Omicron
Article
Omicron is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between November 29, 2021 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “summary of the Omicron evidence”; “the most likely scenario is that Omicron is shaping up to be pretty bad”; “Omicron infections will peak mid-January”. It most often appears alongside Metaculus, US, Futuur.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: November 29, 2021
- Last seen: November 04, 2022
Appears In
- MM: Omicron Variant
- Open Thread 203
- Mantic Monday: Let Me Google That For You
- Mantic Monday: Dogs In Wizard Hats
- Links For December
- ACX Grants: Project Updates
Related Pages
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- Metaculus (4 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Futuur (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Hacker News (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Nathan Young (2 shared issues)
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- slatestarcodex.com (2 shared issues)
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- Substack (2 shared issues)
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- Tyler Cowen (2 shared issues)
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- Utah (2 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Noah Smith has a good summary of the Omicron evidence here, including a lot of quotes from experts. But experts say a lot of stuff like “well, it could be bad, but we can’t be sure”, plus sometimes they disagree. This sounds like a job for prediction markets!
Inline links: here
(source: Metaculus) R0 is a measure of how quickly a disease spreads under certain ideal conditions. The original Wuhan strain was probably around 2.5, and the Delta variant was probably around 5. So if this number is higher than 5, it’s more transmissible than Delta. The community prediction is 7.31, so Metaculus predicts it will be significantly more transmissible than Delta.
(source: Metaculus) Metaculus didn’t want to wade in to precise lethality statistics, so they just asked for a yes-or-no answer on whether it would be deadlier than Delta. Forecasters say there’s a 34% chance it will be.
Inline links: Metaculus
1. Public service announcement: In case you haven’t been paying attention or believing what you read, the most likely scenario is that Omicron is shaping up to be pretty bad (maybe less severe per case, but a lot more cases). Expect it to hit very suddenly and peak sometime in January. Zvi has details as usual; John Schilling is slightly more optimistic but only slightly. Consider taking whatever precautions you wish you’d taken back in March 2020 for a month of panic and maybe more lockdowns. Getting your booster might help, but do it right now to have it working in time and avoid the rush.
Inline links: details, more optimistic
Metaculus thinks hospital admissions this winter (ie from Omicron) will peak mid to late January. Since it takes a week or two for a COVID case to end up in the hospital, this implies Omicron infections will peak mid-January.
Their idea is: anyone can write a question on their market. Whoever writes it also judges it. So if I write the question on whether Omicron will cause a hospital overcrowding crisis, I get to decide whether whatever’s going on next month counts as a “crisis” or not. The intended audience is people who know and trust me - in my case, it might be blog readers like you. So you’d be trying to predict whether I will think that our future coronavirus situation looks like a “crisis”. This is obviously somewhat but not perfectly correlated with whether you think it’s a crisis and whether by some objective standard it really is a crisis, but it’s not clear that it’s any worse of a measure than what number the American Hospital Capacity Association puts on a report. Caveat emptor, I guess.
11: Why COVID variants skipped from Mu to Omicron: “In a statement, the WHO said it skipped Nu for clarity and Xi to avoid causing offense generally.” Rolling my eyes at “offense generally” and the idea of deliberately averting nominative determinism.
Inline links: Why COVID variants skipped from Mu to Omicron
27: Open Source Vaccines (6/10) Alex Hoekstra of RaDVaC says that now that there are many COVID vaccines available, they are focusing on making RNA/LNP vaccines more accessible, both by bringing relevant technologies into the public domain and bringing down the material and logistic costs. They have published several open-source intranasal vaccines for Omicron variants and been working on animal challenge trials.