I'm an attorney not a statistician. But ... Isn't computer modeling to predict hospitalizations and deaths how we got into this hysteria in the first place? I'm looking at you, Neil Ferguson.
It is a mixed bag, you know. You can put anything into a model. But there are practical questions, like for example should I buy extra supplies in case of a lockdown (which I would certainly oppose, but it could happen).
Bad modeling was. March 17, 2020, John Ioannidis correctly predicted (in an article in STAT) the IFR and course of the pandemic while Bill Gates pushed another hysterical overreaction from Neil Ferguson and his consistently wrong imperial college model.
I personally see far fewer deaths (250K-440K in the US between Jan 1st and the beginning of March adjusting Igor's fatality and hospitalization rates but using the rest of his model). I am not an expert, but I'd love to bet $1million I end up closer than anything a Ferguson model predicts. A 4-year-old throwing darts would end up closer.
It was exactly a spreadsheet like this that led to my awakening in April 2020. Every week I would also list the numbers found on Worldometer and for many countries, the figures seemed to line up. But as I live in Japan I also tracked Japan's figures, and lo and behold, they didn't add up. So I started to question the whole narrative.
I hope your getting Bill’s support...he pays well.
“Ferguson co-founded the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, based at Imperial, in 2008. It is the leading body advising national governments on pathogen outbreaks. It gets tens of millions of dollars in annual funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…”
Gates largess also included a separate, unrelated grant of $79 million to Imperial College in March. Gates has been the foremost, highest-visibility proponent of vaccinations for COVID and the founder of the initiative “The Decade of Vaccines.” One of the talents tapped by Gates to drive the initiative is Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Johan Giesecke, the former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has called Ferguson’s model:
““the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also says it was, sadly, “one of the most wrong.””
May God Bless You, Igor. You do an amazing amount of research and put so much effort, time, and critical thinking into your posts. I look forward to them. In an earlier post (yesterday) I wrote that I didn’t think Omnicron would be as deadly as Delta. And yet, your reasoning that it might be is compelling. It kinda haunts me. Medical Ppl on the ground in S Africa insist it isn’t deadly... and yet, what to make of the hospitalization rates? Do we know what form of testing they use? Comorbidities in those hospitalized? I remain hopeful but skeptical and uneasy. We haven’t yet had a case in my hospital but our weather has been unseasonably warm. Thanks for all you do for us.
August, thank you very much for your presence here, I do recall that you are a medical professional, so your perspective here is much appreciated.
It is an open question as to how deadly it is. I think that it will be deadlier in the USA, UK or Denmark than in South Africa, and specifically in USA and UK it will be somewhat worse than Denmark because Denmark has a healthier population.
I keep tracking a lot of things, but specifically looking at Denmark. They publish their "Omikronreporten" every day.
It shows hospitalization rates for Omicron and for Delta for the last couple of weeks. It says Delta is 1.5% and Omicron is 0.7%. But Omicron grows very rapidly and delta is declining as of the last few days. So Omicron virulence is understated and Delta may be overstated or just about right.
As of today, looking at cases up to a week ago (2,152 cases as of Dec 8) and hospitalizations today (57 total) we get 1.5% hospitalization rate for Omicron. It is harder to make this time lag adjustment for Delta because the numbers are not available, so I will leave Delta at 1.5% for now.
This means hospitalization rates in Denmark are about same with very modest degree of confidence.
That does not mean that deaths will also be comparable and I hope that Omicron is less deadly.
Data is now overwhelmingly showing extremely mild symptoms from COVID. Basically cold symptoms. And in many/most “cases” it probably is just a cold due to false positives.
So at this point I would strongly urge you to reconsider your worries about an omicron surge. The risk at this point is false positives and further “casedemic.” Not actual harm from the virus.
In other words you’re feeding the beast with your latest posts.
Believe me, I resist the urge to post more Omicron updates as much as I can. I understand your sentiment.
Although, I must say that from the antivaxx perspective, severe vaccine evading Omicron is validation for absolutely everything that antivaxxers were saying for over a year. We obviously do not want any suffering, but severe Omicron and the resulting medical, social and economic disturbance is the ultimate "I told you so".
For example, severe omicron would show that vaccinating young people was a mistake, that vaccinating with a single-epitope vaxx is a mistake, that untested mRNA technology will make people more vulnerable, that vaxx will lead to deadly variants (Geert) etc.
