Covid facts

returntosender said:

I'm wondering if the powers that be are keeping tabs on the covid strains?
Has the original covid declined? Has the new one taken over. Will the first one eventually die out and the second one be the only one aRound for a while? Here, there is a new strain but they are not concerned about it.
My biggest question is how much has covid 19 faded? I haven't seen anything on this at all.
Thanks for your comments.
Happy day.
PS. I wish they had a way to say which strains a person has been exposed to. A home test would be nice.

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Omicron is 95% of current cases in the US. It has some different symptoms than delta.

Omicron now 95% of new COVID-19 infections in U.S., CDC estimates

returntosender said:

I'm wondering if the powers that be are keeping tabs on the covid strains?
Has the original covid declined? Has the new one taken over. Will the first one eventually die out and the second one be the only one aRound for a while? Here, there is a new strain but they are not concerned about it.
My biggest question is how much has covid 19 faded? I haven't seen anything on this at all.
Thanks for your comments.
Happy day.
PS. I wish they had a way to say which strains a person has been exposed to. A home test would be nice.

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The powers that be -- you mean heavenly?

For human experts here on Earth, this one is pretty good, and will tell you things that will be in the news later, even weeks ahead of time, and you'll hear him answer some of your questions (that the new version is much less severe though many without any antibodies from previous infection or vaccine can still get pretty ill), and it's replacing the old variants, and it basically will lead to the end of the main pandemic, so it becomes only 'endemic' (like the common cold or the flu...)

returntosender said:

I'm wondering if the powers that be are keeping tabs on the covid strains?

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Yes they are.

Has the original covid declined?

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Yes it has.

Has the new one taken over.

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Yes it has.

Will the first one eventually die out and the second one be the only one aRound for a while?

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It's not the second it's about the 11th and yes it will exist for a while and then be taken over by the next one.

Here, there is a new strain but they are not concerned about it.

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A common non concern around the world.

My biggest question is how much has covid 19 faded?

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What does "faded" mean? The current strain is more infectious and less pathogeneic than the last one.

PS. I wish they had a way to say which strains a person has been exposed to. A home test would be nice.

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Very expensive and hard to do at scale.

Halbhh said:

The powers that be -- you mean heavenly?

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Might I ask, have you ever seen the kind of person that uses the phrase "powers that be" to use them to refer to God? Ever?

Tanj said:

Might I ask, have you ever seen the kind of person that uses the phrase "powers that be" to use them to refer to God? Ever?

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Yes, actually , but you'd be right to say it's the exception to the rule.

returntosender said:

So the original is only 5 percent, wow! Thanks for that. It did seem that the current was gobbling people up much faster then the original. So then it gives hope that the second could be very small with the original gone. This is good news. Maybe there will be a day soon when it will be over

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Yes, it's good news, even though for a while we will continue to have high deaths/day here in the U.S., because even though Omicron is less severe, it's infected so many more at once, so quickly, that even less severe, it's still filling up the hospitals in many areas, and killing, even though at a lower rate per case (much less often deadly per case, but far more people have it at the same time now, which offsets that lower severity). But it will end, yes, and not long now.... I found that video link above now, and put it in the post above.

returntosender said:

I wasn't meaning God. I meant whoever puts those facts together. Whatever that power is.

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A consortium of biologists from around the world.

GISAID - hCov19 Variants

returntosender said:

Perhaps you shouldn't always try to find negative in my posts.

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Perhaps you should note it wasn't your post I was responding to.

returntosender said:

That's really interesting that he says that OM is protecting us against Delta.

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Yes, it's pretty great, since Delta was much more severe. And this immunity given by Omicron is helping stamp out Delta pretty fast now.

I'm now looking at the video. It seems his chart shows how the spike, this time, is much higher, but the hospitalizations and deaths are much lower than the first time.

So, it makes sense to me, how Omicron has done a lot of infecting to cause a bigger spike, but the sickness is not so bad.

Also, now, doctors have more experience so they can treat COVID patients better so ones are not getting so much ventilator treatments and they are getting other ways of care.

But, possibly, there is more testing so they know of the less severe cases. So, the spike could be a knowledge spike, to some extent.

com7fy8 said:

I'm now looking at the video. It seems his chart shows how the spike, this time, is much higher, but the hospitalizations and deaths are much lower than the first time.

So, it makes sense to me, how Omicron has done a lot of infecting to cause a bigger spike, but the sickness is not so bad.

Also, now, doctors have more experience so they can treat COVID patients better so ones are not getting so much ventilator treatments and they are getting other ways of care.

But, possibly, there is more testing so they know of the less severe cases. So, the spike could be a knowledge spike, to some extent.

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About that very last idea: partly yes we have more testing, but not enough to detect all the cases yet, Campbell thinks. He thinks (and he bases his ideas on a lot of reading and information) that the actual cases are much higher than the reported cases.

But, that only makes the overall picture even better. Meaning even with much higher cases, we still only have this level of hospitalizations and deaths. And also, with much higher cases even than reported, immunity is happening on a broader way also, which is a good outcome.

I seem to recall that the reason we can't find out with ease about which variant we're infected with is, in no small part, because of the money it would cost to have a lab that would be able to determine such things. And that was a story I skimmed over last year, practically. We don't have the sophistication at this point with simple PCR and the like, afaik, to determine it like we can qualify that you are infected or not

And with the rapid evolution anyway of the virus, it seems pointless to quibble over that when the goal should be to reduce severe infection to begin with, while Americans in particular, myself included to an extent, have a mistaken idea about what vaccines do (probably because of an extremely poor science education in public schools).

Tanj said:

It's not the second it's about the 11th and yes it will exist for a while and then be taken over by the next one.

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Actually it is FAR more than that. Variants only get a letter when they have become significant. That means more than just a variation of concern. The first variant got Alpha and then each one that was either deadly enough, widespread enough, different enough that there was a significant reinfection rate or something else of major concern got the next letter of the Greek Alphabet.

Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek Alphabet. That makes it the 16th version of major concern. Figure several times that many variations that were not of major concern.

keith99 said:

Actually it is FAR more than that. Variants only get a letter when they have become significant. That means more than just a variation of concern. The first variant got Alpha and then each one that was either deadly enough, widespread enough, different enough that there was a significant reinfection rate or something else of major concern got the next letter of the Greek Alphabet.

Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek Alphabet. That makes it the 16th version of major concern. Figure several times that many variations that were not of major concern.

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Well sure, but that depends on your definition of variant. Since the virus error rate means 3 changes per replication and the average infection results in a few billion virus particles, you could argue Omicron is 100 billion billion variants, instead of 1.

However, much like planets vs dwarf planets we have sanity cutoffs, and as such, we are on variant 16 of any level of concern. Noting that major concern variants have so far numbered 5: Orignal, alpha, beta, delta, omicron

ETA also they skipped Nu and Xi, so it's actually lucky number 13.

This is the Kitchen Sink, so....

The blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History has gotten its vaccination. The hall is apparently being used as a vaccination site.