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And we have our first omicron case
By adamg on Sat, 12/04/2021 - 5:34pm
The state Department of Public Health reports a Middlesex County woman in her 20s who "traveled out of state" has become the first Massachusetts resident to test positive for the new Covid-19 strain.
She is fully vaccinated, has experienced mild disease, and did not require hospitalization.
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Congratulations, you've been randomly selected...
[EDIT: OK, interesting, apparently the title posted but the body of the comment was lost? I guess Drupal barfed on the confetti emoji I put in the original comment, haha!]
Sorry!
Every so often it does that, no clue why, but, yes, I should find out (any consolation, it's happened to me; usually I can at least hit the back button to go to the submission form, where the contents will still be there).
Not a problem in this case
since it was just some silly "congratulations, you're our 1,000,000th visitor" nonsense. And good to know that the back button usually works.
But if you want to investigate the emoji thing in particular, I'd look at the character encoding/collation settings for the database tables. Probably some 4-byte fixed-length encoding that won't handle "astral plane" characters such as most emoji.
But probably a little relaxed
But probably a little relaxed on the mask and unaware of the status of the people she was with. Sounds like the Orange Line.
Read carefully...
First, of course it's here. Second, it's interesting to read these lines in the press release:
* "The individual is a female in her 20s and a resident of Middlesex County who traveled out of state."
This line just stinks. The sentence implies she got the virus variant while out of state, but that is not really clear. Either way, it's hard to believe it's not spreading here.
* "She is fully vaccinated, has experienced mild disease, and did not require hospitalization."
This implies she recovered, but does not say so and is unclear and grammatically ... questionable. Why the "has experienced" but the "did not require"?
* "All three COVID-19 vaccines in use in the U.S have been shown to be highly protective against severe disease resulting in hospitalization or death due to known COVID-19 variants and remain the single best way for people to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their community from COVID-19."
Omicron is now a "known" variant, right? So ....
i think you’ve answered your own questions
i think the release is intentionally written like that to avoid speculation. i.e. what if she develops pneumonia and has to be hospitalized? she traveled out of state for the break, but what if she did actually contract it in state? etc.
duplicate
n/t
Silver lining here
So far Omicron has been quite mild for the vaccinated, and not especially lethal even for the unvaccinated. Could we be seeing the evolution of Covid into a more contagious but less virulent virus, similar what happened with the Spanish Flu? There just might be light at the end of the tunnel here. No reason to panic. That's for sure. Get your boosters but lockdowns look unnecessary.
Possibly, but ...
It's still early. Maybe it signals a more mild form of the virus, but maybe what we're seeing is simply that, so far, younger, vaccinated people are getting it and they're just going to do better, so we have to wait to see what happens when it gets into older populations and the millions (just in the US) who remain completely unvaccinated.
The Roy Kent variant
It's here, it's there, it's every-fucking-where ...
It's annoying that they're
It's annoying that they're releasing whether the infected people are "fully vaccinated" or had gotten a booster, but they're not releasing whether those people got Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, or had natural immunity from a previous infection.
That's a significant detail to leave out.
All of the vaccines are
All of the vaccines are effective. There's no need to give people who received a certain vaccine instead of another a false extra sense of security (or danger).
All of the vaccines are
Exactly where did you find data about the effectiveness of existing vaccines against omicron?
Data
are collected on an ongoing basis and reviewed in aggregate. If you care about the quality and validity of data, surely you understand how unimportant this single data point would be from this person in question.
Preliminary data
Most of the cases have been found through contact tracing and testing.
If you read through the case reports, the vast majority of the people who are shown to have it are vaccinated (you can't come into the US otherwise) and have such mild disease that it wouldn't have been found unless someone came knocking on their door wanting to pick their nose.
This is a skewed sample, however - because international travel requires vaccination - as does going to a large event in NYC. But the fact that the positives have been found through testing rather than through people getting sick says a lot about the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Of course you realize that vaccines are tested for "people not getting horribly ill/dying" not for transmission suppression, right? Of course you do.
A lot of capitalization on
A lot of capitalization on the line.
The "empty calories" type of information
That kind of N=1 data would be useless for actually understanding risk. All of the vaccines have a known small chance of not working against hospitalization or death and a high chance of preventing anything beyond mild symptoms, so a single data point with zero control doesn't tell you anything.
Now, if the vaccines were supposed to be 99.9999% effective against death and a vaccinated person died of covid? That N=1 would be somewhat interesting. But even then, news has a way of elevating a 1-in-a-million occurrence to national prominence, so I still wouldn't read too much into it!
Definitely not our first omicron case
Definitely not our first omicron case, just the first identified.
Middlesex County is huge. How
Middlesex County is huge. How about narrowing it down a little, like closer to Cambridge, Lowell, Townsend, or Holliston?