Lockdowns are almost inevitable, like them or not, but they will be completely ineffective. You can play with my model and see that modest lockdowns simply expend the pandemic by a couple of weeks.
I try to follow the data and the data so far suggest that Omicron is extremely mild and most cases are probably just false positives, but I am staying tuned to new data, including ADE data.
I have wondered the same thing...there has been zero reporting that I can find on the severity of Omicron in the unvaccinated who have contracted it, but plenty about how vaccinated people are having less severe cases, thanks to vaccination. It's nonsensical. I can't tell if governments are deliberately leaving out that information so as not to freak people out because unvaccinated are severely ill, or to hide the fact that unvaccinated are less severely ill than vaccinated....
omicron preferentially infecting the vaccinated is basically the definition of ADE no? Just because the ADE results in only enhancement of a mild disease, doesn't make it any less of an ADE.
If this is the case and omicron really does preferentially infect the vaccinated as opposed to to the non-vaccinated recovered and non-vaccinated uninfected, then the only logical mechanism for this is that the vaccinated have something about them that assists the infection by omicron, which is probably non-neutralizing antibodies coupled with bypassed neutralizing antibodies geared towards non-Omicron spike proteins (whereas the non-vaccinated recovered would also have antibodies to the nucleotide proteins which seem to be conserved and thus the antibodies to those retain some effectiveness in fighting off infection).
If this is even remotely the case the world dodged a MASSIVE BULLET if omicron is milder, because if it was as severe (or worse) than say Delta, Alpha or the wildtype Wuhan strain, but still as reportedly transmissible as omicron is now then highly vaccinated societies and their followers in the developing world (which would have between say 15-40% of their adult population vaccinated) would REALLY see overwhelmed hospitals as you postulated in an earlier post and we would enter into an even worse dystopia than the one we are currently experiencing (since the powers that be aren't going to admit that what they did was a mistake, but shift the blame elsewhere and double-down on their measures...at least until there was enough anger among (now rightly) fearful vaccinated persons that that they boot them out of office (via election or protest), but there is no guarantee that those who come after won't decide that even harsher measures aren't the way to go (basically importing the North Korea-model of society, governance and travel...and then pumping it full of steroids)
Seven people believed to have had the Omicron variant had died as of Thursday, up from one death in the UKHSA's previous data which ran up to Tuesday. Admissions to hospital of people thought to have the variant increased to 85 from 65.
Probably since the 'vaccines' are largely responsible for enhancing the generation of any mutations. Note: the word variant is used as it is apparently scarier for the uneducated.
Igor, you have not thought this through! Or perhaps you have? Now anyone on the planet can happily plug in numbers picked from the air and generate 'predictions' to scare the shit out of the gullible population which at present is about 85%. Whheeeee! Now I can be a Neil Ferguson acolyte and propel the madness into 2030!
My biggest thought is the number of recovered seems to include those who were vax-first, then got covid. I don't think those people are as well off as pure-blood, covid first, no jab (the Chartruese). Plus, many people claim infections because of possibly faulty PCR tests.
This just deflates the prior infected and makes the hosp/death number higher.
It is by Phillipe Lemoine and it's a long read (here is a very good summary write up about it by Noah Carl which I'm sure will encourage anyone to read the full article: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/30/population-structure-and-the-cyclical-pattern-of-epidemic-waves/ ) and it is incredible in how it seemingly better models what we have seen and demonstrates how what we have seen in the covid waves could easily be interpreted by many current models as lockdowns having an effect when in fact the effect was negligible or zero (he specifically generated a wave with his model in which no lockdown occurred and asked a different model, one like what many mainstream advisors and governments use, to estimate the effect of a lockdown the he told the model occurred on a particular date and the mainstream model came back to estimate that lockdown reduced cases by 40% in that wave. Which obviously is not correct since the wave he generated specifically didn't have any lockdowns.
Don't know if you can make enough of Lemoine's article to be able to incorporate his workings into your model. But hope it would be of interest and of help for you.
Yeah, I hate lockdowns. And we should NOT lock down.
If we do not lock down, the entire covid pandemic will be over by the end of February. Just help some old people stay isolated, deliver food etc and let it roll, baby.
Something this contagious cannot be stopped by half-measure lockdowns.
