OrgasmAlley wrote:A number of places with "zero COVID" policies are seeing Omicron waves, including in heavily vaccinated and boosted populations. On the plus side, natural immunity acquired via Omicron infection appears broad and highly effective.
Calling bullshit again.
Here in NZ (pop. 5 million):
- We had an elimination strategy until late last year. Delta put an end to that around August, but heavy restrictions kept it in check, holding steady at an average of about 100 cases per day (peak at under 200/day around November) and almost no deaths. Omicron ended that, staring the rise early to mid February.
- Frankly, the NZ Government and health authorities got complacent and consequently fucked up the vaccination programme. In August, when Delta got into the community, the vaccinations had barely started; if it had got going two months earlier (which really, really should have been easily achievable), there would have been a good chance of keeping elimination going until Omicron.
- Still, once the vaccination programme got underway properly, it went fast - 94% of eligible (over age 12) population are now double vaxxed, most of that boosted.
- Now Omicron is out, the official figure is about half a million total COVID cases - in the last few weeks peaking at about 20,000 cases per day, or 4,000 cases per million, but the prevalence of mild infections and moves away from professionally taken, lab processed PCR tests in favour of self-administered RATs and effectively optional reporting, means that a lot of cases aren't being counted. Most agree that the real number is about three times that. But the rate of infection has stabilised at that number - the official count has been under 20,000 per day since the beginning of March and is heading steadily downwards.
So yes, we're seeing a massive spike in infections. But don't forget: this is the first big wave here; we never had the massive waves of 2020 or the second waves in 2021. And the infection rate isn't the important number: we all get sick, be it COVID, the 'flu, common colds or whatever. The question is, how many people need hospital treatment or die? Right now there are 28 people in ICU in NZ, again, that figure has been fairly constant over the last couple of weeks. Over the whole country. The death rate is settling at about 10/day, or 2/million/day - the US and other countries that did or could not take the line we did have never seen figures that low. Not even in the deepest troughs. And that's despite the NZ health authorities giving up on trying to differentiate "died of COVID" from "died with COVID" - a good chunk of that rise in deaths are from people who have been infected but really got killed by something else.
(Previously, with tiny rates of COVID in the community, if a stiff tested positive, you could be fairly confident that was at least partly responsible for carrying them off - if you weren't sure already.)
The thing people don't seem to understand about vaccinations is that
they don't stop infections. If virus particles get into you, you get infected, regardless of vaccinations or previous infection. What happens then depends on a bunch of things, including whether your immune system is primed to deal with it or not, and how much virus you actually acquired - if someone sneezes a load of virus into your face, you're likely going to end up with a worse infection than a little acquired through contact with an infected surface. If you are vaccinated, or previously had the disease, then your system is already primed to start fighting the infection; if not, it has to develop a fresh immune response and that takes time, time in which the virus could get away on you.
Basically, vaccinations affect severity. Severity appears in your statistics in hospitalisations, deaths, and case transmission rates (less severe cases mean less onward transmission).
The low death and hospitalisation rate here speaks volumes on how effective the vaccination programme has been at blunting the effect of the current spike. Really, the big problem with the current spike isn't health system strain or high death rates. It's supply chain issues due to stores, warehouses and transport operators having staff off sick all at once. And I think we can wear that one. People recover from not being able to get their favourite breakfast cereal.