Garbage. The South African dataset conclusively disproves the truth of your statement.
Garbage? No, your thoughts on Covid are the only thing that are garbage in this thread. WHO says they need at least 3 more weeks to determine if Omicron is less severe. And early studies are not finding evidence that Omicron is less severe:
The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be certified by peer review.
www.reuters.com
The study by researchers from Imperial College London in the UK estimates that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant is 5.4 times greater than that of the Delta variant
www.business-standard.com
The Omicron variant largely evades immunity from past infection or two vaccine doses according to the latest Imperial modelling.
www.imperial.ac.uk
The study finds no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta, judged by either the proportion of people testing positive who report symptoms, or by the proportion of cases seeking hospital care after infection, the authors of the study said. This same study found that protection from past infection of other variants provides as low as 19%, which is really not good. Those without a booster also have very little protection. And those with a booster, protection against infection was only 55-80%.
Experts agree that the South African data is anecdotal/not conclusive. Over 80% of the small group tested was under age 50, which they attribute to the high vaccination rate in S. Africa for the population over 50. The majority of unvaccinated in S. Africa that have contracted Omicron are also young, which tend to have mild cases of any variant. There is limited data to show the impact against the usual demographics that Covid hits the most, which is over 55 and/or health compromised.
If anything, the South African data has shown that Omicron spreads much faster and the mRNA vaccines appear to be somewhat effective against hospitalization/severe disease, as the large majority of Omicron patients (with current limited data) are unvaccinated.
The morbidity factor (not just death) is also unknown, so we don't know how the impact will be here.
Even if "less severe", which early data is inconclusive, the fact that we will see a lot of breakthrough infections likely means we may be worse off that we were at the start of the pandemic in regards to having our hospitals overwhelmed.
I'm hoping (but not optimistic) that the vaccinations and prior infections end up providing more protection than what early data from the UK shows.
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/BO7XER7AI5IODKYD2C3RSGE7E4.jpg)
www.npr.org
www.bostonglobe.com
www.ksl.com
