<story><title>South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true.&lt;p&gt;Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.&lt;p&gt;I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>specialp</author><text>A place where it hit exponential levels with really bad results is here in NY at the beginning. We had no precautions, testing, or vaccines in place yet, and hospitals were overwhelmed. It was honestly a scary time. That was where we started &amp;quot;flattening the curve&amp;quot;. Now with vaccines available if there are surges and they are not literally building hospitals on fields like they were near me that is something we have to just live with. COVID will never hit 0 cases. People will still be hospitalized and occasionally die of COVID as was always the case with winter flu seasons.&lt;p&gt;Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.</text></comment>
<story><title>South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true.&lt;p&gt;Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.&lt;p&gt;I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donquichotte</author><text>Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.</text></comment>