Omicron variant symptoms may change based on your COVID vaccine status - Deseret News

Omicron variant symptoms may change based on your COVID vaccine status - Deseret News:

Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York, recently shared some anecdotal information about what’s been seen in the emergency room when it comes to COVID-19. Here’s what he found:

• Every patient who got a third booster COVID-19 vaccine shot had mild symptoms. This included sore throat, fatigue and muscle pain.
• Patients who had two doses of Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines had mild symptoms but more than those who had three doses. He said there was more fatigue, more coughing and more miserable symptoms overall.
• Those who had one dose of Johnson & Johnson were worse, feeling horrible with a fever for a few days. Tiredness, weakness, shortness of breath and cough were also common COVID-19 symptoms for this group.
• Every patient that needed to be admitted was unvaccinated. The unvaccinated had “profound shortness of breath” and their “oxygen dropped when they walked,” he said. The unvaccinated needed “oxygen to breathe regularly,” he added.

Do masks protect against new variants like omicron?

Do masks protect against new variants like omicron?

A University of Minnesota study looked at how long it takes a person to be infected by COVID-19 according to the type of mask they were wearing around an infected person.

For example, if the infected person is maskless and you have on a cloth mask, the study found that you had about 20 minutes before you were infected. You had 30 minutes if you were wearing a surgical mask and two and a half hours if you were wearing a fit-tested N95 or equivalent, like a KF94 or KN95.

Your protection time increased if the person was also masked. The study suggested that the maximum protection of 25 hours was achieved when you and the person both wore a fit-tested N95 or equivalent.

"If you're going to be in an indoor place for a while with other people, then upping the game to a KN90 or an N95 is really the way to go," Infectious Disease Specialist at Family Health Centers of San Diego, Christian Ramers, MD, MPH said.

We can reduce illness but not transmissibility at this point (Omicron)

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All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows. And because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic.

psychological impact of Omicron

I'm just wondering if a wave of despair is going to accompany this latest mutation, and how you might measure that.

Natalie E. Dean, PhD on Twitter: "A sketch to explain how a new variant may appear milder even with no change in underlying virulence. This can occur because, when calculating the fraction of cases that are severe, the denominator now includes many re-infections that had previously been averted. A thread. 1/8 https://t.co/XxrYHnb6XY" / Twitter

Natalie E. Dean, PhD on Twitter: "A sketch to explain how a new variant may appear milder even with no change in underlying virulence. This can occur because, when calculating the fraction of cases that are severe, the denominator now includes many re-infections that had previously been averted. A thread. 1/8 https://t.co/XxrYHnb6XY" / Twitter: A sketch to explain how a new variant may appear milder even with no change in underlying virulence. This can occur because, when calculating the fraction of cases that are severe, the denominator now includes many re-infections that had previously been averted. A thread. 1/8

Vaccines appear weak at blocking Omicron infection | Reuters

Vaccines appear weak at blocking Omicron infection | Reuters: Billy Gardner and Marm Kilpatrick from the University of California, Santa Cruz developed computer models incorporating data on COVID-19 vaccines' efficacy against earlier variants and initial data on the Pfizer (PFE.N)/BioNTech vaccine against Omicron. Their models suggest that early after two doses of an mRNA vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna (MRNA.O), efficacy against symptomatic infection from Omicron is only about 30%, down from about 87% versus Delta, they reported on Sunday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. Protection against symptomatic infection is "essentially eliminated" for individuals vaccinated more than four months earlier. Boosters restore protection to about 48%, "which is similar to the protection of individuals with waned immunity against the Delta variant (43%)," Kilpatrick said.

I wish I knew something about epidemiology computer modeling.

Omicron’s Explosive Growth Is a Warning Sign

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Protection against infection after two doses is not looking very good. “Omicron was a huge jump in evolution,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle. In what seems to be just a few months, the virus has changed as much as Bloom says he and many researchers expected it to change “over the span of four or five years.” In a slew of recent lab studies, the potency of antibodies that can neutralize the virus dropped anywhere from five- to sevenfold against “pseudoviruses” that have been engineered to carry Omicron’s spike mutations to 41-fold in a study with live Omicron viruses, which is the gold standard. (In the Beta and Delta variants, we saw drops of about six- and threefold compared with the original virus, respectively.) A 41-fold drop in neutralizing antibody activity after two doses does not mean a 41-fold drop in vaccine effectiveness. The real-world impact is hard to predict, but the effect is big enough that protection against infection might be quite low, says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “I think you’re dealing with a variant that has no problem infecting vaccinated individuals,” he says.