Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

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One reason why this is sort of relevant now, I think, is that it raises the question of how much we can extrapolate from the U.K. experience with Omicron to what we can expect here. So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in South Africa and to some degree and in the U.K. and how you think we should think about it in terms of what’s likely it happen in America.

The severity is something that’s been frustratingly hard to get a read on. If we recall back to spring 2020, we were arguing with John Ioannidis and everyone else — there was this vast range of severity that was being argued about at that time. So I can understand why it’s taking longer to resolve this time around as well.

And now we have to factor in the question of immunity, too.

Exactly. , it was mostly about the denominator. Now it’s kind of also about the denominator, but we also have to separate out people with immunity from people without. And I think that we definitely have an effect from immunity. It might also be intrinsically less severe. I think that’s entirely entirely possible, but also that what we’re seeing might be explained entirely by immunity. I don’t have a good guess between those two. But if we’re at like 80 percent-ish of the population with some kind of immunity in the U.S., and over 90 percent in the U.K., we can expect this wave to be more mild, because a larger fraction of cases will be reinfections or breakthroughs.

And so I would strongly suspect that on a case-fatality basis, the rate will be much lower with Omicron. But we’ll have a lot of cases, too, because now we have all of these individuals available to the virus that were weren’t available before.

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One reason why this is sort of relevant now, I think, is that it raises the question of how much we can extrapolate from the U.K. experience with Omicron to what we can expect here. So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in South Africa and to some degree and in the U.K. and how you think we should think about it in terms of what’s likely it happen in America.

The severity is something that’s been frustratingly hard to get a read on. If we recall back to spring 2020, we were arguing with John Ioannidis and everyone else — there was this vast range of severity that was being argued about at that time. So I can understand why it’s taking longer to resolve this time around as well.

And now we have to factor in the question of immunity, too.

Exactly. , it was mostly about the denominator. Now it’s kind of also about the denominator, but we also have to separate out people with immunity from people without. And I think that we definitely have an effect from immunity. It might also be intrinsically less severe. I think that’s entirely entirely possible, but also that what we’re seeing might be explained entirely by immunity. I don’t have a good guess between those two. But if we’re at like 80 percent-ish of the population with some kind of immunity in the U.S., and over 90 percent in the U.K., we can expect this wave to be more mild, because a larger fraction of cases will be reinfections or breakthroughs.

And so I would strongly suspect that on a case-fatality basis, the rate will be much lower with Omicron. But we’ll have a lot of cases, too, because now we have all of these individuals available to the virus that were weren’t available before.