Coronavirus (2021) thread

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Marvin said:
The mild illness argument is coming from some GPs and Drs who make videos and gets picked up and repeated.

They should present the argument another way: no reason to think that omicron is any less virulent than any other previous strain but in populations with high exposure to the virus it will lead to a predominantly mild illness.

That still leaves us with a big problem that's hard to quantify because if you have 250,000 infections a day, and some people who have limited exposure / poor immune response, you are going to see 'some' serious illness.

We'll probably get a better handle on this when we see the extent of hospitalisation in the limited omicron infections we have seen in the UK population i.e. more accurate information going into models.
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It is not just a few GPs though. The WHO have said publically that early research suggests that Omicron is mild and that has been backed up EU health officials. It is too early to say what the outcome will be in the Uk where the population is very different to South Africa. I agree it is correct to be cautious till we know the full picture though.
 
Psychedelic Casual said:
Scientists don’t make predictions based on their own knowledge and opinion; they forecast what might happen going off past data. They can only use past data and the results can only come from that data. Their own expertise doesn’t come into it.

If the forecast doesn’t fit with the real world occurrences, it doesn’t mean the scientists were wrong, it simply shows that what they’re investigating is variable.

With Covid, scientists had to use other viruses as their dataset because there’s no past data for Covid in humans. But they can’t just tell us what they think is going to happen, they have to use data, and action can only be taken from data.
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They don't go by past data. If they did the predictions in March, July and late September would have become more accurate with each wave with latest actuals somewhere between the lower and upper quartile predictions.
Last September the lower quartile prediction was between two and three times HIGHER than the actual numbers.
As a statistician the SAGE models really, really bug me. They are shit and are are virtually useless.
They are so consistently bad that I will take their lower quartile prediction as the very worst case and scale it back from there.
 
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M18CTID said:
Is it just me or do cases numbers in SA look to be on the decline?
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They have to be interpreted cautiously. Weekend figures tend to be patchy and there have been numerous technical hiccups, so we cannot hold too much stead in daily figures either way. Apparently, Wednesdays and Thursdays tend to be a better indicator, though that information was anecdotal. The price of PCR tests is set to drop in South Africa now, so that may lead to more people being tested and affect the numbers we see.
 
roubaixtuesday said:
Wishful thinking and denial.

I can't fathom the arrogance that, when almost every expert in the world disagrees , drives people to think "yeah, but I know better".

Rather than "I wonder where I might be mistaken".
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Are you worried this thread will die off and you’ll have to post in the rest of the forum or something?
 
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