At this point I'm not sure what to think about how
contagious omicron is (everything I've seen so far does show, however, that vaccines signficantly reduce the odds of ending up in a hospital). "Fog of war" comes to mind.
I'm still trying to avoid getting it, but I'm not at all sure I'll succeed. I'm starting to think almost complete isolation might be the only way to get through this wave.
An article at NPR discusses a "super spreader" event in Norway where a large number of vaccinated people were infected:
>>>In late November, more than 110 people gathered at a crowded Christmas party at a restaurant in Oslo. Most of the guests were fully vaccinated. One had returned from South Africa just a few days earlier and was unknowingly carrying the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Ultimately, about 70% of the partygoers were infected. . . .
"This is a game-changing virus, especially in the vaccinated population where people have had a level of invincibility," says
Sumit Chanda, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research.<<<
The same article cites another study which seems to suggest omicron is spreading because it can evade vaccine immunity, not because it is inherently more infectious:
>>>A new
study from Denmark suggests that much of the variant's dominance comes down to its ability to evade the body's immune defenses.
Researchers compared the spread of omicron and delta among members of the same household and concluded that omicron is about 2.7 to 3.7 times more infectious than the delta variant among vaccinated and boosted individuals.
But here's an interesting additional point: For unvaccinated people, there was no significant difference in rates of infection between delta and omicron. That would indicate that both variants are about at the same level of transmissibility among the unvaccinated — in other words, under those circumstances, omicron is not necessarily more transmissible than delta.<<<
The burning questions: What makes this newly identified variant so transmissible? And what does it mean for preventing spread?
www.npr.org
A paper posted at the New England Journal of Medicine website shows that vaccines are effective against omicron with regards to hospitalization, albeit somewhat reduced compared to prior variants:
>>>During the proxy omicron period, we found a vaccine effectiveness of 70% (95% confidence interval [CI], 62 to 76), a finding that was supported by the results of all sensitivity tests. This measure of vaccine effectiveness was significantly different from that during the comparator period, when the rate was 93% (95% CI, 90 to 94) against hospitalization for Covid-19 (
Table 2).<<<
Correspondence from The New England Journal of Medicine — Effectiveness of BNT162b2 Vaccine against Omicron Variant in South Africa
www.nejm.org
To add a little more fog to the mix, quite a few media outlets are reporting that in the UK, omicron seems to be resulting in lower hospitalization rates. But, of course, this is very preliminary:
>>>The latest data from the U.K. Health Security Agency found the risk of hospitalization for people infected with omicron is about a third of that posed by the delta variant. The study analyzed more than 528,000 omicron cases and 573,000 delta cases from Nov. 22 through Dec. 26 in England.
However, Chief Medical Advisor Susan Hopkins cautioned that it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions about the severity of illness caused by omicron. . . . The new U.K. study also found Covid vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization from omicron across the board, though a booster dose provides the highest level of protection. The latest data adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that although the vaccines have taken a hit from omicron, they still provide significant levels of protection compared to people who are unvaccinated. <<<
The U.K. Health Security Agency found the risk of hospitalization for people infected with omicron is about a third the risk posed by the delta variant.
www.cnbc.com
