Hallucigenia wrote:odysseus2000 wrote:I thought the observation of weak effect in South Africa where vaccinated folk are relatively low in number was definitive evidence that omicron is inherently weaker than say delta. Is this no longer a tenable deduction?
The trouble with South Africa is that there's a lot of immunity from previous infection, and that can be hard to quantify. This paper is probably the best one at compensating for that :
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 22269148v1
They suggest that although eg they saw a 73% reduction in deathrate during the omicron wave versus their delta wave, when you adjusted for vaccination and known infection that went down to 59%, and if you assume that only 15% of infections are actually detected (based on excess mortality and seroprevalence) it drops to 28% less inherent severity. And if you assume 12% of infections are detected, then there's no difference at all between omicron and delta.
But some reduction seems plausible based on what we know from epidemiology elsewhere and mechanisms, it's just that immunity plays at least as big a part.
Based on what you are saying, does this not suggest that an anti-body test would be a better diagnostic than a lateral flow test?
Regards,