If you are interested in epidemiological data, you might find this paper interesting:
To add some anecdotal evidence: four people I know were diagnosed with COVID this week. Two of them previously infected, all of them fully vaccinated, one boosted. They were not tested for the specific variant. Quite mild symptoms, fortunately.
Thanks for the link, interesting to see new data coming in on the variant.
So does the original and Delta variant. Nothing new here.
You’re creating a false equivalence here. It’s pretty clear that omicron is responsible for a far higher percentage of breakthrough cases than Delta.
Based on what data? We’ve been dealing with Delta since around May, Omicron for a little over a month. There’s been breakthrough cases since the beginning, as there always has and will be as no vaccine has ever claimed to be foolproof.
There’s still way more people getting Delta than Omicron at this point and the more people that get vaccinated shift the term from infected to “breakthrough”.
People need to stop being obsessed with variants, the more people that vaccinate, the more variants. That’s how it works. The harder it is for a virus to survive forces a mutation. Its as good as its " bad".
People should be lining up to catch Omicron from what it seems. I didn’t have a bad time at all with Delta, from what we know so far Omicron is a complete joke compared to Delta and the original strain assuming your healthy as a whole and not immune compromised or have other comorbidities that could complicate it.
Based on what data?
Epidemiological data showing that, given the same exposure, the Omicron variant is more likely than other variantes to infect a previously immunized individual (greater “adjusted odds ratio”):
Molecular data showing that the neutralizing activity in immunized individuals is lower for Omicron than other variants:
EDIT: I do disagree with the statement “It’s pretty clear that omicron is responsible for a far higher percentage of breakthrough cases than Delta.” I follow specifically the data in the Netherlands, so the statement might be true for a different country. According to the RIVM, in the Netherlands, between 22 November - 19 December 2021, there were 44,368 reported Delta breakthrough infections and only 815 Omicron breakthrough infections. The data suggests that we will see Omicron become dominant over the next few months.
Ontario went from a steady 1k cases per day with Delta to 10k cases since Omicron started making its way through the population. Data from UK and Africa suggests that it’s far more infectious and that double dose offers practically no protection against it in terms of infection. However, symptoms for vaccinated people are less severe.
People need to stop being obsessed with variants, the more people that vaccinate, the more variants. That’s how it works. The harder it is for a virus to survive forces a mutation. Its as good as its " bad".
People should be lining up to catch Omicron from what it seems.
That’s not how it works. Variants come about not just from evolutionary pressures, but also people passing around the virus. The more transmission, the more copies. The more copies, the more mutations. And the more mutations, the more variants. By reducing risk of transmission, vaccines help avoid variants. That’s why it’s vital to get vaccines to regions that have low rates, especially Africa. Without something close to universal vaccination availability, we’ll just keep getting waves of variants.
