R council and the vote was 5 2

[Bootes Void]

From the UK government:

Ministers are ‘privately worried Covid-19 is spreading through farting’

Ministers are reportedly fretting in private over the possibility Covid-19 is being spread via farting.

The virus is primarily found in the respiratory system and spreads through coughing and sneezing – but it’s not the first time alternative routes have been looked into.

Now it appears figures at the very top of government are taking the threat of flatulence-based transmission seriously.

One unnamed minister told The Telegraph they had seen ‘credible-looking stuff on it’ from other countries, including evidence of a ‘genomical-linked tracing connection between two individuals from a [lavatory] cubicle in Australia’.

Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the Prime Minister is not aware of the concerns but that he ‘keeps the latest scientific evidence under review’.

The facts are by no means settled on flatulence and Covid-19 – but the theory isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound.

A September 2020 study published by experts at an Indian university reviewed the evidence surrounding alternative transmission routes and pointed out that ‘farts do have the tendency to carry micro-particles which have the capacity to spread bacteria’.

They also pointed to a Chinese study which lent credence to the possibility but noted with relief that ‘pants do act as a hindrance in the transmission of disease via flatulence’.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/07/24/ministers-privately-worried-covid-19-is-spreading-through-farting-14983904/

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Redundant precautions prevent calamities.

There was no redundancy at Chernobyl.

Excellent post. People should pay more attention to this.

Unfortunately, human beings systematically underestimate the risk of large scale disaster from low probability events.

This is one of the major flaws in how human beings naturally think, and has been repeated many times throughout history.

Ideally we could learn from history, but if there is one lesson we can learn from history, it is that human beings do not learn from history.

Are you saying that reimposing mask mandates is a good idea?

Nah, more agreement with pbrower2a's general point, rather than any particular application of it.

Mask mandates as a policy (note that actual enforced mandates are distinct from CDC "recommending" masks) are a complicated question at this point on a number of levels, and if I were hypothetically in the position of making a recommendation for what policies would actually be implemented at this point, then I would want to re-review the newest research as a starting point before deciding anything. And in addition to scientific understanding of the delta variant and the efficacy of vaccines over time (and masks) which is still an area where new evidence is coming up all the time. Some of the most important things to consider are areas where we simply lack knowledge because not enough time has passed, like about long COVID and the future potential evolution of variants. One of the primary things to be worried about is e.g. the potential evolution of a vaccine-resistant virus strain, something that is more likely to happen when we are in a situation similar today where a large part of the population is vaccinated and a large part also un-vaccinated.

But the policy merits/demerits of a renewed mask mandate would also depend on more than just scientific evidence. The fact that it is pretty clear that large numbers of people would not comply with renewed mask mandates and there is no real enforcement mechanism, and various other things like that also cannot simply be ignored.

As far as personal behavior, I will happily wear a mask when e.g. going into a grocery store at this point. This is not a big deal to me for ~30 minutes while walking around in a store. Part, though not all, of the reason for that is indeed "redundancy" as pbrower puts it. If there is even a small chance that I can make things a bit better by wearing a mask, it is worth doing so because the cost is very small. Much of that "small chance" is related not to known risks, but to the recognition that there are lots of things that we are still in the process of learning about and understanding, so significant unknowns remain, and in the presence of the unknown, caution is warranted.

At the same time, I recognize that it is a bigger ask for e.g. a person like yourself who is working in a store to wear a mask for an extended time period without respite - that is more burdensome and a bigger ask, so the risk/reward calculus is somewhat different.

I would also say that we shouldn't just get too focused on the policy merits or demerits of mask mandates when we could also be talking about the policy merits/demerits of other things including (but not limited to) vaccine mandates.

[emailking]

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

Those tweets seem to be cherry picking.

[Mechavada]

Pfizer data suggest third dose of Covid-19 vaccine 'strongly' boosts protection against Delta variant

A third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can "strongly" boost protection against the Delta variant -- beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, suggests new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday.

