Omicron Variant
-What if the Omicron virus is milder than Delta?
-What if Delta dies out because of Omicron?
-What if the Omicron was created as a result of unvaccinated people?
How ironic would that be?
Another theory I heard is that Deta and Omicron mutations are the result of mass vaccinations.
This is what I was thinking to be honest. Spanish flu was over after about 18 months as it rapidly mutated into a mild strain. If anything, to many vaccines, especially people who don't need them, especially young and healthy people will probably slow down the inevitable process of covid becoming mild.
I have heard it reported that a previous deadly Russian virus became the mild common cold.
I put the coronavirus out of my mind. I was burnt out on the first wave hysteria. covid=0. me=1. so far. so far.
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Professor Anne von Gottberg, a clinical microbiologist at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases, told reporters during an online press briefing that omicron may not be more contagious or virulent than delta, but early data indicates previous infection does not provide protection against omicron as it seems to do with delta.
"We believe that omicron is widespread in the country," von Gottberg said.
It does look like there is a predominance of omicron throughout the country," von Gottberg said. "Almost 80% of specimens being sequenced in November are omicron. So we believe, truly, there is a link in the increase in cases with omicron variant."
Thirty-two cases of the omicron variant have been detected in the U.K.
A woman who lives in Arapahoe County, Colorado, has tested positive for the omicron variant of COVID-19, the state's department of health said.
She recently traveled to southern Africa and has "minor symptoms."
She is fully vaccinated but has not yet received the booster, the department said.
The Minnesotan man who is confirmed to have the omicron variant of COVID-19 received a booster shot in early November, health officials said.
The man attended an anime convention at the Javits Center in New York City from Nov. 19 to Nov. 21, and then, after experiencing mild symptoms on Nov. 22, he was tested on Nov. 24. He no longer has symptoms.
"It seems quite possible, perhaps, most likely, that the transmission happened at the convention in New York City, but that's not definitive," health officials said.
The Javits Center said everyone is required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks inside.
The individual had no history of international travel, officials said.
One of the man's close contacts has tested positive via a rapid test, officials said. Further tests to determine if the second individual is also positive for the omicron variant have yet to be conducted
New York officials confirm 5 cases of omicron Covid variant across state
Cases were discovered in Suffolk County, two in Queens, one in Brooklyn and one in New York City, she said at a press briefing. Minnesota health authorities confirmed the second U.S. case of the omicron Covid variant earlier Thursday, in a resident who recently returned from New York City.
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Hmmm, for some reasons, they both emerged in places with very low vaccination rates...
Local hospital data here indicates Delta isn't overall milder than the previous variants - it's worse for younger people. Much more hospitalizations of small children, teenagers, pregnant women and generally 30-40yos since Delta became dominant.
Omicron is yet to be found out. As soulless as it sounds, you need many cases to see the general trend.
Flu viruses generally mutate super-rapidly, much faster than most other human viruses. That's why yearly updated flu shots are largely based on educated guessing - and that's why even the deadliest flu pandemics don't last more than about two years.
I agree. It seems more likely to me the mutations are due to it being a novel virus that's still evolving regardless of of the vaccine.
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Omicron Triggers ‘Unprecedented’ COVID Surge Hitting Children Under Age 5 in South Africa
The alarming development raises the prospect of a new global battle cycle against the virus, given that the new variant has already spread to dozens of countries. The South African scientists also said the new variant was spreading much quicker than any previous wave of the coronavirus.
In a worrying virtual press conference, government adviser Waasila Jassat, speaking about the worst-affected area of Gauteng province (which includes the city of Johannesburg), said: “It’s clear in Gauteng, the week-on-week increase we’re seeing in cases and admissions is higher than we’ve seen it before. We’ve seen quite a sharp increase [in hospital admissions] across all age groups but particularly in the under 5s.”
She added: “The incidence in those under 5 is now second highest, second only to those over 60. The trend that we’re seeing now, that is different to what we’ve seen before, is a particular increase in hospital admissions in children.
Jassat produced graphs that clearly showed how children under 5 years old are now being hospitalized at an alarming rate.
She said, for example, that in the city of Tshwane Metro, more than 100 children under the age of 5 were admitted to hospitals with COVID in the first two weeks of the new fourth wave (Nov. 14 to 27). In the first two weeks of the country’s third wave, in May of this year, fewer than 20 children were admitted to hospitals.
In a follow-up question-and-answer session, asked about the extraordinary numbers of children being admitted to hospital, Jassat said she suspected there might be an “immunity gap” and that the lack of vaccination of children might account for the numbers.
Omicron-stricken South Africa may be a glimpse into the future of COVID-19
Even with the rapid increase, infections are still below the 25,000 new daily cases that South Africa reported in the previous surge, in June and July.
It’s not clear if the variant causes more serious illness or can evade the protection of vaccines. Phaahla noted that only a small number of people who have been vaccinated have gotten sick, mostly with mild cases, while the vast majority of those who have been hospitalized were not vaccinated.
But in a worrisome development, South African scientists reported that omicron appears more likely than earlier variants to cause reinfections among people who have already had a bout with COVID-19.