Which is implying that full measure lockdowns work. I have always been under the belief that attempting to hide from a highly contagious virus is fools folly......even WuFlu Fauci said masks were only a delaying tactic to keep from over loading hospitals.
Plenty of peer-reviewed literature shows that lockdowns don't work in stopping severe Covid or deaths, and emerging research shows they cause truly massive harm. The vast majority of the harm attributed to the virus has been caused by lockdowns and fear, both of which drive isolation and despair and thus exacerbate almost all normal causes of death.
Also, I wrote the message quoted below in resopnse to "aramis". The gist of the below is that I am not sure why antivaxxers hate the idea that omicron is not milder.
Here it is:
===================
Believe me, I resist the urge to post more Omicron updates as much as I can. I understand your sentiment.
Although, I must say that from the antivaxx perspective, severe vaccine evading Omicron is validation for absolutely everything that antivaxxers were saying for over a year. We obviously do not want any suffering, but severe Omicron and the resulting medical, social and economic disturbance is the ultimate "I told you so".
For example, severe omicron would show that vaccinating young people was a mistake, that vaccinating with a single-epitope vaxx is a mistake, that untested mRNA technology will make people more vulnerable, that vaxx will lead to deadly variants (Geert) etc.
Lockdowns are almost inevitable, like them or not, but they will be completely ineffective. You can play with my model and see that modest lockdowns simply expend the pandemic by a couple of weeks.
What I'm suggesting goes further than this: it's quitely likely that a large number of the "cases" are just false positives that result from massive increases in testing in response to panic about Omicron, which when testing asymptomatics results in large majority of false positives. Combine this background dynamic with extremely low hospitalization for Omicron and still zero deaths, it seems pretty likely that the whole Omicron thing is a nothing burger. Have you dug into and understood the Positive Predictive Value catastrophe that results from widespread asymptomatic testing?
The problem is using a SIR model. Covid doesn't appear to follow SIR very well. It appears to be more like a SIR(S) model, with a 'superspreader' at the end. The important aspect then is the proportion of the population that are likely to be a superspreader and the delay between infection and becoming a superspreader. Each covid wave continues until the number of potential superspreaders drops below a threshold (essentially related to the herd immunity threshold). (it has been suggested that the impact of the vaccines is to increase the risk of being a superspreader -- thus you see no specific increase in transmission in the vaccinated population if you investigate at an individual level, but you definitely see much higher case loads in those countries that have high vaccination rates).
Now, I suppose that's a nuance, because we will get an Omicron wave and we will have massive levels of hospitalisations. Hospitals are already busy (not from covid, something else) and healthcare won't be able to cope -- thus we'll see deaths in many purely because of lack of effective healthcare. So, I'd say IRO 100k deaths is rather likely...
You have a point. But Omicron is particularly contagious and particularly fast. This implies a fast course that is easier to model. There is no doubt that Covid in general does not follow the SIR model. However it does not mean that modeling is futile.
There is zero actual evidence that a) the Moronic variant exists and b) what its contagiousness might be. There's more I can say on this but really, the whole modelling issue is insane.
The more is contagiousness, the steeper is the curve in the beginning. The peaks would be higher and the duration of pandemic would be shorter.
Try to select contagiousness to match the beginning of the curve in your country. Usually it is 8-10 times a week increase in cases in the beginning, to become less steep as time goes on.
Interesting. It is interesting that they seem to "agree with me", but I have a few words of caution.
A point to note is that Imperial College, home to the infamous professor Neil Ferguson, received enormous donations from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and as such we need to look at what comes out of there, very critically.
This specific press release seems to be written kind of carelessly, specifically it is wrong about natural immunity's protection. But click and see the PDF, there are many interesting points to look at.
- Somehow Omicron seems to infect Black and African people (UK seems to be making a distinction) preferentially. It may be just an artifact of Black community being "seeded" by visitors from Africa, a few weeks ahead of White people.
- Only 1.2% of Delta Covid are reinfections
- The most interesting question for me -- reinfection rate by vaccinated status -- is vaguely mentioned in part 2.3, but not looked at in depth, I wonder why.
The imperial college and Neil Ferguson have had hysterical over reactions to every epidemic, real and perceived, for the last 2 and 1/2 decades. Bill Gates loves them - they predicted 2 million US deaths by August 1, 2020 even with mitigation.