The data posted online, which are expected to be discussed in a company earnings call on Wednesday morning, suggest that antibody levels against the Delta variant in people ages 18 to 55 who receive a third dose of vaccine are greater than five-fold than following a second dose.

Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels against the Delta variant after receiving a third dose of vaccine are greater than 11-fold than following a second dose.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/health/pfizer-third-dose-data-bn/index.html

Booster shots are on the way, it seems. I'm not sure how much success they are going to have given that vaccination rates for the two shots we have already have plateaued, and given that the unvaccinated segment of our population seems to be unshakable at this point.

Yeah who cares that a non-insignificant portion of this country has effectively decided that the shots give you AIDS or something, let's make the people who actually looked at the science and the data and determined that a couple of shots would keep them and everyone else safer take another shot!  Hell, why stop there!  If Three Shots are ELEVEN TIMES AS EFFECTIVE surely that means that FOUR SHOTS are at least FIFTY TIMES AS EFFECTIVE!

WHat the hell are we even hesitating about?  How about we just tell vaccinated people to keep getting shots every 28 days, taking a day off every damn month due to the feeling that their arms are getting ripped off, while the most we ever expect from unvaccinated folks is to occasionally "wear a mask" when cases spike!

Great idea guys!

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

https://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/1420131409646264334

"Everyone under 60 has a better than 99.9% chance of NOT dying of COVID, regardless of vaccination status. 

A huge % of persons above 60 have been vaccinated and also have a 99.9% chance of NOT dying of COVID

There is no justification for any mandates whatsoever."

It is true that immediate chances of dying from COVID are low for young people, especially if you are vaccinated. But there is more at stake here than just the individual chance of death for young people. There are other things to consider, such as:

a) The future evolution of variants (so far it looks like evolutionary selection pressure does not drive us towards the evolution of less severe variants, and if anything looks more like the opposite). Remember that SARS-1, the most similar virus to this we have seen before, had at least a 10% fatality rate or so. There is potential for this to get significantly worse 5 or 10 years from now.

b) Long COVID, which can occur even in significant numbers of "mild" cases. For SARS-1, a similar phenomenon was observed, and lasted a LONG time. Chronic health conditions are in many ways more worrisome than the effects of a normal "temporary" virus.

c) What happens with multiple re-infections over time. Personally, I am not that concerned for myself about the risk of getting infected with COVID 1 time now. What I am more concerned about is what happens if it becomes endemic I get it repeatedly e.g. 5-10-20 times over the next 10 years or over the rest of my life. We simply do not know what happens in that case. Infection one time could make you less vulnerable to a severe reaction the second time. But it could also make you more vulnerable (e.g. if a first infection causes chronic inflammation, inflammation is something that characterizes poor immune responses). This is obviously not unrelated to future variant evolution and to how long COVID works out.

These sorts of things, IMO, are the things we should really be talking about and trying to figure out, but hardly anyone is.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Yeah who cares that a non-insignificant portion of this country has effectively decided that the shots give you AIDS or something, let's make the people who actually looked at the science and the data and determined that a couple of shots would keep them and everyone else safer take another shot!  Hell, why stop there!  If Three Shots are ELEVEN TIMES AS EFFECTIVE surely that means that FOUR SHOTS are at least FIFTY TIMES AS EFFECTIVE!

WHat the hell are we even hesitating about?  How about we just tell vaccinated people to keep getting shots every 28 days, taking a day off every damn month due to the feeling that their arms are getting ripped off, while the most we ever expect from unvaccinated folks is to occasionally "wear a mask" when cases spike!

Great idea guys!

There is a new flu shot every year for a reason - because immunity wanes and a new shot is necessary.

The same sort of thing may be necessary for COVID, and if you are pretending that this is not a serious possibility, you have your head in the sand.

Or if we are lucky, maybe a 3rd shot will create true long-lasting immunity (we can hope, but I wouldn't hang my hat on that).

[Fargobison]

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

Those tweets seem to be cherry picking.