"Previous infection used to protect against delta, and now with omicron it doesn’t seem to be the case," one of the researchers, Anne von Gottberg of the University of Witwatersrand, said at a World Health Organization briefing on Thursday.
South Africa’s hospitals are so far coping with the surge, even those in Gauteng province, which accounts for more than 70% of all new infections, Phaahla said.
While warning that cases could well rise quickly because of omicron, Dr. Takeshi Kasai, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, said the measures used against the delta variant — which itself caused surges the world over — should remain at the core of the response.
"The positive news in all of this is that none of the information we have currently about omicron suggests we need to change the directions of our response," Kasai said.
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Why Delta and Omicron Could Be a ‘Twin Epidemic’
Where does your thinking stand on Omicron?
There’s a few ways to look at this variant. First of all, it looks as if there are a lot of similarities in terms of the spectrum of illness, so at this point, the two big questions are: Is it more transmissible than Delta, and what’s the story on immune escape? In terms of immune escape, we’ve seen all of these mutations in the receptor-binding domain in the spike protein, and that probably means Omicron will disproportionately affect people with partial immunity, either because they didn’t get vaccinated after infection and recovery or because they got their first two doses and never got their third. We have studies from the CDC that show people who were previously infected and recovered, but never got vaccinated, are twice as susceptible to Delta reinfection. That’s almost certainly going to be the case with Omicron reinfection. That’s what’s happening in South Africa, and it’s going to be a major issue if Omicron starts to gain ascendancy in the U.S. Now, there are studies from Michel Nussenzweig’s lab at Rockefeller University that show that people — not from Omicron, specifically — who are infected and recovered and then get vaccinated seem to have this phenomenon of epitope broadening and are more resilient to new variants.
As you said, the current vaccines, with boosters, offer a 30- to 40-fold increase in virus-neutralizing antibodies. At a public-health level, at what point should we be concerned about the efficacy overall of the vaccines?
We’ll have to see how much of a drop there is.
But vaccine makers have said they can tweak the existing formulas relatively easily, right?
The actual manipulations in the lab to make a booster are not complicated. But there is this phenomenon that’s sometimes called “original antigenic sin,” which means it’s not easy to shift over the immune response to something that’s similar but not quite the same. It’s not a slam dunk. You can’t just assume, “Yeah, no worries, we’ll just make an Omicron-specific booster.” It’s not hard to make, but we don’t know for certain that it’s going to work.
Should we develop an Omicron-specific vaccine; is it possible that the approach to vaccines becomes more prescriptive based on different personal characteristics and immunity?
That’ll depend on a lot of things. By the time that booster is ready and shown that it actually works, and goes through regulatory approval, there are potentially going to be a lot of people already infected with Omicron. Then you have to decide whether it’s worth it at that point.
What about it will be messy?
Actually demonstrating that it works, scaling up the distribution, the same vaccine-equity issues all over again, the public-health messaging, which has already been so complicated to begin with, and all of the anti-vaccine aggression. It’s doable, but if we have to go there, it’s going to be a slog at the scientific level, the public-health level, and policy level.
Should the worst-case scenario be true, that Omicron evades vaccines somewhat easily, what other public-health measures will be on the table?
Whether you’re worried about Delta or Omicron, as of today, the strategy is the same. If you’ve gotten two doses, get your third, if you’re eligible. If you are infected, recovered, and haven’t gotten vaccinated, get vaccinated. And vaccinate your kids.
If Omicron starts to accelerate to the point where it outcompetes Delta, like Delta outcompeted Alpha, then we’re going to start maximizing non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Is that something we’ll understand before the holidays?
I think so. Roughly two weeks from now, we’ll know a lot more.
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Sorry for the long post but this is behind a paywall, I believe.
When we first wrote to you about the Omicron COVID-19 variant last week, the point we most wanted to drive home was just how much remained uncertain. “If I was writing an article on this, the title would be ‘We Don’t Know,’ because that basically sums up almost everything,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a clinical epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Toronto, told The Dispatch at the time. “We’ll find out [soon].”
Since then, cases of the Omicron variant have popped up in dozens of countries and at least 16 U.S. states. Markets experienced their most volatile week in months, and governments around the world outlined differing approaches to combating the potentially threatening variant. We went back to the same experts we spoke to a week ago, asking them one simple question: What knowledge have we gained about Omicron?
“I would describe it as accumulating anecdotes and early data,” Bogoch said Sunday. “That’s what we have this week that we didn’t have last week.” And although it’s early, those initial anecdotes and data are making the case for cautious optimism.
As of Sunday, the largest known Omicron outbreak outside of southern Africa can be traced to a corporate Christmas party in Oslo, Norway, where public health experts believe “at least half” of the 120 fully vaccinated attendees were infected with the variant. Noting that most of the partygoers were on the younger side, Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health confirmed that “none of the patients [have] severe symptoms” and “none [are] hospitalized.” Outbreaks at a San Francisco area wedding and within a Toronto prison have thus far yielded similar results. The World Health Organization said over the weekend that it has yet to see reports of a death attributed to the variant.
