Omicron peaking in South Africa already

[Loki Liesmith]

Very odd.

Link to tweet

?s=21

[Elessar Zappa]

1. Weird.

I wonder what’s going on?

[bullwinkle428]

2. I'm personally paying more attention to the UK, as the population demographics

are a bit more similar in terms of age, distribution of ethnicity, etc.

Case levels exploding, but too early to determine effect on hospitalizations and deaths.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

[LisaL]

3. Their delta wave also peaked quickly.

And went down quickly. Our delta wave is still going, and it is not coming down on its own. Omicron might displace delta here, but our waves are not behaving as they do in South Africa.

[FBaggins]

4. Viruses impact different populations differently

It isn’t just masks and vaccination statuses. Those just happen to be the things that public policy can best impact.

Sometimes they spike rapidly with a high implied Rnaught and then fade just as quickly without hitting the whole population - but you can’t know that in advance or infer it from the same path in an area with different genetics/climate/etc.

Similarly, it could be less severe (symptom-wise) there, but worse here… and vice-Versa

We’ll find out soon enough.

[taxi]

5. The 5 day forecast there has temps in the 70's and 80's

Sunrise is about 5am and sunset is fourteen hours later at 7pm. Maybe in South Africa people enjoy being outside more in the summer?

[LisaL]

9. Yep, it's summer there.

NT

[Hortensis]

6. Darn, I've used up my freebies from Intelligencer. Here's another tweet

of a clip from it at least:

Link to tweet

[Wingus Dingus]

7. I can think of a few reasons why it doesn't keep going up--

maybe, despite the hype, Omicron is similar enough to other variants that prior covid infection and vaccination basically stop it in its tracks before it infects. Maybe there are only so many people left in that country who are both completely naive to the virus and are unvaxxed, and the big sweep hit them and now it's running out of victims. And how many people are they testing--everyone? Even the asymptomatic? Maybe there's just a lot of asymptomatic cases.

[LisaL]

8. If there is one thing everybody agrees on, it's that omicron is much more infectious and easily

breaks through the vaccines or natural infection. They are not testing to catch all infections. The positivity rate is 30%. The actual number of infected are clearly much larger than official numbers.