Well, some models were pretty good (John Ioannidis, Stat, 3/17/2020). The problem is Bill Gares pushed Neil Ferguson’s consistently completely wrong imperial college model which is basically gobblygook numbers to “justify” hysterical overreactions to imagined threats. His models are worse than Al Gore’s climate predictions.
Modeling has a place in science but political scientists like Neil Ferguson, Gates, Fauci, the MSM create nonsense political science “models” they dream up out of thin air that has nothing to do with actual replication of outcomes or real observed data.
"Overall, though, the figures out of Denmark largely back those from South Africa - and make clear that the reason that Europe has seen a massive rise in cases and hospitalizations this fall has nothing to do with Omicron and everything to do with vaccine failure."
I'm an attorney not a statistician. But ... Isn't computer modeling to predict hospitalizations and deaths how we got into this hysteria in the first place? I'm looking at you, Neil Ferguson.
It is a mixed bag, you know. You can put anything into a model. But there are practical questions, like for example should I buy extra supplies in case of a lockdown (which I would certainly oppose, but it could happen).
Bad modeling was. March 17, 2020, John Ioannidis correctly predicted (in an article in STAT) the IFR and course of the pandemic while Bill Gates pushed another hysterical overreaction from Neil Ferguson and his consistently wrong imperial college model.
I personally see far fewer deaths (250K-440K in the US between Jan 1st and the beginning of March adjusting Igor's fatality and hospitalization rates but using the rest of his model). I am not an expert, but I'd love to bet $1million I end up closer than anything a Ferguson model predicts. A 4-year-old throwing darts would end up closer.
It was exactly a spreadsheet like this that led to my awakening in April 2020. Every week I would also list the numbers found on Worldometer and for many countries, the figures seemed to line up. But as I live in Japan I also tracked Japan's figures, and lo and behold, they didn't add up. So I started to question the whole narrative.
Worldometer is known to unreliable.
I hope your getting Bill’s support...he pays well.
“Ferguson co-founded the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, based at Imperial, in 2008. It is the leading body advising national governments on pathogen outbreaks. It gets tens of millions of dollars in annual funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…”
Gates largess also included a separate, unrelated grant of $79 million to Imperial College in March. Gates has been the foremost, highest-visibility proponent of vaccinations for COVID and the founder of the initiative “The Decade of Vaccines.” One of the talents tapped by Gates to drive the initiative is Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Johan Giesecke, the former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has called Ferguson’s model:
““the most influential scientific paper” in memory. He also says it was, sadly, “one of the most wrong.””
You may go down in history as the new Neil Ferguson.
May God Bless You, Igor. You do an amazing amount of research and put so much effort, time, and critical thinking into your posts. I look forward to them. In an earlier post (yesterday) I wrote that I didn’t think Omnicron would be as deadly as Delta. And yet, your reasoning that it might be is compelling. It kinda haunts me. Medical Ppl on the ground in S Africa insist it isn’t deadly... and yet, what to make of the hospitalization rates? Do we know what form of testing they use? Comorbidities in those hospitalized? I remain hopeful but skeptical and uneasy. We haven’t yet had a case in my hospital but our weather has been unseasonably warm. Thanks for all you do for us.
August, thank you very much for your presence here, I do recall that you are a medical professional, so your perspective here is much appreciated.
It is an open question as to how deadly it is. I think that it will be deadlier in the USA, UK or Denmark than in South Africa, and specifically in USA and UK it will be somewhat worse than Denmark because Denmark has a healthier population.
I keep tracking a lot of things, but specifically looking at Denmark. They publish their "Omikronreporten" every day.
https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder
It shows hospitalization rates for Omicron and for Delta for the last couple of weeks. It says Delta is 1.5% and Omicron is 0.7%. But Omicron grows very rapidly and delta is declining as of the last few days. So Omicron virulence is understated and Delta may be overstated or just about right.
As of today, looking at cases up to a week ago (2,152 cases as of Dec 8) and hospitalizations today (57 total) we get 1.5% hospitalization rate for Omicron. It is harder to make this time lag adjustment for Delta because the numbers are not available, so I will leave Delta at 1.5% for now.
This means hospitalization rates in Denmark are about same with very modest degree of confidence.
That does not mean that deaths will also be comparable and I hope that Omicron is less deadly.