Perhaps but if the CDC is going to make reccommendations to require masks for the vaccinated, then they need to be showing their work.

[ProudModerate2]

Video: Why do vaccinated people need to mask? See CNN's Dr. Gupta's answer.

Click here to watch ... https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/07/27/gupta-cdc-guidance-masks-sot-vpx-lead.cnn

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

Those tweets seem to be cherry picking.

Perhaps but if the CDC is going to make reccommendations to require masks for the vaccinated, then they need to be showing their work.

For better or worse, you are mischaracterizing what the CDC said. The CDC did not recommend that masks be required/mandated, they recommended that individuals in counties with high transmission wear masks. Those are different things.

[Hammy]

Pfizer data suggest third dose of Covid-19 vaccine 'strongly' boosts protection against Delta variant

A third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can "strongly" boost protection against the Delta variant -- beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, suggests new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday.

The data posted online, which are expected to be discussed in a company earnings call on Wednesday morning, suggest that antibody levels against the Delta variant in people ages 18 to 55 who receive a third dose of vaccine are greater than five-fold than following a second dose.

Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels against the Delta variant after receiving a third dose of vaccine are greater than 11-fold than following a second dose.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/health/pfizer-third-dose-data-bn/index.html

Booster shots are on the way, it seems. I'm not sure how much success they are going to have given that vaccination rates for the two shots we have already have plateaued, and given that the unvaccinated segment of our population seems to be unshakable at this point.

A third booster (and fourth, and as many as are needed down the road given there will always be variants, and even the flu vaccine is 'updated' every year) would still likely be accepted by most people who are fully vaccinated, especially if this administration stops acting like some sort of inverted Trumpism and lets vaccinated people get on with their lives. And given the protection seems almost exponential, that would almost certainly isolate this to the unvaccinated, even regarding asymptomatic cases--especially given that an exponential increase with each dose would dramatically spread out the time between to where it would probably not be needed more than twice a year.

And at this stage I'm in favor of revoking citizenship for anyone who continues to refuse a vaccine.

[Calthrina950]

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

Those tweets seem to be cherry picking.

Perhaps but if the CDC is going to make reccommendations to require masks for the vaccinated, then they need to be showing their work.

For better or worse, you are mischaracterizing what the CDC said. The CDC did not recommend that masks be required/mandated, they recommended that individuals in counties with high transmission wear masks. Those are different things.

The unfortunate thing is that many jurisdictions (i.e. several of the counties in Nevada, cities such as Los Angeles and New Orleans) are using the CDC's revised guidance as justification to reimpose mask mandates, and it's possible that some governors and businesses may do so also.

[Fargobison]

Looks like this might get worse, CDC may have based it on flawed research....

Those tweets seem to be cherry picking.

Perhaps but if the CDC is going to make reccommendations to require masks for the vaccinated, then they need to be showing their work.

For better or worse, you are mischaracterizing what the CDC said. The CDC did not recommend that masks be required/mandated, they recommended that individuals in counties with high transmission wear masks. Those are different things.

It doesn't really change anything when they haven't shown why they need to wear masks in either scenario. If they had said wear masks around unvaccinated elderly or the immunocompromised I would get it, those are high risk populations but to paint with such a broad brush should require hard data to back it up. It is hard enough to get people in those high risk areas to vaccinate to begin with, now if you are tossing around still needing a mask they will likely be even more hesistant.

[emailking]

It doesn't really change anything when they haven't shown why they need to wear masks in either scenario. If they had said wear masks around unvaccinated elderly or the immunocompromised I would get it, those are high risk populations but to paint with such a broad brush should require hard data to back it up. It is hard enough to get people in those high risk areas to vaccinate to begin with, now if you are tossing around still needing a mask they will likely be even more hesistant.

