I can’t confirm you didn’t talk about this, but the only thing of importance I haven’t seen you mention in these is that the serial interval might be much smaller (eg as mentioned here), so that R0 and number of secondary infections is not so vastly higher even as we see incredibly fast doubling times. I think people don’t realize how much this effect played a part in Delta’s containability, even while Delta overtook other variants very quickly and it seemed pretty concerning at the beginning.
Specifically, if Omicron is tearing through vaccinated populations because it has 5x higher immune escape than Delta, 2⁄3 the serial interval, and 1.5x the transmission (which I think roughly fits the SA data), then we might see the Omicron wave ending up surprisingly containable—only needing behavior to curb the 1.5x transmission and to go back to pre-vaccine (Jan 2021) measures to fix the immune escape.
I don’t put much probability on this since I don’t know a ton about omicron and I haven’t heard people talking about it much, but it seems like it’s still an overlooked phenomenon re Delta and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it made omicron a lot more containable than I’ve seen implied. Admittedly people seem very done with countermeasures at this point, so we still might be screwed (and screwed quickly if serial interval is in fact a big driver), but I wouldn’t actually be all that surprised if the control system kicked in in a few weeks and the wave peaked fairly quickly.
I haven’t talked about it recently, I did discuss it with regard to Delta, whose interval was shorter than the original strain. It would be surprising for Omicron, which didn’t come from Delta, to be faster even than Delta, but perhaps it is possible. It would take a lot of this to be enough, but it would certainly help.
Given that serial interval is a very effective way to amplify an already-high R0 to great evolutionary advantage, and common colds/flu etc all have developed serial interval of more like 1-2 days showing there’s plenty of room for COVID to climb in this regard, I would expect lots of new dominant strains to show shortened serial interval regardless of heritage.
Not sure if there’s publication bias or measurement bias here but the first link on google shows a study estimating Omicron serial interval at 2.2 days in South Korea.
I can’t confirm you didn’t talk about this, but the only thing of importance I haven’t seen you mention in these is that the serial interval might be much smaller (eg as mentioned here), so that R0 and number of secondary infections is not so vastly higher even as we see incredibly fast doubling times. I think people don’t realize how much this effect played a part in Delta’s containability, even while Delta overtook other variants very quickly and it seemed pretty concerning at the beginning.
Specifically, if Omicron is tearing through vaccinated populations because it has 5x higher immune escape than Delta, 2⁄3 the serial interval, and 1.5x the transmission (which I think roughly fits the SA data), then we might see the Omicron wave ending up surprisingly containable—only needing behavior to curb the 1.5x transmission and to go back to pre-vaccine (Jan 2021) measures to fix the immune escape.
I don’t put much probability on this since I don’t know a ton about omicron and I haven’t heard people talking about it much, but it seems like it’s still an overlooked phenomenon re Delta and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it made omicron a lot more containable than I’ve seen implied. Admittedly people seem very done with countermeasures at this point, so we still might be screwed (and screwed quickly if serial interval is in fact a big driver), but I wouldn’t actually be all that surprised if the control system kicked in in a few weeks and the wave peaked fairly quickly.
I haven’t talked about it recently, I did discuss it with regard to Delta, whose interval was shorter than the original strain. It would be surprising for Omicron, which didn’t come from Delta, to be faster even than Delta, but perhaps it is possible. It would take a lot of this to be enough, but it would certainly help.
Given that serial interval is a very effective way to amplify an already-high R0 to great evolutionary advantage, and common colds/flu etc all have developed serial interval of more like 1-2 days showing there’s plenty of room for COVID to climb in this regard, I would expect lots of new dominant strains to show shortened serial interval regardless of heritage.
Not sure if there’s publication bias or measurement bias here but the first link on google shows a study estimating Omicron serial interval at 2.2 days in South Korea.