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Arieh Kovler Profile picture
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15 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Seen a few people confused about this, so here's what I think Whitty's getting at about immunity in South Africa vs UK. Short thread:
The Delta wave in South Africa was intense. Limited testing capacity didn't show the full picture, but deaths mounted. By late September, Delta had burned through enough of the SA population that it had no exposed people left. Covid basically disappeared by October.
When Delta appeared in the UK in June, though, it spread quickly and carried on spreading. At times there were more or less infections, but Delta cases kept coming. The UK never reached a herd immunity threshold for Delta.
Why? I don't know. But it certainly looks like there's more population immunity to Delta in SA than there is in the UK. That's enough to be concerned that Omicron will also be different there.

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More from @ariehkovler

Arieh Kovler Profile picture
15 Dec
That is not enough to bend the curve. Maybe nothing short of a total lockdown is enough. The question then is what's the strategy? To bend the curve? To flatten it? To shift it right by a few days?
Not to say the Govt measures are bad. They might flatten the curve a little. Boosters will reduce the AOC though they're a few weeks too late.
We still don't know how bad an Omicron wave is in a population with very high previous vaccination/exposure. The options range from totally fine to complete collapse of the hospitals to anywhere inbetween. Makes strict measures politically hard to impose.
Read 5 tweets
Arieh Kovler Profile picture
14 Dec
According to the press release, Trump Media's TRUTH social network will run on Rumble's cloud service, which also supposedly, erm, exists.
Rumble's the "alt-tech" YouTube alterative that's been serving antivaxxers, election conspiracists and others banned from YT. Like Trump Media, Rumble is going public via a SPAC ($cfvi)
Rumble is making a play for the alt-tech stack — basically the same play Rightforge is making. "We're going to have our own datacentres and won't be reliant on Big Tech so we can keep anyone online".
Read 7 tweets
Arieh Kovler Profile picture
14 Dec
Conclusions from Discover Health's summary of Omicron in South Africa:
* Omicron seems to have an incubation period of 3-4 days, shorter than other variants.
* 'mild' cases are milder, with faster recovery times
* BUT more reinfections and breakthroughs, so many of those 'mild' cases wouldn't have caught it at all if it was Delta.
Omicron in kids:
*More are testing positive than in previous waves
* symptoms of sore throat, nasal congestion, fever for 2-3 days, sometimes a headache.
* more kids already in hospital with Omicron than at Delta peak.
Read 5 tweets
Arieh Kovler Profile picture
9 Dec
No surprise here, was pretty clear which way the panel was leaning. Doubtless Trump will appeal.
This judgment is technical at points, but it's very clear when it needs to be. ImageImageImage
oof. Image
Read 6 tweets
Arieh Kovler Profile picture
8 Dec
Evolution is the process by which the fittest genes for the situation survive because they're the ones that get to reproduce themselves most efficiently. It doesn't have needs or desires. It just is.
Genes that help a creature survive until it reproduces are the genes that succeed. Speed, vision, size, venom, flight, intelligence... all of these can make a creature more likely to stay alive long enough to breed.
A species that cares for its young will be more likely to see those same kids breed, so evolution *sometimes* selects for stuff that happens after breeding. But mostly, there's no reason for genes for long post-reproductive life and good health in old age to be selected.
Read 10 tweets
Arieh Kovler Profile picture
7 Dec
Just be adding another voice to the choir, but the narrative that "Omicron is super mild" is premature, probably not true in the way most people understand it, and likely to be irrelevant anyway if it's highly infectious.

arieh.substack.com/p/is-omicron-m…
The idea that Omicron is a milder variant of Covid suits a lot of people, including the corona-sceptics who oppose any measures to control it.
But it's unfair to pin this one on antivaxxers. There are plenty of people who are hoping that Omicron is the fairytale ending to the pandemic, based on popular misunderstandings of evolution.
Read 7 tweets

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