Data is now overwhelmingly showing extremely mild symptoms from COVID. Basically cold symptoms. And in many/most “cases” it probably is just a cold due to false positives.
So at this point I would strongly urge you to reconsider your worries about an omicron surge. The risk at this point is false positives and further “casedemic.” Not actual harm from the virus.
In other words you’re feeding the beast with your latest posts.
Believe me, I resist the urge to post more Omicron updates as much as I can. I understand your sentiment.
Although, I must say that from the antivaxx perspective, severe vaccine evading Omicron is validation for absolutely everything that antivaxxers were saying for over a year. We obviously do not want any suffering, but severe Omicron and the resulting medical, social and economic disturbance is the ultimate "I told you so".
For example, severe omicron would show that vaccinating young people was a mistake, that vaccinating with a single-epitope vaxx is a mistake, that untested mRNA technology will make people more vulnerable, that vaxx will lead to deadly variants (Geert) etc.
Lockdowns are almost inevitable, like them or not, but they will be completely ineffective. You can play with my model and see that modest lockdowns simply expend the pandemic by a couple of weeks.
I try to follow the data and the data so far suggest that Omicron is extremely mild and most cases are probably just false positives, but I am staying tuned to new data, including ADE data.
Do you know of any interesting ADE data?
All I know is that Omicron preferentially infects the vaxxed. Is there something else interesting?
There is not much information on severity in vaxxed vs unvaxxed. I wonder if this is just an accident or?
I have wondered the same thing...there has been zero reporting that I can find on the severity of Omicron in the unvaccinated who have contracted it, but plenty about how vaccinated people are having less severe cases, thanks to vaccination. It's nonsensical. I can't tell if governments are deliberately leaving out that information so as not to freak people out because unvaccinated are severely ill, or to hide the fact that unvaccinated are less severely ill than vaccinated....
There is little death data that I am aware of, but they could break down hospitalizations by vaccination. Denmark already has 77 hospitalized.
omicron preferentially infecting the vaccinated is basically the definition of ADE no? Just because the ADE results in only enhancement of a mild disease, doesn't make it any less of an ADE.
If this is the case and omicron really does preferentially infect the vaccinated as opposed to to the non-vaccinated recovered and non-vaccinated uninfected, then the only logical mechanism for this is that the vaccinated have something about them that assists the infection by omicron, which is probably non-neutralizing antibodies coupled with bypassed neutralizing antibodies geared towards non-Omicron spike proteins (whereas the non-vaccinated recovered would also have antibodies to the nucleotide proteins which seem to be conserved and thus the antibodies to those retain some effectiveness in fighting off infection).
If this is even remotely the case the world dodged a MASSIVE BULLET if omicron is milder, because if it was as severe (or worse) than say Delta, Alpha or the wildtype Wuhan strain, but still as reportedly transmissible as omicron is now then highly vaccinated societies and their followers in the developing world (which would have between say 15-40% of their adult population vaccinated) would REALLY see overwhelmed hospitals as you postulated in an earlier post and we would enter into an even worse dystopia than the one we are currently experiencing (since the powers that be aren't going to admit that what they did was a mistake, but shift the blame elsewhere and double-down on their measures...at least until there was enough anger among (now rightly) fearful vaccinated persons that that they boot them out of office (via election or protest), but there is no guarantee that those who come after won't decide that even harsher measures aren't the way to go (basically importing the North Korea-model of society, governance and travel...and then pumping it full of steroids)
Sweet! Thank you!
No sky is falling yet in SA, to the contrary: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/covid-is-over/comments
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/omicron-in-uk-surge-shows-bigger-wave-ahead-alarm-sounded-in-london-2659077
Seven people believed to have had the Omicron variant had died as of Thursday, up from one death in the UKHSA's previous data which ran up to Tuesday. Admissions to hospital of people thought to have the variant increased to 85 from 65.
Why is it "believed" and "thought"? They don't trust themselves? But want us to trust their numbers? Just saying. Still waiting till the 23rd.
Interesting, thanks, I’ll download and have a go now. Will Omicron be more severe in highly vaccinated countries?
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/reading-between-the-lines-chris-witty
Probably since the 'vaccines' are largely responsible for enhancing the generation of any mutations. Note: the word variant is used as it is apparently scarier for the uneducated.
