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Omicron: The New Variant
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Has Achieved Nirvana
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quote:
People who have recovered from an infection with the new omicron coronavirus variant may be able to fend off later infections from the delta variant, according to a new laboratory study carried out by South African scientists.

If further experiments confirm these findings, they could suggest a less dire future for the pandemic. In the short term, omicron is expected to create a surge of cases that will put a massive strain on economies and health care systems around the world. But in the longer term, the new research suggests that an omicron-dominated world might experience fewer hospitalizations and deaths than one in which delta continues to rage.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/omi...efend-191714512.html


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Meanwhile, on the breakthrough front....couple of neighbors in their 70s (he's a doctor), both vaccinated and boosted, have come down with COVID...at home feeling miserable but surviving...

Over the last two weeks, cases and hospitalizations have both grown by significant amounts:

-Hospitalizations have gone up 50.8%

-ICU admissions have gone up 32.4%

-The daily average of new COVID cases has gone up 133.3%

According to state data, just 10% of the state’s ICU beds are currently open, with 33% currently occupied by severely ill patients who have COVID-19.

A total of 18% of the state’s hospital beds are currently open, with more than 20% of the state’s total hospital bed capacity being used by COVID patients as of midnight.


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
"I've got morons on my team."

Mitt Romney
Minor Deity
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Originally posted by CHAS:
My home county, Summit County, Colorado

Cases 820
Case Rate per 100k 2,644.22
% Positivity 25.23%
Deaths 0
% of population ≥ 5 years of age fully vaccinated 84.7%
New Hospital Admissions 0


Within a highly vaccinated community, this does sound like a fifth version of the common cold.
 
Posts: 12511 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
czarina
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That was a really good short article. I like how the McNeill writes. Just the right level of technical detail, always augmented by a common sense intuitive explanation.


Old friend from back in the day. A fine reporter.


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fear is the thief of dreams

 
Posts: 21305 | Registered: 18 May 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
quote:
Originally posted by CHAS:
My home county, Summit County, Colorado

Cases 820
Case Rate per 100k 2,644.22
% Positivity 25.23%
Deaths 0
% of population ≥ 5 years of age fully vaccinated 84.7%
New Hospital Admissions 0


Within a highly vaccinated community, this does sound like a fifth version of the common cold.


Residents are highly vaccinated. A flood of tourists started around the 20th. A very high percentage of those came from Texas.
Wondering what will change when many leave when the new year begins.


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Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.

 
Posts: 25677 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Gadfly
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we are down to 5% ICU beds and they are really getting serious about stuff. I'm triple jabbed and still think I had it in December 2019.

I have a specialist's appointment on the 3rd and they called basically to cancel, inferring they needed a negative covid test in the last 30 days to come in and I said "I have one. I got it two weeks ago from YOUR hospital. See you on the 3rd!"


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Another day in Paradise.

 
Posts: 3902 | Registered: 14 November 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Michael Osterholm on the health care crunch.

quote:
The current omicron surge represents one of the greatest public health challenges not only of the pandemic but also of our lifetime. To deal with the surge over the next six to eight weeks, policymakers need to plan for the impact of what could be 1 million cases a day of new infections in the United States.

Such planning involves being realistic about the effectiveness of vaccination at this point; taking immediate steps to improve public health messaging, data collection and the availability of drug therapies; and doing whatever is possible to ameliorate the potentially devastating consequences for our health-care system.


quote:
Another area of urgent concern is that we have too few therapies to dent the surge. The two main monoclonal antibody cocktails appear ineffective against omicron. Meanwhile, a third monoclonal that retained effectiveness against omicron is in very short supply. Ditto for the much-heralded covid-19 oral drugs. There are less than 180,000 doses of the Pfizer drug, and it takes months to manufacture. These therapies must be rationed and allocated to those most likely to suffer severe cases: the elderly, younger patients with comorbidities and the immunocompromised. Expect shortages of these therapies in the next few weeks.

Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, we must brace for the possible catastrophic impact of the omicron surge on the U.S. health system. The weakest link is not the number of hospital beds but the availability of highly trained workers. Approximately 9.8 million doctors, nurses and high-level medical technicians are employed throughout the country. It is possible that 10 or even 20 percent of health-care workers could be infected by omicron in the next eight weeks, as has been reported in South Africa.

Losing that many health-care workers from a system already severely strained by staff shortages would be an enormous challenge. Even with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allowing shorter isolation and quarantine periods to help mitigate risk, covid-related absences won’t be addressed by providing hospitals with a thousand more Defense Department health-care workers. Omicron has already caused wide-scale disruptions across the airline industry, in sports leagues and among essential workers. State and local officials must put in place crisis-management plans to account for a 20 percent reduction in the health-care workforces.


https://www.washingtonpost.com...nt-challenges-covid/

(P.S.....Still have that free WaPo subscription available, in case anyone is interested....)


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
(self-titled) semi-posting lurker
Minor Deity
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a negative covid test in the last 30 days


That's absolutely ridiculous and meaningless.

