73 Comments
Jan 4, 2022Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

That sewage data from Boston is absolutely astounding. Do we know if fecal viral load is higher for Omicron than for previous variants? Consequently, do we think that the RNA count in the sewage is directly proportional to cases across waves, or that some sort of correction factor would be needed to compare population case count from sewage results between periods where different variants dominated?

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

Happy new subscriber here! Wonderful post. Many thanks. Heartened to see the hospitalized vaxxed are trending older and/or with more co-morbidities but it Makes me wonder whether you think we need to start fourth shots for people (like my parents in the 75+ crowd) who were boosted as early as first week if September and don’t have great ability to mount robust tell etc response

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Can you please please at some point discuss the true risk for children under 5 who are not likely to be vaccine eligible for a while. I know we want everyone to take this seriously on a population level so we don’t want to compare it to flu but how dangerous is it for each susceptible kid?

-How does it really compare to other (respiratory) infections in this age group?

-What is the true prevalence of MISC by age groups?

There is so much noise and it is hard to really know what most kid’s individual risk is. This group seems forgotten. It is not possible to keep them cooped up for more than 2 years and with how contagious omicron is, every kid will likely get this.

Please please please share your thoughts or any resources you think is reliable. My heart fell out of my chest this morning when I dropped my kids off at school knowing the will get covid.

Thank you

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Thank you again for your time, knowledge, and experience. I wish I could corner some of my “people” and have them hear you. So many people are still contriving such absurd conspiracy theories that I’m sickened by it. How can they ignore what is happening across the GLOBE?!

I will continue to spread the information provided in hopes that I’ll reach someone before C19 comes them. 🌈❤️

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

The University of Michigan also has a great graph showing co-morbidity and age for its vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. I feel lucky to live in a college town during this pandemic. https://www.uofmhealth.org/coronavirus/covid19-numbers

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The advantage of your catbird YLE seat inspires a question I've not heard addressed: Are there any reports or statistics on incidents of DUAL infection--with both Delta and Omicron?

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This is so exhausting and just demoralizing. We can all be vaccinated and three are boosted and our waiting on CDC approval for our 14 year old guy. Daughter was positive and had super mild case thankfully. No one else in our house got it and I am still so scared of this virus. My kids schools are mask optional ( can’t even) and they are going in them. I teach children with severe learning differences and they have to see my mouth in order to learn and clear masks fog, but I do my best. The anxiety is really not healthy but how do we take all the news and process the risk? So grateful for your knowledge, honesty, and humble reporting. Feel like a pinball bouncing from hope to despair. This is hard

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

Cities are shockingly higher than the states: Chicago is at 1141 per 100,000! My local area Virginia Beach is at 603 per 100,000 with 21% test positivity over 7 days but yesterday's positivity was 32%! AND testing is all but impossible to find, of any kind!

Big question though for you: what about 11 year old that turned 12, so they only got the small dose first two shots but now should they still wait the 5 months for a booster? Is there any information for these families? I have friends whose pediatricians are just as clueless and it seems both frustrating and shocking that no one considered this issue, ESPECIALLY when we saw the little kids' doses fail for 2-5 year olds, so it's not out of the question what tested well for 5-11 may quickly not be enough for 12 year olds.

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founding

I've long thought testing sewage at international airports would be a good way to do disease surveillance. It seems the sewage testing underway at some larger cities suggests this could be doable at airports.

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I'm disillusioned by the lack of vaccine for the under 5 crowd. I've kept my children so isolated, and we can't stay like this indefinitely. Is there any sense in exposing them to this variant, given that it's supposed to be mild, to build up their immunity in case the next variant is more virulent? Or will the next variant more than likely not responded to Omicron antibodies? I know that this is not the ideal way to gain immunity, but without a vaccine, my hands feel tied.

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Just seen a news report on the variant you mention here. Thank God for you.

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Question on transmission. This question is predicated on a conversation I had online with some NBA fans: you've mentioned before omicron seemingly ignores prior immunity, especially in unvaxxed individuals. Has there been any record of someone getting omicron twice yet? I know things are still sort of early compared to when it arrived, just curious if this has been detected.