Are you saying they don't have hard data? Those tweets are taking issue with one of the studies cited. And I'm not sure their issue with it really matters anyway to the conclusion but it's just one piece of it.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Google to require vaccination for all employees

Google is postponing a return to the office for most workers until mid-October and rolling out a policy that will eventually require everyone to be vaccinated once its sprawling campuses are fully reopened in an attempt to fight the spreading Delta variant.

In a Wednesday email sent to Google’s more than 130,000 employees, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is now aiming to have most of its workforce back to its offices beginning Oct. 18 instead of its previous target date of Sept. 1. The decision also affects tens of thousands of contractors who Google intends to continue to pay while access to its campuses remains limited.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

It doesn't really change anything when they haven't shown why they need to wear masks in either scenario. If they had said wear masks around unvaccinated elderly or the immunocompromised I would get it, those are high risk populations but to paint with such a broad brush should require hard data to back it up. It is hard enough to get people in those high risk areas to vaccinate to begin with, now if you are tossing around still needing a mask they will likely be even more hesistant.

Supposedly the CDC decision was based at least partly on some new unpublished data indicating that people who are vaccinated can be infected with the same viral loads as non-vaccinated people. It would be wise to at least wait for this information to be published before jumping to conclusions on our part either way.

I agree with you that vaccine hesitancy may be fed by not having the incentive of "you don't have to wear a mask," and that is a legitimate concern. But realistically, I think CDC is in a difficult position here. You are criticizing them now for not taking this into account sufficiently. But alternatively, if they did take it into account, then they would be criticized for making decisions based on politics rather than science. So they are sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't.

[LabourJersey]

a) The future evolution of variants (so far it looks like evolutionary selection pressure does not drive us towards the evolution of less severe variants, and if anything looks more like the opposite). Remember that SARS-1, the most similar virus to this we have seen before, had at least a 10% fatality rate or so. There is potential for this to get significantly worse 5 or 10 years from now.

Viruses aim to become more contagious, but not more fatal. It's way more likely for viruses to adapt to be easily transmissible but much less fatal (how the flu is, basically). Usually the most lethal viruses are the ones that are hardest to transmit

[emailking]

a) The future evolution of variants (so far it looks like evolutionary selection pressure does not drive us towards the evolution of less severe variants, and if anything looks more like the opposite). Remember that SARS-1, the most similar virus to this we have seen before, had at least a 10% fatality rate or so. There is potential for this to get significantly worse 5 or 10 years from now.

Viruses aim to become more contagious, but not more fatal. It's way more likely for viruses to adapt to be easily transmissible but much less fatal (how the flu is, basically). Usually the most lethal viruses are the ones that are hardest to transmit

The death rate is less than 1%. I don't think an increase hinders it from spreading much. It's probably random whether it gets more or less deadly.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Yeah, it is true that evolution selects for viral transmissability, but it can be the case that the same mutations that make a virus more transmissable ALSO make it more severe and increase the fatality rate at the same time.

The delta variant reportedly has viral loads ~1000 times higher than the OG version of COVID. That is the main reason why it is more transmissable - in short, it is easier to infect other people with a virus if you have more of that virus in your nose/mouth etc. But higher viral load is also correlated with increased disease severity (in simple terms, if you have more virus in you, your symptoms are generally going to be worse), and the UK reported higher hospitalization rates with the delta variant, which is consistent with that. As far as I am aware, the base fatality rate for the delta variant is not pinned down, but it is reasonable to suspect it may be higher along with the hospitalization rate if measured properly. That is not easy to reliablyl estimate, partly because there are some factors that would bias the observed fatality rate downwards that need to be corrected for, like the fact that a good # of the most vulnerable people died in earlier waves, and many now being vaccinated, so delta cases are now skewed towards younger populations that are less likely to be vaccinated.

[GeneralMacArthur]

As someone who got J+J, to my understanding the most popular vaccine worldwide, it annoys me to no end to be left out of these booster studies.

With Pfizer now widely available, what would happen if I got Pfizer as well?  What if I got just the Pfizer booster?  What about a J+J booster?

I'm less-protected than everyone else and I'd like to fix that.