“There’s just a growing number of these anecdotes: bigger outbreaks, even among vaccinated individuals, and those who are vaccinated having no-to-mild symptoms,” Bogoch said, though he cautioned against drawing any sweeping conclusions. “I always say, you can never ignore anecdotes, you just have to put them in the appropriate context.”
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Omicron coronavirus variant partly evades Pfizer vaccine's protection, study shows
Boosters are also likely to protect people, Alex Sigal of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, who led the study team, told CNN.
Tests in lab dishes using samples from 12 people who had been fully vaccinated with Pfizer's vaccine showed the Omicron variant could evade the immune protection built by the vaccine -- but not completely.
"There is a very large drop in neutralization of Omicron by BNT162b2 [Pfizer/BioNTech] immunity relative to ancestral virus," Sigal said on Twitter.
"Omicron escape from BNT162b2 neutralization is incomplete. Previous infection + vaccination still neutralizes," he added.
The findings are good news, Sigal told CNN.
"I thought this news was very positive. I expected worse," Sigal said in a telephone interview. The mutations that characterize the Omicron variant, he said, looked like they could allow it to evade the immunity offered by vaccines to a greater extent.
But the experiment indicates it doesn't. "This is not a variant that has completely escaped," he said. "It certainly escapes. It is certainly bad. But it looks to me like there are ways of dealing with it."
Sigal's team used human lung cells for the tests. Blood from the six volunteers who had been infected and then vaccinated was better able to neutralize the virus, they reported in a study submitted to an online preprint site. It has not been peer reviewed
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Compared to some of the doomsday predictions made when the variant first emerged, it’s fantastic news. “My overarching notion would be, so far so good,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “There’s a lot of caution around that because we don’t have complete information, but it certainly would appear as though our current vaccines—especially if they’re boosted—provide a notable degree of protection against Omicron.”
As we’ve previously discussed, vaccines provide two different types of immunity: Humoral (antibody-driven) immunity that neutralizes pathogens more quickly but generally wanes over the course of a few months, and cell-mediated (T-cell-driven) immunity that doesn’t necessarily prevent infection but sticks around in the body much longer.
“Even if the number of mutations on the [Omicron] spike protein affect neutralizing antibodies, it is likely the T-helper-cell epitopes and cytotoxic T-cell epitopes will still remain intact,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That’s what you would imagine would be true because that always has been true. That immunological memory—with T-cells and B-cells—ultimately is going to protect against serious illness. And I think it’s extremely likely that two doses will protect against serious illness, just as was true for the other three variants.”
Pfizer said yesterday its scientists are continuing to develop an Omicron-specific vaccine that could be available by March, and Moderna is doing the same. But even if these tailored boosters are more effective against Omicron—which, for reasons having to do with something called “original antigenic sin,” is not guaranteed—will they actually be necessary?
Schaffner believes it’s unlikely, but he’s glad the pharmaceutical companies are going through the motions anyways. “There will be opportunities for yet other variants to show up where we might indeed need a tailored vaccine,” he said. “And if the companies have gone through that process once or twice, they could do it a little faster.”
Omicron’s emergence—and its apparent extreme transmissibility—has reignited a debate among public health officials over what the purpose of vaccination ultimately is: to prevent severe disease and death, or limit infection and transmission.
“If we were having a discussion at the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, there would be unanimity in saying goal one is to keep people out of the hospital, keep them from dying, keep them home,” Schaffner said. “Of course, a secondary goal would be to reduce the occurrence of milder infections and reduce transmission as much as possible, that would be ideal. But given the current technology with the vaccines, the goal really is to keep people out of the hospital.”
Offit concurred, but went a step further and expressed frustration with the Biden administration’s prioritization of booster shots for all. “The notion that because of Omicron we need to get a booster dose in healthy young people, that statement is not based on any evidence,” he said. “I just think we’ve not made it clear what the goal of the vaccine is. If the goal of the vaccine is protection against severe disease, we’ve done that. If the goal of the vaccine is protection against any symptomatic disease, then this won’t be the last dose. You’re [only] going to increase neutralizing antibodies for a finite period of time.”
The source of the public confusion likely dates back to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines’ clinical trial data from last year. “Those were three-month studies that Pfizer and Moderna presented,” Offit said. “Those people had just gotten their second dose, so neutralizing antibody titers were high, so protection against mild illness was high. I mean, protection against mild illness was 95 percent—no vaccine does that!”
That transition, combined with the colder weather, means it’s entirely possible that confirmed COVID-19 cases—and breakthrough infections—will begin to skyrocket again in the coming days and weeks. And even if it is confirmed to be a milder strain, an Omicron surge could wreak havoc on hospital systems, as a small percentage (hospitalization rate) multiplied by an enormous number (cases) is often still a pretty significant figure.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re all going to get this virus at one point or another, and it’s better to do so with some Moderna, Pfizer, or Johnson & Johnson coursing through your veins.
“If you’ve been vaccinated and you have an asymptomatic or mild infection, you just won! That’s great!” Offit said. “If you have a cold that lasts for a few days, even if it knocks you on your butt for a couple days, that’s okay, because you didn’t have to go to the doctor, and you didn’t have to go to the hospital, and you didn’t have to go to the morgue.”
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