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Despite all our precautions, our family is Covid positive. We’ve been isolating a lot as our three year old has high and complex needs and obviously, no vaccination. Now that she’s caught Covid, will she have sufficient immunity to be able to again join in activities we ended such as her beloved kinder gymnastics classes? If so, how long might it last?

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About Ohio & Indiana: how do we know whether the high hospitalization rate is due to Delta vs due to Omicron + low vaccination rate?

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OK; so I'll play devil's advocate here:

It's disappointing that we chose to call these medical options "vaccines" because they really aren't the same. You can _still_ get COVID, it's just less likely to kill you or put you in the hospital. Yeah -- I know. Mutations are to blame (for the most part), but that's somewhat beside the point: when you get the hepatitis A VACCINE, you wont get hepatitis (A, at least) Of course, I recognize that no vaccine is 100% effective, but we have eradicated other viruses by using the "vaccine approach" where you have some form of immune response in most people and consequently they WONT GET THE VIRUS at all. COVID is not like that.

So maybe, the way the "coronapocalypse" (as I like to call it) ends is written on the wall: we all eventually will get some form of COVID-19. Those who choose to remain unvaccinated will eventually develop immunity or suffer more serious consequence (hospitalization, financial doom, lifelong health issues, and/or death) while those of us who are vaccinated (and have pushed the "Easy" button, so to speak) develop a much milder form of it that our body fights off.

We will produce a better immune response than many of today's vaccines. To wit: I'm vaccinated, but no booster _yet_. I got Omicron last month and have since recovered (10 days quarantine). My GF, who had the original virus back in Feb of 2020, was unaffected despite us living in close proximity, sleeping together unmasked every day, and not wearing masks at home. There was no point in me masking up because she was told to quarantine like me because I tested positive. But she never got sick.

So perhaps all these "breakthrough infections" are a good thing in the long run - bringing us closer to the holy grail of herd immunity and teaching the unvaccinated a potentially painful lesson in the real life consequences of your freedom to make bad choices.

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Given this reference below sent by friend RH, i have to wonder if it is perhaps nothing more than one or more advantageous recombination(s) in a person or people who had two concurrent strains.

I can see labeling something that behaves very differently and needs different approaches as being “deviant" from a treatment and public information standpoint. It may help with those functions.

Certainly, there are people suggesting a labeling change for Omicron, with suggestions varying from taxonomic relabeling to public designation changing from CoVID-19 to CoVID-21 if it continues to pan out as having less health impact on a number of people while being more infectious.

From a genetics and evolutionary standpoint, though, i see the trends which are occurring as being not at all unexpected from a viral survival, spread, and replication aspect, so for species or subspecies designations, especially in such a genetically active disease, i would rather be a lumper than a splitter taxonomically. We humans are far too inclined to split species easily in designations when impact upon us (or similarity to us) is involved. That is just my paleontology and E&E education speaking, of course, but that strikes me as being applicable.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.25.21268404v2

Cooccurrence of N501Y, P681R and other key mutations in SARS-CoV-2 Spike

Abstract

Analysis of circa 4.2 million severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genome sequences on Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) shows the spike mutations N501Y (common to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Omicron variants) and P681R (central to Delta variant spread) have cooccurred 3,678 times between 17 October 2020 and 1 November 2021. In contrast, the N501Y+P681H combination is present in Alpha and Omicron variants and circa 1.1 million entries. Two-thirds of the 3,678 cooccurrences were in France, Turkey or US (East Coast), and the rest across 62 other countries. 55.5% and 4.6% of the cooccurrences were Alpha Q.4 and Gamma P.1.8 sub-lineages acquiring P681R; 10.7% and 3.8% were Delta B.1.617.2 lineage and AY.33 sub-lineage acquiring N501Y; remaining 10.2% were in other variants. Despite the selective advantages individually conferred by N501Y and P681R, the N501Y+P681R combi-nation counterintuitively did not outcompete other variants in every instance. Although a relief to worldwide public health efforts, in vitro and in vivo studies are urgently required in the absence of a strong in silico explanation for this phenomenon. This study demonstrates a pipeline to analyse combinations of key mutations from public domain information in a systematic manner and provide early warnings of spread.

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