delta is serious business and by all accounts the most fearsome strain yet, yes.Dilbert_X wrote:
It is however liberal countries burning themselves out making the world a better place allows the selfish countries to steal a march on them.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-04/ … /100736056NSW Health has revealed 72 per cent of COVID positive patients admitted to ICU since December 16 were infected with the Delta variant of the virus, not the Omicron strain.
So Omicron being less harmful is irrelevant.Presumably 38% were fully vaccinated. Doesn't really seem like we're winning here.Of those patients, 62 per cent were not vaccinated or had received only one dose of a vaccine
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and now.Larssen wrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/30/up-to-three-covid-jabs-a-year-could-be-needed-for-protection-data-suggestsAustralians may have to receive two or even three Covid jabs each year to maintain defences against the virus if early results on the efficacy of booster shots turn out to be a useful guide.
Weekly data published just before Christmas by the UK’s Health Security Agency shows the effectiveness of both the Pfizer and Moderna boosters against symptomatic diseases is lower for the Omicron than the Delta variant across all periods after the injection.
Health worker with Pfizer vaccine
Why has Australia reduced the Covid vaccine booster shot wait time to five months?
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The analysis included 147,597 Delta and 68,489 Omicron cases in the UK. The agency stressed the “results should be interpreted with caution due to the low counts and the possible biases related to the populations with highest exposure to Omicron (including travellers and their close contacts) which cannot fully be accounted for”.
The UK data showed both Pfizer and Moderna boosters had 90% effectiveness against symptomatic diseases from the Delta variant up to at least nine weeks.
By contrast, efficacy against the Omicron strain was about 30% lower, and appeared to drop away further after nine weeks.
god damn those evil israelis with their large-scale pilot schemes and data sharing!Israeli study finds fourth vaccine dose boosts antibodies five-fold
A fourth dose of Covid vaccine boosts antibodies five-fold a week after the shot is administered, the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Tuesday, citing preliminary findings of an Israeli study.
“A week into the fourth dose we know to a higher degree of certainty that the fourth dose is safe,” Bennett said at Sheba Medical Centre, which is giving second booster shots in a trial among its staff amid a nationwide surge in Omicron variant infections.
“The second piece of news: we know that a week after administration of a fourth dose, we see a five-fold increase in the number of antibodies in the vaccinated person,” he told reporters.
“This most likely means a significant increase against infection and ... hospitalisation and (severe) symptoms,” Bennett said in English.
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Yes night life resumed. But with other measures than social distancing. How do you expect to maintain 1,5m distance in a club. In the EU it's the QR code system that's intended to safeguard against mass infection and hospitalisation.uziq wrote:
totally not true. night life resumed in the UK, germany, spain, etc, for a large stretch of 2021, prior to the emergence of the new highly transmissible strains.
the UK's NHS even piloted giant stadium-sized events that were tightly monitored and had follow-up testing. the fear of a 'superspreader' event were totally unfounded. vaccination from mRNA vaccines prevents even the carrying of virus in a high proportion of people.
there's the rub with sars-cov-2, especially in its highly transmissible variants. a superspreader event could occur and you wouldn't even know it until minimum 3-5 days after; much longer with previous variants.It could only work if it were real-time.
The balls on the Chicago teachers union is legendary but good God the political choices it sometimes makes.The Omicron surge threatens to upend any sense of peace in the nation’s education system.
After a holiday break that saw Covid-19 cases spike unrelentingly, a small but growing list of districts — including Newark, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland — moved temporarily to remote learning for more than 450,000 children.
Districtwide closures, even those that last for a week or two, are a step backward after months in which classrooms largely remained open.
...
And there are signs that some unions are becoming more resistant to in-person teaching. Members of the Chicago Teachers Union are preparing to vote on Tuesday on whether to refuse to report to schools starting the following day. The union, which has repeatedly clashed with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration, had demanded that every student be tested for the virus before returning from winter break, a step the district did not take.
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On Monday, it became clear that the testing effort had largely failed. Of 35,590 tests recorded by the district in the week ending Saturday, 24,843 had invalid results. Among those that did produce results, 18 percent were positive.
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viruses don’t (necessarily) evolve to become more deadly. it’s in their evolutionary interest to replicate, not kill humans. they’re not some malign force of nature.pirana6 wrote:
I'm dumb but I'll admit I always assumed each new variant made it more deadly. Why does is Omicron going so much easier on us? Is the next variant just as like to be more deadly than the last as it is to be less deadly?
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