This is the new covid thread.

It's being reported that more than 80% of inpatient hospital beds as well as 84% of all intensive care unit beds across the state are full. West Michigan has been hit particularly hard and some hospitals are starting to even turn patients away.

(Other obvious ways are more politically difficult here, but they should also be implemented now, and many nations are doing exactly that.)

Scientists in South Africa have reported a sudden, sharp rise in November in coronavirus cases among people in that country who had already been infected, in a study that has not yet been reviewed and published by a scientific journal. The authors noted that there was no such upswing when the Beta and Delta variants emerged.

They did not say how many of those reinfections could be attributed to Omicron, but South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases reported on Wednesday that when it conducted a genetic analysis on a sampling of coronavirus-positive test results from November, almost three-quarters were the new variant.

“Population-level evidence suggests that the Omicron variant is associated with substantial ability to evade immunity from prior infection,” the authors of the unpublished study wrote.


“We believe that previous infection does not provide them protection from infection due to Omicron,” said Anne von Gottberg, a microbiologist at the communicable disease institute.

Merkel musing that Germany might make vaccination mandatory.

As a broad analogy if it took ~8 weeks for Omicron to grow from initial spark into local epidemic in South Africa, I would expect very roughly 8 weeks from today for secondary epidemics to begin to manifest

That is depressing news. If Omnicron means starting over.... that sucks.

Dec 7 (Reuters) - The Omicron variant can partially evade protection from two doses of Pfizer (PFE.N) and partner BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine, the research head of a laboratory at the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa said on Tuesday.

But the study showed that blood from people who had received two doses of the vaccine and had a prior infection was mostly able to neutralize the variant, suggesting that booster doses of the vaccine could help to fend off infection.

Tottenham have been forced to call off their Europa Conference League tie at home against Rennes on Thursday night after an alarming rise in Covid cases at the club as English football confronted an escalating crisis.

Spurs also confirmed they had closed the first-team area of their training centre in Enfield, hours after Leicester reported that seven of their players had not travelled to their Europa League game at Napoli because of coronavirus or illness. Three members of staff did not make the trip either because of illness.

Tottenham said: “Discussions are ongoing with Uefa and we shall provide a further update on this fixture in due course.” Their manager, Antonio Conte, had earlier admitted he was “scared” as he revealed eight players and five coaches had tested positive for the virus. Spurs are now likely to ask the Premier League to postpone their match at Brighton on Sunday, and the visit to Leicester next Thursday is also set to be affected.

Some evidence from South Africa that the Omicron wave isn't particularly leading to a surge in hospitalisations - there are possible explanations for this that include the age profile of those testing positive, but also could point towards Omicron genuinely being less dangerous, but more transmissible than Delta.

A tiny percent of a huge number is still a big number. A largely mild but uncontrolled Omicron wave could cause a lot of pain, hospitalizations, and death across a country.

The ultimate impact of Omicron will depend on how tiny that tiny percent is and how huge that huge number is.

the study showed that blood from people who had received two doses of the vaccine and had a prior infection was mostly able to neutralize the variant, suggesting that booster doses of the vaccine could help to fend off infection.

and no life insurance

[50] My guess is that they believe that 3 exposures is the optimal amount of probably/hopefully enough immune stimulation needed.

Medical experts warn that the 44% of people in Michigan who remain unvaccinated are putting not only themselves at risk, but increasingly, their entire community.

At Oaklawn Hospital, a small community hospital in Marshall, chief medical officer Dr. J. Summer Liston-Crandall said several patients have arrived after heart attacks, only to have to wait days, or even weeks to be transferred to another hospital that can perform a cardiac catheterization. Patients with brain bleeds have been sent home from the emergency department to recuperate, rather than being transferred to a larger hospital with neurosurgeons on staff who can evaluate the patients. And other patients have arrived at the hospital’s emergency department only to be given counseling on end-of-life care and a referral to hospice, without the patients ever being admitted to the hospital.

The local health department of a rural southern Missouri county is halting its COVID-19 response efforts after Attorney General Eric Schmitt wrote agencies this week demanding they drop mitigation measures.

It will no longer investigate COVID cases, contact-trace, issue directives for exposed residents to quarantine themselves or make public announcements of case numbers and deaths.

