Now I’m confused too. Asking “where the hell are the cases?” seems to imply that, if case counts had doubled this week, we would know this week? The intuition I’ve picked up from posts with more pictures, which give me a greater sensation of understanding, is that different metrics come in at very different times: tests estimate how many people are contagious about as fast as the data gets shared from the test results, which can be on the scale of hours to weeks… test results lag behind what they’re actually measuring by hours to days… hospitalizations have historically followed infections by several days or a couple weeks, with death counts trailing days-months behind hospitalizations because, frankly and gruesomely, people take days-weeks to die once hospitalized.
So it seems like the big question, this early in a variant that seems to spread much faster, isn’t “where are the cases now”, but “when should we expect to see the cases in the various metrics we follow?”.
Also, I don’t follow why it’s implausible that omicron might be wildly out-competing delta without a huge change in the overall case count? It seems like peoples’ behaviors, especially around vaccinating or not and willingness to share air indoors, create a relatively fixed segment of the population who act like generally good hosts for covid, vs those who act like generally bad ones. With no behavior change, if we assume for simplicity that delta and omicron are competing only within that good-host population and that there’s a fixed rate of reinfection/immunity across variants, couldn’t omicron almost stomp out delta? For the current level of uncertainty, I don’t follow why it’s so implausible that an average increased transmissibility and decreased severity for omicron could roughly cancel each other out in the overall “any kind of covid” case counts. Then again, I am absolutely not even an armchair epidemiologist, so my speculation might be obvious wrong to those with more knowledge based on facts I simply haven’t met yet.
Now I’m confused too. Asking “where the hell are the cases?” seems to imply that, if case counts had doubled this week, we would know this week? The intuition I’ve picked up from posts with more pictures, which give me a greater sensation of understanding, is that different metrics come in at very different times: tests estimate how many people are contagious about as fast as the data gets shared from the test results, which can be on the scale of hours to weeks… test results lag behind what they’re actually measuring by hours to days… hospitalizations have historically followed infections by several days or a couple weeks, with death counts trailing days-months behind hospitalizations because, frankly and gruesomely, people take days-weeks to die once hospitalized.
So it seems like the big question, this early in a variant that seems to spread much faster, isn’t “where are the cases now”, but “when should we expect to see the cases in the various metrics we follow?”.
Also, I don’t follow why it’s implausible that omicron might be wildly out-competing delta without a huge change in the overall case count? It seems like peoples’ behaviors, especially around vaccinating or not and willingness to share air indoors, create a relatively fixed segment of the population who act like generally good hosts for covid, vs those who act like generally bad ones. With no behavior change, if we assume for simplicity that delta and omicron are competing only within that good-host population and that there’s a fixed rate of reinfection/immunity across variants, couldn’t omicron almost stomp out delta? For the current level of uncertainty, I don’t follow why it’s so implausible that an average increased transmissibility and decreased severity for omicron could roughly cancel each other out in the overall “any kind of covid” case counts. Then again, I am absolutely not even an armchair epidemiologist, so my speculation might be obvious wrong to those with more knowledge based on facts I simply haven’t met yet.