COVID-19 News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

Could Omicron be GOOD news? Variant 'might speed up end of pandemic if it causes mild illness' as South Africa records NO hospital admissions or deaths from super strain - but scientists won't know for at least two weeks

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... lness.html

[Yuli Ban]

Yowza, South Africa hospitalizations are backfilled so the numbers we've seen in the last days are low estimates



I haven't felt this much malaise since February 2020
We've gone full retard for the sake of the Almighty Stock Market
"It's mild! It's mild! There's nothing to worry about!"
One doctor alone said that, completely out of context, referring solely to some young healthy patients and not the rest, and yet the global neoliberal media completely ran with that bullshit to do absolutely nothing
Biden's literally doing LESS THAN TRUMP

LESS THAN TRUMP

How the f*ck can you be THAT incompetent


Lol we're about to get our shit wrecked on an apocalyptic scale
Anyone who sees anything otherwise should be outright ashamed of themselves for believing the overwhelming amount of cope

Wouldn't be surprised if Biden's dumbass is dragged out of the White House by a violent, soon-to-be-bullet-riddled mob and the Pentagon assumes control of the USA by July at this rate
And not even because things get THAT bad. I don't think it's going to be existentially terrible or even that much worse than COVID's been. Only that by the time those in power realize that they fucked up, the moment they do a damn thing to fix it, MAGA'll go insane. Should've been more proactive, but nope!

[Yuli Ban]

Also:


I'm getting dangerously close to wishing Biden lost the election
Not that I'll cross over, because that means I'd rather Trump handle it. As milquetoast as Biden is, I know in my heart Trump would find new and spectacular ways to f*ck everything up.

[Yuli Ban]

China's going to be like the only fucking country left that doesn't suffer mass disability from this.

[erowind]

.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

That's a doubling time of about 24 hours...

[raklian]

Just maybe Omicron is the REAL pandemic we've been waiting for. The waves we've had with the earlier Covid variants were just an appetizer.

[Yuli Ban]

Just maybe Omicron is the REAL pandemic we've been waiting for. The waves we've had with the earlier Covid variants were just an appetizer.

Maybe Omicron IS mild
The monkey's paw being that Delta was super mild and OG COVID was ultra-turbo mild

Dibs on the Sigma variant being the Horseman of Pestilence.

[Ken_J]

Just maybe Omicron is the REAL pandemic we've been waiting for. The waves we've had with the earlier Covid variants were just an appetizer.

Maybe Omicron IS mild
The monkey's paw being that Delta was super mild and OG COVID was ultra-turbo mild

Dibs on the Sigma variant being the Horseman of Pestilence.

nah, what's actually happening is the virus is damaging central nervous system tissues, setting in motion events that 5 to ten years from now those who were infected will start to have the same symptoms of long covid sufferers, and by then the original long covid sufferers will have been the canaries in the coal mine, as the autoimmune attack on their own nervous system results in an ALS like degenerative disorder had killed most of them off within a few years. By then it will become clear that anyone who caught it, even mild cases and asymptomatic, start having fatigue, brain fog, depressive episodes and occasional signs similar to dementia. It rapidly moves toward nerve pain and loss of control of the nervous system. incontinence, stumbling gait, aspirating food and drink. soon inability to walk unassisted, or to reach and grasp things. ultimately increased senility and increased physical debilitation will take over their existence. Many who see the signs set in early and saw what happened to the first long covid cases, commit suicide. and the world is stunned and horrified at the nightmare of hundreds of millions of people across the world face this decline toward a horrible death. And the strain on every government to deal with it all is too much. welcome to the bleak nightmare future.

[Yuli Ban]

Such a nightmare long-term physical decline would probably greatly facilitate a move towards transhumanism as a last resort. Well, for the wealthier populations of the world at least. For the poor, they either have to wait another decade or two or, well, sucks to be them.

[raklian]

nah, what's actually happening is the virus is damaging central nervous system tissues, setting in motion events that 5 to ten years from now those who were infected will start to have the same symptoms of long covid sufferers, and by then the original long covid sufferers will have been the canaries in the coal mine, as the autoimmune attack on their own nervous system results in an ALS like degenerative disorder had killed most of them off within a few years. By then it will become clear that anyone who caught it, even mild cases and asymptomatic, start having fatigue, brain fog, depressive episodes and occasional signs similar to dementia. It rapidly moves toward nerve pain and loss of control of the nervous system. incontinence, stumbling gait, aspirating food and drink. soon inability to walk unassisted, or to reach and grasp things. ultimately increased senility and increased physical debilitation will take over their existence. Many who see the signs set in early and saw what happened to the first long covid cases, commit suicide. and the world is stunned and horrified at the nightmare of hundreds of millions of people across the world face this decline toward a horrible death. And the strain on every government to deal with it all is too much. welcome to the bleak nightmare future.

So, this era will be what future historians will call the Second Black Death.

[Xyls]

I think this is overblown and scaremongering... yes Omicron is serious, but have no reason to believe this...

[Xyls]

On the other hand... it appears the new variant is taking aim at young children who have NO protection

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Xyls]

Interesting:

Omicron variant may have picked up a piece of common-cold virus

Also a piece of AIDS virus according to the article... this could suggest different way it plays out in the body. It could also explain why more young children are symptomatic as opposed to older as it may mean there is some historic immunity amongst adults to this. Will have to see if the clotting risk remains as that is what typically leads to the very bad outcomes.

https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 021-12-03/

[Xyls]

Also:


Omicron driving record rate of Covid infection in South African province

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ca-gauteng

"Despite a rise in virus-related hospital admissions in South Africa, deaths appear to be increasing at a lower rate than during the country’s third wave of Covid. This was underlined by a statement from the WHO on Friday saying it had yet to see any reports of deaths related to Omicron."

This is nice, however regular COVID tends to have deaths around day 14-15 so may not have a large enough sample of people recovered for them to say this. Then the concern is also if it now isn't fatal what are the chances of long COVID as that is what concerns me more.

[caltrek]

How Long Will It Take to Develop and Distribute Vaccines Against the Omicron Variant?
by Matt Field
December 1, 2021

https://thebulletin.org/2021/12/how-lon ... n-variant/

Introduction:

(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) Talk about whiplash. After the first Thanksgiving Americans had spent together since the pandemic began, many began digesting alarming headlines about omicron, the new COVID-19 virus variant with dozens of mutations. Will it evade the protection offered by current vaccines? Will it spread wildly like delta or peter out like the beta variant? While health officials still have much to learn about the new variant, pharmaceutical companies say they can crank out new vaccines, fast.

Pfizer, the maker of one prominent COVID-19 vaccine, said that if research, which should be available in the coming weeks, shows the variant escapes the protection of its vaccine, it could “produce a tailor-made vaccine against that variant in approximately 100 days, subject to regulatory approval,” according to a statement the company sent the Bulletin. A company official told the health and medicine news site Stat that Pfizer could be producing a billon doses of new vaccine a quarter by March. Moderna, another manufacturer of mRNA vaccines, said, it could produce new vaccines in early 2022, in large quantities.

Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, which makes a viral-vector COVID-19 vaccine, have been “running dress rehearsals” for pushing out variant-specific vaccines. According to an October piece in Nature, they’ve conducted trials on vaccines designed against variants such as beta, which better evades vaccine protection than others. Notably they’ve also thought about how those new vaccines might go through the regulatory approval process. While the initial steps of designing and synthesizing a new mRNA vaccine could take only days and, as company officials have said, producing new shots in large quantities could be done in months, it remains unclear exactly how those new vaccines would be cleared for public use.

[wjfox]