pieterstreicher Profile picture
Dec 12, 2021 8 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1 of 7:

Gauteng #Omicron update - 12 December.

The 7 day avg cases increased above the previous highest level of 9,645 on 9 December to 10,131 today.

This is most likely the result of a reporting delay (16,716 today).

The peak is now likely to end up in the window specified.
2 of 7:

I work with cases by reported date. In this table by Louis Rossouw, cases are given by specimen date, but we will have to wait a day or two to see how the 16k cases from today are allocated.

Either way, growth if any is extremely slow currently.

unsupervised.online/static/covid-1…
3 of 7:

The increases in hospital variables were negligible today, but this is most likely the typical weekend effect.

data source: NICD
nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-i…
4 of 7:

The most contentious issue regarding my tweets remain my assertion that #Omicron is extremely mild compared to Delta.

My most compelling argument is that Delta is still running at a CFR of 3% in South Africa, while Omicron is running at ~0.42% at the same time.
5 of 7:

The unexpected early dropoff in cases below my projections might be the result of reporting delays.

All other variables are tracking my projections reasonably well.
6 of 7:

A major fear in Europe seems to be the expectation that #Omicron will infect up to 70% of the population.

#Omicron will infect only 15-25% in South Africa, and we only have light restrictions (a curfew from 12-4am).

Restriction details:
gov.za/covid-19/about…
7 of 7:

All variants and all waves in almost all countries reach saturation at well below 30% infected, even in countries with only light restrictions.

It is unlikely that #Omicron will be different.
Here is an update showing 7 day average cases by specimen date.

More than 50% of cases reported yesterday were sampled several days earlier.

The daily increase is marginal now.

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More from @pieterstreicher

Mar 6
Five years on, the countries that never locked down, don't appear to be much different in terms of pandemic excess deaths compared to neighbouring countries according to the BBC. 🤔

🧵(1/5)

bbc.com/future/article…
This is quite a departure from the June 2020 BBC article that claimed lockdowns saved millions of lives in Europe alone.

The 2020 BBC article was based on the Imperial College London paper in Nature by Flaxman et al.

(2/5)

bbc.com/news/health-52…
By 2021 subsequent reports by Imperial College London walked back these claims, conceding that in the case of London, Rt was already below 1.0 before the 23 March 2020 lockdown.

Note the difference between the 2020 ICL report (Flaxman) and the 2021 ICL report (Knock).

(3/5) Image
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Read 5 tweets
Nov 20, 2024
How many lives did Covid vaccines save during the pandemic?

Most studies calculate a number based on an "assumed" level of protection against death, with numbers varying from 313 per mil (Ioannidis, 2024) to 2,500 per mil (Mellis, 2022).

I propose a different method.

(1/7)
There are a handful of countries that vaccinated >90% of their populations before infection.

Their C-19 deaths per million ranged between 1,000 and 2,000 per million.

In Europe and the Americas, C-19 deaths averaged between 2,790 and 3,150 per million (700-2,200 higher).

(2/7) Image
If countries were able to delay infections until vaccination and Omicron, as Finland and Australia did, Covid deaths could have been 28% to 68% lower.

However, this benefit (700-2,200 deaths per mil) is the combined benefit of waiting for vaccination and a milder variant.

(3/7)
Read 7 tweets
Jul 19, 2024
Lockdowns – a case of scientific injustice.

Suppression as a concept did not exist before 2020.

Pre-pandemic plans did not ignore it because it planned for the wrong pandemic.

It was ignored, as without timeous vaccines, it would be futile.

#covidinquiryreport

🧵(1/11) Image
Using costly measures to delay infections, only became worthwhile considering in a scenario where a significant portion of people had the hope of getting vaccinated prior to first infection.

It is this change that lead to the abandonment of pre-pandemic plans.

(2/11)
The concepts of mitigation and suppression were defined in haste, early in 2020, and as a result were defined poorly, and remain poorly defined to this day.

(3/11) Image
Read 11 tweets
Jul 16, 2024
What was the relative mortality burden of Covid-19 for different ages during the acute phase of the pandemic (w12/2020-w11/2021) in England?

The relative burden was calculated as Covid-19 mortality as a percentage of pre-pandemic mortality.

🧵(1/5) Image
Both Covid-19 mortality and all cause mortality increase exponentially with age (straight line on log graph). However, the slope is steeper for Covid-19.

The implication is that the burden of Covid was significantly higher at the older ages.

(2/5) Image
On a linear scale, mortality levels in the younger ages are hardly visible.

However, one needs to consider that only 6% of the population is over 80 years of age, and the young have more life years to lose.

(3/5) Image
Read 5 tweets
Dec 20, 2023
Crying Wolf One Time Too Many

It is exactly 2 years ago that the UK government ignored scientists’ advice to tighten restrictions to combat Omicron.

Cabinet met on 20 December 2021 and decided to persist with Plan B despite SAGE’s apocalyptic scenario for Plan B.

(1/9) Image
Experts accused the government of ignoring the latest modelling by SAGE which pointed to between 3,000 and 10,000 hospitalisations a day, and between 600 and 6,000 deaths a day without additional restrictions.



(2/9) bmj.com/content/375/bm…
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Commentators described these numbers as utterly implausible.

No sense checking was done, with implied hospital fatality rates ranging from 20% to 60%, when it was already down to 16% for the Delta variant in England, and down to 9% for Omicron in South Africa.

(3/9)
Read 10 tweets
Dec 7, 2023
#CovidInquiry

Unrealistic worst case scenarios

On 7 July 2021 SAGE published daily hospital admission scenarios reaching 10,000 per day at the upper bound.

The range was so wide, it was displayed on a log scale!

Daily hospitalisations remained below 800 (grey line).

(1/7) Image
Most remaining restrictions were to be lifted on 19 July 2021, so the worst case cannot be regarded as a counterfactual scenario.

Here is the range of daily hospital admissions plotted on a normal scale to illustrate how wide the range of outcomes were.

(2/7) Image
It is hard to see how such a wide range could be of any use for hospital planning purposes. By 20 August 2021, the range spanned 2 orders of magnitude!

Imagine having to plan for a party for 1 to 100 people!

(3/7)
Read 8 tweets

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