At-home/“fast” antigen tests: Only about 80% accurate and will only indicate positive if there’s a pretty heavy load of active virus in your nose at the time of the test. You can get a false negative even with a nascent, borderline infection. But at least you’ll get a true negative if you had a recent bout of covid from which you’ve recovered fully (and are antigen-free, the antigen being active virus in this case) but still have some residual inactive virus or virus fragments (both harmless) in your nose.
Testing site & clinic/hospital PCR tests: Extremely accurate at detecting virus RNA, but will indicate positive for several to many weeks after you’re no longer contagious. That’s because PCR tests detect tiny amounts of inactive virus as well as harmless virus fragments that remain in your nose for that long. So you might test false positive because you had covid but got over it some time ago (and can’t infect others). You might also test (true) positive if you inhaled a tiny amount of active virus somewhere that’s insufficient to lead to a full-up infection and will be knocked down by your immune system response.
Neither test is without its questions, in other words.
There are many other numbers we’d like to know. How likely is Omicron to deliver not an irritating cold but the worst flu of your life? How does that risk increase with the number and severity of medical conditions a person has? What are the chances of lingering symptoms following a mild illness? How long does immunity last after a booster shot or an infection?
To this development, the willingly unvaccinated will probably just say: “Don’t look up.”
For those who are vaccinated, there’s more encouraging news, this one an excerpt from yesterday’s SD Union-Tribune:
A new study from researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, published recently in the respected medical journal Cell, documents this trend. Research showed that while the antibody response to the Omicron coronavirus variant is significantly reduced — just 42 percent effective at preventing infection — the T cells made during vaccination fare far better.
While antibodies are large Y-shaped proteins that can connect with and eliminate invaders such as viruses before they enter the body’s cells, T cells are more complex. They are technically specialized white blood cells capable of recognizing many different pieces of viruses that are produced when the pathogens infect previously healthy cells.
Researchers found that T cells remained more than 80 percent effective against Omicron, according to the paper, even as antibody protection fell.
Other research teams in other nations have recently published similar findings, and many, said Alessandro Sette, a professor of biological sciences at La Jolla Institute, have used techniques and materials developed in San Diego.
Taken together, he said, the picture is one of vaccination being able to produce broadly-acting T cells capable of fighting off infection even if antibodies become ineffective at preventing people from getting sick.
“In science, when you find the same thing in multiple countries with completely different patient cohorts, completely different situations, that really supports the validity of a conclusion,” Sette said.
While such research helps explain what many people are feeling at the moment — miserable but not so bad that they end up in the emergency room — the fact that T cells can tackle multiple variants also suggests that universal vaccines are quite possible.
The next variant of concern will be more fit, and what we mean by that is it will be more transmissible because it will have to overtake what is currently circulating,
The WHO is fucking up again here. Omicron’s fading on its own. The next variant could be less contagious so long as existing vaccines or having had Omicron don’t provide much immunity against catching it.
No, WHO is not doing/saying anything wrong - that is very much inline with most other virologists and epidemiologists. Omicron won’t be fading on its own (you have said this before but that’s not how virus work at all) - it will be endemic (similar in some respect to flu) but it will be continuously mutate to generate “fitter” variants.
Omicron is fading on its own, that’s a fact. It’s so infectious that it starts running out of new people to infect a few weeks after it takes hold in a place. Almost everybody in the area has either had it or is taking effective steps to avoid infection, so it declines as exponentially as it grew.
Covid-19 will presumably be endemic eventually, like H1N1, but anyone who makes categorical statements about what the next variant will be like is full of shit.
“Expect the next variant to come out of left field,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport. He added, “It’d be a hugely foolish thing for anyone to speak with excessive certainty about what’s coming in the next two years.”
Temporarily fading doesn’t mean that it will be gone for long. As we have seen before with other variants vaccines and infections will only protect for a relatively short period of time before omicron can reinfect people again. In addition, it will continue mutating to further get evolutionary advantages. Getting complete new variants is just an additional risk (as omicron most likely evolved relatively independently from delta, whereas delta most likely originated from alpha)
Actually we have yet to see any displaced SARS-CoV-2 variant come back in force. Delta supplanted Alpha and was in turn drastically cleared out by Omicron (99.5% of all new cases).
The unprecedented fast rise and decline of Omicron could easily result in Delta (the other 0.5%) coming back, but it might also create an opening for some new variant. No trustworthy expert will make a categorical statement about what’s going to happen next.
Omicron may also have evolved from Alpha, perhaps over a period of time in an immunocompromised individual, or in some other species.
I feel that in discussions of this nature it’s important always to clarify the distinction between the relatively short-lived protection conferred by antibodies, i.e., the early immune system response to infection or vaccination, and the long-term T-cell protection that is also induced by infection or vaccination. The latter is what’s keeping vaccinated people out of hospitals (for the most part), I believe.
So I agree with those who say that case counts and positivity rates are no longer meaningful, especially given the presumably very large number of unreported infections. It’s health system overload (in particular hospitalizations) – largely caused by the unvaccinated – that’s the meaningful metric now. Hospitalization numbers, unlike case counts, are unambiguous.
And in a personal as well as community way, I’m sick and tired of paying the ancillary, concomitant sociological price that the willingly unvaccinated have caused and continue to cause. I know I’ve said that before, but I’ll say it again.
There’s a link to this buried in my earlier post but since it’s an important and very recent journal article, I’m going to post it explicitly here. No need to plow through the entire thing, the Summary will suffice (and/or the Discussion section).
Yes, T-cells help against severe diseases but with many vaccines even T cell response will wane over time and we will see how long it will last for covid. In addition, and I have said this before it doesn’t protect against infection and the potential for long covid which for some reason is rarely discussed in the US but quite a significant topic elsewhere as the number of long covid patients is quite significant and with omicron will continue to become a much bigger issue (and people vastly underestimate the severity of long covid on your daily life
I think (but am not sure) that not seeing any COVID variant come back (period) is diff than not seeing any COVID variant come back b/c it’s been supplanted by a significantly more contagious variant…
If Omicron infections don’t provide significant immunity to Delta (as is the case vice-versa), the exponential peak and crash of Omicron might let Delta come back even though it’s less contagious.
Vaccination with two doses does help against omicron; it’s just nowhere near as effective as it was against delta in terms of antibody generation and associated short-term protection. Vaccination with three doses is over 90% effective against getting any covid-19 infection, omicron included.
In terms of “long covid”, most conditions resolve within 3 - 6 months. Some cases have lasted over a year. Everyone’s best bet is to get a third shot (with mRNA) to minimize the chance of getting an infection in the first place and avoid that possible post-infection outcome.