Hombre Brotani Posted: December 09, 2021 at 08:57 PM (#6056852)

My wife's cousin passed away yesterday, having suffered a massive stroke after a month-long bout with covid. He was unvaccinated. He was a great believer in Q and covid conspiracy theories, and spent much of the last few years posting about it and jabbing at relatives who didn't agree with him. He leaves behind a wife and 11-year-old daughter, a pile of debt, and no life insurance.

I don't know him. He and I have never met. My wife's side of the family on my coast is debating whether or not to fly cross country from California to Virginia for his funeral, which would effectively blow up our Christmas plans. I wonder how many thousands of times families across the country have had to deal with this stupid, stupid, stupid bullsh!t, and how many more times this will have to happen.

RJ, if it helps, i had almost no negative reaction to my booster (Moderna). A little soreness at the injection point, nothing else.

The UK just had 78,000 cases reported today, the most ever. They aren't as clean a laboratory as Norway/Denmark, since delta has been rampant in UK for a while. Still we should be getting a feel for how serious the effects of omicron are in the UK, but we might have to wait until early January.

Preliminary data, published online Wednesday, gives us the first look at how omicron may behave inside the respiratory tract — and the data offers a tantalizing clue as to why this heavily mutated variant is spreading so fast and even outcompeting delta.

The omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant does, scientists at the University of Hong Kong report. The variant reaches also higher levels in the tissue, compared to delta, 48 hours after infection.
…
Chan and his colleagues also ran the experiments with lung tissue. Interestingly, inside that tissue, omicron was less efficient at infecting cells than delta or the original version of the virus.

Absolutely. A common thing to hear is that ‘they aren’t the same as they were before.’ Families say that. I think it is shocking to people, because they seem to believe that beating the infection means they can expect they are their family member will be as they were before.

People are sometimes extremely emotional, almost like their behaviors have reverted to the toddler years. Small requests, such as to drink more water, can send big, formerly strong and healthy men into hysterics. They get frustrated very easily. They start bawling over everything. It is shocking. They throw things. I think that’s where some of the violence comes from. This is all super normal to us now.

Some people are entirely flat. Many have various levels of receptive or expressive aphasia or both. You have to be extremely patient, repetitive, and go slow. You hear what their lives were like before Covid, and the cognitive decline is astonishing. Many are discharged to facilities. They just can’t go home, even with family support. It’s actually not a good idea to go home necessarily, because they can’t manage their own long term care, and most families don’t understand it either.

Some people develop rapid onset dementia, long after the delirium has passed. It makes sense when there was a CVA, either before, during, or after their initial admission. It also makes sense when there wasn’t, because as you know, covids have extremely elevated D dimer results (e.g. >10.0…which is as high as it goes on our system). You know there were microembolisms. How would that plus the hypoxia not affect the brain, and how would that not be very likely permanent? It is always weird that they were just a business owner, working long days and supporting a family etc, and now they’re this person in front of you.

They can have neuropathy or ataxia, even absent visible thrombi. Other common complications long term are extreme fatigue that is crippling, insomnia, depression, and anxiety that does not respond well to treatment. The loss of taste and smell can present a huge problem and lead to readmissions. We place a lotta CorTraks.

We tend to view and treat these people as having a TBI. And I’m also lumping in people who had a positive PCR, never were sick enough to need a bed, but now have all these new problems after the acute illness is ‘over’.

I don’t read up on Covid much when I’m not at work. I need a break. But the long term effects of Covid get nowhere near enough attention, from what I can tell. Many of these people are disabled, and they count as a success story. The amputations are obvious in how they cause disability, but the impact on the brain is more of a mystery, even though it’s also more disabling in a sense. One can get a prosthetic leg but not a prosthetic brain.

Then, of course, we d/c people who come back in maybe a month or so later for MI, CVA, etc. And they rapidly decline and die. That isn’t a Covid death on the books.

Also, this is anecdotal, but most of my young patients with serious immediate and long term effects are males.

Thank you for what you do. I’m just one freaking nurse, and I’ve seen so much of these long term effects. The number of people suffering from them must be beyond what any of us can imagine.