Igor, you have not thought this through! Or perhaps you have? Now anyone on the planet can happily plug in numbers picked from the air and generate 'predictions' to scare the shit out of the gullible population which at present is about 85%. Whheeeee! Now I can be a Neil Ferguson acolyte and propel the madness into 2030!
This is what makes life fun.
My biggest thought is the number of recovered seems to include those who were vax-first, then got covid. I don't think those people are as well off as pure-blood, covid first, no jab (the Chartruese). Plus, many people claim infections because of possibly faulty PCR tests.
This just deflates the prior infected and makes the hosp/death number higher.
Great!
By the way have you seen this article yet?
https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/have-we-been-thinking-about-the-pandemic-wrong-the-effect-of-population-structure-on-transmission/
It is by Phillipe Lemoine and it's a long read (here is a very good summary write up about it by Noah Carl which I'm sure will encourage anyone to read the full article: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/30/population-structure-and-the-cyclical-pattern-of-epidemic-waves/ ) and it is incredible in how it seemingly better models what we have seen and demonstrates how what we have seen in the covid waves could easily be interpreted by many current models as lockdowns having an effect when in fact the effect was negligible or zero (he specifically generated a wave with his model in which no lockdown occurred and asked a different model, one like what many mainstream advisors and governments use, to estimate the effect of a lockdown the he told the model occurred on a particular date and the mainstream model came back to estimate that lockdown reduced cases by 40% in that wave. Which obviously is not correct since the wave he generated specifically didn't have any lockdowns.
Don't know if you can make enough of Lemoine's article to be able to incorporate his workings into your model. But hope it would be of interest and of help for you.
I will read it. But also note that you can play with lockdowns in my model by modifying the "mitigation" column. Lockdowns have a short term effect
Lockdowns have caused most of the harm that is attributed to the virus. Lockdown and policies are the problem.
Yeah, I hate lockdowns. And we should NOT lock down.
If we do not lock down, the entire covid pandemic will be over by the end of February. Just help some old people stay isolated, deliver food etc and let it roll, baby.
Something this contagious cannot be stopped by half-measure lockdowns.
Which is implying that full measure lockdowns work. I have always been under the belief that attempting to hide from a highly contagious virus is fools folly......even WuFlu Fauci said masks were only a delaying tactic to keep from over loading hospitals.
Plenty of peer-reviewed literature shows that lockdowns don't work in stopping severe Covid or deaths, and emerging research shows they cause truly massive harm. The vast majority of the harm attributed to the virus has been caused by lockdowns and fear, both of which drive isolation and despair and thus exacerbate almost all normal causes of death.
Yeah, I hate lockdowns too.
Also, I wrote the message quoted below in resopnse to "aramis". The gist of the below is that I am not sure why antivaxxers hate the idea that omicron is not milder.
Here it is:
===================
Believe me, I resist the urge to post more Omicron updates as much as I can. I understand your sentiment.
Although, I must say that from the antivaxx perspective, severe vaccine evading Omicron is validation for absolutely everything that antivaxxers were saying for over a year. We obviously do not want any suffering, but severe Omicron and the resulting medical, social and economic disturbance is the ultimate "I told you so".
For example, severe omicron would show that vaccinating young people was a mistake, that vaccinating with a single-epitope vaxx is a mistake, that untested mRNA technology will make people more vulnerable, that vaxx will lead to deadly variants (Geert) etc.
Lockdowns are almost inevitable, like them or not, but they will be completely ineffective. You can play with my model and see that modest lockdowns simply expend the pandemic by a couple of weeks.
extend, not expend
Full measure lockdown is economic paralysis and death, and impossible in USA. Half measure lockdown will not stop omicron.
You can actually play with my model and put in a 50% lockdown in the "Mitigation" column. You will see that nothing changes in principle.
What I'm suggesting goes further than this: it's quitely likely that a large number of the "cases" are just false positives that result from massive increases in testing in response to panic about Omicron, which when testing asymptomatics results in large majority of false positives. Combine this background dynamic with extremely low hospitalization for Omicron and still zero deaths, it seems pretty likely that the whole Omicron thing is a nothing burger. Have you dug into and understood the Positive Predictive Value catastrophe that results from widespread asymptomatic testing?
Any suggestions on what to read? I will read gladly.
'play' is the operative word.
