"Seriously worried": Is Omicron outcompeting Delta? – HotAir - Hot Air

If it’s virulent and immune-evasive but not very transmissible, it won’t spread much.

If it’s transmissible and immune-evasive but not very virulent, it’ll spread widely but won’t make people severely ill.

The earliest preliminary evidence from South Africa is that Omicron falls into the third category.

And data keeps trickling in pointing to it being extremely transmissible, whether because it’s more contagious than Delta or more capable than Delta of infecting people with prior immunity (or some combination of both).

If it’s one-tenth as dangerous as Delta but infects 100 times as many people, it’ll send 10 times the number of people to the hospital that Delta did.

Virologist Trevor Bedford has been looking at the data in South Africa, trying to estimate the reproduction number for Omicron.

His best guess is that the variant has a reproduction number of 3 or 3.5, which would mean it’s infecting twice as many people as Delta and is comparable to how quickly COVID was spreading in the U.S.

In other words, after nearly two years of South Africa and the rest of the world acquiring a large degree of immunity against the coronavirus, Omicron somehow seems to be running as freely as the initial Wuhan strain was.

Although current data cannot fully address this, I suspect there is decent immune evasion and some individuals protected from infection by Delta will be susceptible to Omicron.

The problem with using South Africa to gauge how Omicron will behave in the U.S.

That makes it uncertain if Omicron is actually outcompeting Delta instead of just filling a vacuum.

Hanage is forced to conclude that Omicron is outcompeting Delta, which means hospitals may soon be crushed with patients unless the new variant is drastically less virulent than the old one:.

It may be that the large number of boosters administered in Israel has restored most people’s immunity to the point where they’re capable of fending off the variant when they’re exposed, a hopeful sign.

If Omicron is capable of leaving him bedridden after three doses of the vaccine, how likely is it that the variant is so mild that the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those with comorbidities have nothing to fear from it.

Maybe the promising data yesterday about mild cases in South Africa has less to do with a dramatic decline in virulence of the variant and more to do with the fact that it’s mostly younger people who have tested positive so far.

We already have hard proof, in other words, that boosters don’t render people immune to the variant