2021-12-17 General

I remember thinking it was really strange that more people died in the second year of the Spanish Flu pandemic than the first. I’m not surprised any more. Vaccines Someone asked me today, “would Omicron still have arisen if we’d had equitable and effective vaccine distribution globally? At first I hedged, and said we couldn’t… Continue reading 2021-12-17 General

2021-12-04/05/06 General

Variants I referenced a preprint on Friday which said that Omicron’s doubling time was 1.2 days, but everybody else seems to be saying more like 2.5 days. This makes a difference: ten doublings (which is about 1000x) is either 12 days away or 25, which means before Christmas or after Christmas. Either way, don’t plan… Continue reading 2021-12-04/05/06 General

2021-12-03 General

Variants I had been hearing that Omicron had a doubling rate of something like 5 days. I finally went and scraped the data for Guateng province — which is only like two-thirds Omicron right now — and calculated a doubling time of 3.1 days. Then this preprint came out (which probably has information about just… Continue reading 2021-12-03 General

20211202 General

Variants I’m seeing a lot of news stories saying things along the lines of “don’t panic, Omicron might not be as 1) lethal, 2) immune-evasive, 3) contagious as you think!” #1: For the stories about the severity of the disease, note that South Africa’s population is a LOT younger than most of the developed world… Continue reading 20211202 General