I hate it when this kind of thing comes from hospitals, where they should really, truly know better. And it makes the test (whose date could be anytime, even 29 days ago) meaningless, and encourages incorrect understandings of how testing should be used...

VeryAngry

Sigh.


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My piano recordings at Box.Net: https://app.box.com/s/j4rgyhn72uvluemg1m6u

 
Posts: 18329 | Location: not in Japan any more | Registered: 20 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Originally posted by Big John:
we are down to 5% ICU beds and they are really getting serious about stuff. I'm triple jabbed and still think I had it in December 2019.

I have a specialist's appointment on the 3rd and they called basically to cancel, inferring they needed a negative covid test in the last 30 days to come in and I said "I have one. I got it two weeks ago from YOUR hospital. See you on the 3rd!"


That's odd. How could a 30 day old (or 15 day old, or even three day old) test be of any value?


Confused


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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December 30, 2021. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash said Thursday he decided to approve administering a fourth dose of the COVID vaccine to those with immunosuppression, amid the spread of the Omicron variant.

In a press conference, Ash said the decision was made “due to concerns that they are more vulnerable.”

Last week a panel of health experts approved, but Ash chose not to sign off on, the introduction of a fourth dose for Israelis over 60 and others at risk.


https://www.timesofisrael.com/...he-immunosuppressed/


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Gadfly
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quote:
Originally posted by wtg:
quote:
Originally posted by Big John:
we are down to 5% ICU beds and they are really getting serious about stuff. I'm triple jabbed and still think I had it in December 2019.

I have a specialist's appointment on the 3rd and they called basically to cancel, inferring they needed a negative covid test in the last 30 days to come in and I said "I have one. I got it two weeks ago from YOUR hospital. See you on the 3rd!"


That's odd. How could a 30 day old (or 15 day old, or even three day old) test be of any value?


Confused


I don't know. Didn't make much sense to me on the phone either, which is why I basically replied with "see you at 11 am on the 3rd!"

I'll give em more when I get there.... after the appt.

We are down to 5% ICU beds in my county. We've never gotten below 20.5% the whole pandemic.

Almost all unvaxxed and lots of kids this time around apparently from the few medical folks I know who speak off the record cuz HIPAA and all.

No monoclonal antibodies either. Apparently all the people who get it over and over demand them. Amazing how they don't question cloned technologies. I've lost long-term friends over this pandemic. SMART, INTELLIGENT SUCCESSFUL people telling me it's all a 5G conspiracy for a mass genocide event by radiation coming in 2022.

Argh. So frustrating.


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Another day in Paradise.

 
Posts: 3902 | Registered: 14 November 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus.

In studies on mice and hamsters, omicron produced less-damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.

“It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.


https://news.yahoo.com/studies...-less-183823600.html


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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AI tackling omicron.

https://www.wired.com/story/ai...ns-tricky-structure/


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Fact check: The theory that SARS-CoV-2 is becoming milder


https://www.npr.org/sections/g...2-is-becoming-milder


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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While the Omicron variant continues to infect people around the world, researchers at the University of Missouri have identified the highly prevalent, specific mutations that are causing the Omicron variant’s high rate of infection.

The findings help explain how the new variant can escape pre-existing antibodies present in the human body, either from vaccination or naturally from a recent COVID-19 infection.

“We know that viruses evolve over time and acquire mutations, so when we first heard of the new Omicron variant, we wanted to identify the mutations specific to this variant,” said Kamlendra Singh, a professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, assistant director of the MU Molecular Interactions Core and Bond Life Sciences Center investigator.


What they found:

quote:
The team identified 46 highly prevalent mutations specific to Omicron, including several located in the region of the virus’ spike protein where antibodies bind to the virus in order to prevent infection.

“The purpose of antibodies is to recognize the virus and stop the binding, which prevents infection,” Singh said. “However, we found many of the mutations in the Omicron variant are located right where the antibodies are supposed to bind, so we are showing how the virus continues to evolve in a way that it can potentially escape or evade the existing antibodies, and therefore continue to infect so many people.”


Members of the team. Wow.

quote:
Singh collaborated with Saathvik Kannan, a freshman at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, and Austin Spratt, an undergraduate student at MU


Hope for the future:

quote:
As antiviral treatments for individuals infected with COVID-19 continue to be developed, Singh explained that having a better understanding of how the virus is evolving will help ensure future antiviral treatments will be targeted toward the specific parts of the virus to produce the most effective outcomes.

In a recent trip to his native India, Singh met with Manish Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi, to discuss the launch of CoroQuil-Zn, a supplement that can be taken while infected with COVID-19 to help reduce one’s viral load. The supplement, which Singh helped to develop, is now being used by patients in Tamil Nadu, a state in India. The manufacturer will soon seek FDA approval for its distribution in the United States.


https://showme.missouri.edu/20...-to-omicron-variant/


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37793 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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