Thread by @Styo28183449

We really have to hit this nail of the head: omicron is less severe so it will be all right.

Lets take the extreme new claim. 70% less severe.Lets believe it for a moment.

so if 100 cases was delivering 10 hospitalisations, not it's only delivering 3.

Here is the problem.

omicron grows the number of cases, doubling every 2 days.

So after 4 days you have 400 cases.

3% of 400 is 12.

So you have more cases that with the original strain.

And from here it gets worse.

because omicron keeps doubling every 2 days, the next doubling will yield 800 cases, of which, I'm sure you're getting it now, 24 will be hospitalisations.

This isn't magic. not trickery.

It just point the what is the driving force - the number of cases.

The key statistic is how many cases per day, because the differences between variants in terms of severity simply aren't significant enough to overcome rapid exponential growth.

So please @rtenews @Independent_ie , let's try to understand this very basic mathematical fact

the driving force of the epidemic is the daily case rate

When a politician responds "but omicron is less severe" what they are telling you is that they are mathematically illiterate.

If you can't see why, then you shouldn't be reporting on covid.

find something else to cover and find someone else who does understand this to cover covid.

Now that basic maths is out of the way, lets talk about the real problem.

We have no idea how many cases a day there are but its certainly much larger than is being reported and is getting close to doubling every 2 days as omicron gets towards total dominance.

First off, its crucial to understand that omicron is gaining this dominance by creating a shed load of new cases, not replacing the delta cases that are being generated. This is not a takeover. this is outcompeting for headcount.

what this means mathematically is that the total case rates is growing by a rate that is trending towards a doubling of the total case rate every 2 days.

This is because the proportion that is perhaps even in decline, the delta cases, are rapidly demising as a percentage.

what this means is that the pace of acceleration in raw numbers is increasing massively as days go by.

It's very hard for people to get this because it's counterintuitive.

Here's a classic example.

You start painting a wall beginning with a small 2cm square. The next day you paint a 4cm square path, and so on. What day is half the wall painted? You may think I've not told you the dimensions so you can't answer.

But I've given everything you need for an answer. The correct answer is the day before its fully painted.

There is no trickery there. It's just a mathematical consequence of doubling every iteration. each day before covered half as much.

covid growth, and especially omicron growth, is like this.

How long does it take to go from able to cope with hospitalisations to completely overloaded?

the answer is going to be one doubling. literally 2 days.

our real problem is that we can't see this coming. no testing.

we have never experienced a doubling every 2 days.

there is no reference point in life, whether in nature or in economics or anywhere else.

it's totally foreign to us.

so, even if you accepted todays case rate of about 9k positive swabs.

you will probably find it hard to appreciate that this becomes 72,000 in just 6 days.

You will be able to do the sum no doubt, but you still won't be able to accept it most likely.

you will look for a but... you will perhaps call the calculation naive, and so on.

But you won't be able to come up with a convincing answer to it.

Because there is no answer, except to stop the pace of transmission.

and the final piece, after which you are entirely equipped to understand the predicament.

Omicron want s to transmit. Left to its own devices it will find new hosts at the rate of about 5 for every infection.
this is what it does, until there is no-one left to infect.

you only get a plateau when omicron is for some reason unable to find new hosts.

That is network science, the nature and degree of connectivity between people in a population.

Government have a very poor understanding of this and largely abstract it away in their modelling.

even nobel laureate have made dreadful errors oversimplifying how transmission occurs, grossly underestimating the capacity of a pathogen to continue to find new hosts.

it is the nature and quality of links between groups that matters. it is local and contextual.

it is very hard to take the experience in one local instance and apply to a new context.

So what you have to do really is to look for examples of how is has played out in places and cultures that are similar structurally.

There is no point is cherry picking. that won't work.

you have to look broadly and ask, what overall are we seeing, and how likely are we to follow a similar pattern given noted similarities in how people live and recreate.

When you do that, what you find is that Ireland is not particularly different but we do have a tendency more than other cultures to bend rules, and not take authority too seriously.

For example, the British are as obstinate as they come, but they arise by the democratic decision

when a rule is decided on, they follow it even if they disagree with it.

a majority are against Brexit, but they are doing it. it won't be reversed.

we aren't like that. we agree to rules and then quietly ignore them.

put simply, personal responsibility is a bad strategy for Ireland because we bend rules. push the envelope.

its who we are.

last Christmas it gave us the worst wave of covid in the world, bar none.

It will do pretty much the same this year.

The only way to bring about a reduction in transmission that will stop omicron doubling every two days is for us to prevent it doing so.

There isn't much chance of us doing this.

we have never achieved a sustained reduction in covid case rates outside of lockdown.

that's not..

..to say that this is impossible, but it to definitely say that we have never achieved it.

Why think we will achieve it now without a specific targeted plan based on policies that have been seen to work?

as Paul Reid claimed today "if people keep doing the same thing" we'll beat it. that's madness. actually a decent definition of how a crazy person thinks.

yes, that is the "common sense" being presented and accepted.

Update: I think this is apposite