The problem is using a SIR model. Covid doesn't appear to follow SIR very well. It appears to be more like a SIR(S) model, with a 'superspreader' at the end. The important aspect then is the proportion of the population that are likely to be a superspreader and the delay between infection and becoming a superspreader. Each covid wave continues until the number of potential superspreaders drops below a threshold (essentially related to the herd immunity threshold). (it has been suggested that the impact of the vaccines is to increase the risk of being a superspreader -- thus you see no specific increase in transmission in the vaccinated population if you investigate at an individual level, but you definitely see much higher case loads in those countries that have high vaccination rates).
Now, I suppose that's a nuance, because we will get an Omicron wave and we will have massive levels of hospitalisations. Hospitals are already busy (not from covid, something else) and healthcare won't be able to cope -- thus we'll see deaths in many purely because of lack of effective healthcare. So, I'd say IRO 100k deaths is rather likely...
You have a point. But Omicron is particularly contagious and particularly fast. This implies a fast course that is easier to model. There is no doubt that Covid in general does not follow the SIR model. However it does not mean that modeling is futile.
There is zero actual evidence that a) the Moronic variant exists and b) what its contagiousness might be. There's more I can say on this but really, the whole modelling issue is insane.
Just a question, I'm a non believer in viruses infectivity so how do I compensate for these?
Disease Parameters
Contagiousness 1
Days of Infectiousness 5
Implied Recovery Rate 0.2
Do I just take them from official sources if they say that they exist. Or they standard across this virus of Chronus?
Big thank you btw.
The more is contagiousness, the steeper is the curve in the beginning. The peaks would be higher and the duration of pandemic would be shorter.
Try to select contagiousness to match the beginning of the curve in your country. Usually it is 8-10 times a week increase in cases in the beginning, to become less steep as time goes on.
Thanks.
Igor appears to be vindicated:
Modelling suggests rapid spread of Omicron in England but same severity as Delta
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-rapid-spread-omicron-england/
Interesting. It is interesting that they seem to "agree with me", but I have a few words of caution.
A point to note is that Imperial College, home to the infamous professor Neil Ferguson, received enormous donations from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and as such we need to look at what comes out of there, very critically.
This specific press release seems to be written kind of carelessly, specifically it is wrong about natural immunity's protection. But click and see the PDF, there are many interesting points to look at.
- Somehow Omicron seems to infect Black and African people (UK seems to be making a distinction) preferentially. It may be just an artifact of Black community being "seeded" by visitors from Africa, a few weeks ahead of White people.
- Only 1.2% of Delta Covid are reinfections
- The most interesting question for me -- reinfection rate by vaccinated status -- is vaguely mentioned in part 2.3, but not looked at in depth, I wonder why.
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/warning-sars-cov-2-surges-will-make-the-end-of-2021-far-worse-than-last-year-2022-marks-the-beginning-of-catastrophic-surges-that-will-peak-in-2024
This hints at more HIV-like attributes emerging.
It hints at the "vaccinations" being an utter disaster
The imperial college and Neil Ferguson have had hysterical over reactions to every epidemic, real and perceived, for the last 2 and 1/2 decades. Bill Gates loves them - they predicted 2 million US deaths by August 1, 2020 even with mitigation.
oddly enough, talking to my sister in early 2020, I predicted 2 million deaths also, but through the entire pandemic
Was it a gut feeling, a ballpark, or a calculation? 2mln - about 0.7% population of the US. Or are we talking globally?
"Modeling suggests" is equivalent to "scientists agree", or what not?
Well, some models were pretty good (John Ioannidis, Stat, 3/17/2020). The problem is Bill Gares pushed Neil Ferguson’s consistently completely wrong imperial college model which is basically gobblygook numbers to “justify” hysterical overreactions to imagined threats. His models are worse than Al Gore’s climate predictions.
Modeling has a place in science but political scientists like Neil Ferguson, Gates, Fauci, the MSM create nonsense political science “models” they dream up out of thin air that has nothing to do with actual replication of outcomes or real observed data.
If you insist: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/stunning-covid-data-from-denmark
"Overall, though, the figures out of Denmark largely back those from South Africa - and make clear that the reason that Europe has seen a massive rise in cases and hospitalizations this fall has nothing to do with Omicron and everything to do with vaccine failure."
Just saying: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-17/s-africa-says-hospitalizations-in-omicron-wave-much-lower