Cipheron on 22/10/2022 at 05:04
Big respiratory illness spike in little kids close to overwhelming US children's hospital and it's not even winter yet. The likely explanation is that two years of lockdowns have led to lower immunity against regular respiratory illnesses, now all the kids are catching it at the same time as parents ease up on keeping their kids isolated.
(
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/21/health/rsv-hospitals-what-to-know-wellness/index.html)
Pyrian on 23/10/2022 at 04:58
The article asserts that virtually everyone gets RSV and that a wave of young children (2 and under) that didn't get it the past two seasons due to lockdown are getting it now.
Cipheron on 23/10/2022 at 07:30
Quote Posted by Pyrian
The article asserts that virtually everyone gets RSV and that a wave of young children (2 and under) that didn't get it the past two seasons due to lockdown are getting it now.
That's basically what I said when I summarized the article. The big risk here is that children's hospitals get overwhelmed because all the cases are happening at once that are normally staggered across time.
Also, however, I suspect that the cases could be more severe than average, because with less herd immunity, the amount of viral load new kids get exposed to could be higher. This study was related to Covid but probably translates to other respiratory illnesses:
(
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0)
Quote:
Infectious viral load (VL) expelled as droplets and aerosols by infected individuals partly determines transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
lowenz on 23/10/2022 at 08:23
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Got the new "Bivalent" vaccine with updates against recent strains. :D
My parents too (so for 6 months they're ready to fight), for me in November.
Azaran on 2/11/2022 at 20:49
(
https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/how-severe-is-the-sars-cov-2-ba2-subvariant-compared-to-earlier-subvariants) The Ba2 variant seems to be even less severe than the original Omicron
Quote:
Of 102,315 confirmed COVID-19 cases from March 3, 2020 to June 20, 2022, there were 20,770 labeled as Delta variants, 52,605 labeled as Omicron B.1.1.529 variants (the original Omicron variant), and 28,940 labeled as Omicron BA.2 subvariants.
Mortality rates were 0.7% for Delta, 0.4% for the original Omicron variant, and 0.3% for Omicron BA.2. After adjustments, the odds of death were more than 2-times higher for the Delta and the original Omicron variant compared with Omicron BA.2. Patients with Delta and original Omicron variants were also more likely to need hospitalizations, invasive ventilation, and intensive care admissions.
“While the SARS-CoV-2 virus always has the potential to mutate to a more deadly form, when you look at the recent trajectory of Delta, Omicron BA.1, to Omicron BA.2, the virus seems to be getting intrinsically less severe. Hopefully this trend will continue,” says lead author Zachary Strasser, MD, MBA, an academic physician in the Laboratory of Computer Science at MGH and an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We can continue to use our analytics system and method to assess many other questions such as which vaccinations have the most impact on preventing long COVID, or whether certain treatments reduce the likelihood of long COVID.
Too early to come to conclusions, but I'm hopeful Covid will become just another common cold in the near future, like similar viruses in the past
Starker on 3/11/2022 at 00:19
Most likely the reduced mortality rates have to do with the virus being able to find less and less naive organisms and not with any changes to the virus itself.
lowenz on 3/11/2022 at 09:05
Quote Posted by Starker
Most likely the reduced mortality rates have to do with the virus being able to find less and less naive organisms and not with any changes to the virus itself.
Both.
Cipheron on 3/11/2022 at 19:30
That, plus a big factor behind Omicron is that it shifted from the lungs to more specifically target the nasal membranes, throat etc.
Clogging up your lungs just fundamentally isn't a very efficient way to spread the virus. Especially as more people would have partial immunity now, a successful variant would need to get in, replicate, then get out, as much as possible before the immune response kicks in. So being more specific about which tissues it infects seems like it would be advantageous.
(
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html)
heywood on 3/11/2022 at 20:13
There are so many factors which are driving down the death rate besides the virus.
Like Starker alluded to, COVID-19 already took its easiest victims, starting with the institutionalized.
And hospital facilities and equipment are adequate to handle surges now. We can test for it and deal with less severe cases at home so we're not burdening the health care system. Testing at home helps prevent us from inadvertently infecting vulnerable people. We developed effective treatment methods for vulnerable people who do get infected, and continue to refine them.
We have vaccines which reduce the severity of subsequent infections. We are also building up our immune response through repeated low level exposure. Omicron is so transmissible by asymptomatic individuals that I suspect the winter BA.1 wave exposed nearly everyone in urban and suburban areas.