Dr. Paul Anderson breaks down BA.2, the Omicron subvariant spreading faster than BA.1 but causing no more severe disease. He weighs the alarmist and hopeful narratives against actual data from New Zealand, Denmark, and South Africa, and explains why viruses evolve toward higher transmissibility and lower harm.
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Welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal, to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Well, good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today It is, in case you're keeping track, February 24th, 2022. So everything we say is accurate as of today, at least to the information I have. And I was going to have a whole different health topic today, but I decided this one, Omicron 2. So the new Omicron, the other Omicron, et cetera, what now? And the reason I did this was mostly, well, I mean, there's some really interesting things as far as a virus goes and, you know, how it's affecting us and how it's affecting herd immunity, uh, which we'll get into and talk about. But also, uh, I started to see some really interesting points of view, uh, being shared on, uh, social media outlets, like, you know, all of them basically. You name it, I've seen them shared. And they seemed, um, and these are from, you know, people with whose points of view I listen to and think, oh, well, you know, that's— I mean, sometimes they have a different slant than I do. Sometimes it's the same, but they're, you know, they're all in the healthcare space and they know stuff. And I started to see a subsection that was really sort of inflammatory and really seemed to be trying to scare people about Omicron and the 3 subtypes of Omicron, the BA.1, BA.2, BA.3, which are shorthand for longer numbers that they have. So I thought, well, Omicron variant called BA.2 is getting, you know, some press. It's causing a lot of stir right now. And you've got kind of 2 completely different ends of the spectrum that are, um, either I would characterize as hopeful or alarmist. And I thought, well, why don't we work our way through that, because if we need to be alarmed, then we should be alarmed. If we need to be hopeful, let's be hopeful. And if it's somewhere in the middle, then let's be somewhere in the middle. And most people are not only, you know, certainly tired of hearing about COVID and living this way and all that, but also we just keep hearing new things dredged up around, you know, COVID and then Omicron and then new Omicron and— you know, what does it mean? Do I really need to be concerned? What direction are things going? All of that. So that's what we want to do today. Now, uh, first off, I want to make sure, uh, if you are looking for links to any of my stuff, go to dranow.com. D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. So just D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. And that's got links to newsletters and all the media and books and all that business. If you're watching or listening on a, um, a pod burner, uh, or a subscription service or YouTube, especially as we move all these over to YouTube, uh, please like, share, do notifications, subscribe. Uh, it really does help all of the channels and it helps get our listenership up. So I really appreciate that from everybody. But, uh, what is it about all this, you know, Omicron and, uh, BA.1 versus 2 versus 3, and, um, there was even one of the more— what I would call, my own personal opinion— more alarmist sort of articles that said, well, BA.2 is different enough from BA.1, we should just call it a new variant of concern. So Omicron is a variant sort of classified as variant of concern. now we have it. It's the predominant variant out there in the world. And as I said, you kind of have these 2 camps. So we look at a lot of the European scientists, the data scientists and the virologists and that group of people who know a lot more than I do about a lot of these things. And they're saying, well, you know, Omicron is doing what viruses mostly do, but not always. Now you want to be careful if you ever say, well, viruses always evolve to a more penetrant but less pathogenic, so easier to get around, less likely to kill you. That's usually what viruses do, but you can get variations that are worse, right? We just have not had that. Omicron certainly is better. Now, I will say, even saying that Omicron has a lower amount of pathogenicity or danger in its presentation in humans, I have seen patients of mine get very sick with Omicron and have had patients die with Omicron because they had other problems, namely co-infections. You can go back and look at the 2 COVID and Me things that I did. Thankfully, I didn't die, but— That was part of my problem. So Omicron, we do want to make sure that we have that in there, that while it's certainly less— it's more cold-like, really, it's like a bad flu or cold— it's not that way for everybody. It's just that way for most people. So please keep that in mind. By the way, if you're streaming this on Facebook, hi there. The 2 live places we do this, we stream it over to Facebook, and then of course my home is at Contact Talk Radio, CTR Radio Network. And if you ever need anybody to do not just radio program, but podcasts or production, check out CTR, which is the host of this. So a couple of things. Some people are making it out, as I said, to be a big threat, an extreme new threat that we need to really, you know, brace ourselves for, and things are going to go bad. And other people are saying, well, no, it's just BA.1, BA.2, maybe BA.3 are just All Omicron. They're a milder version of COVID They're going around the world. They've got big penetrance into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, so they're giving all of us an immune booster, essentially. Now, what side do we think about? Now, when you go later, if you're interested in links to the research we're going to talk about, down below. If you're, um, on an audio-only service, it won't be there. You'll have to go to YouTube. YouTube, in the description box, is where I put all of this stuff, all the links and things. So if you're on a device like your phone, so you got your phone there, uh, down on the right-hand side below the video is a little down arrow or a chevron. You click on that, it'll open up the description box where all the links and stuff will be. If you're on your laptop or a bigger your computer screen, usually it's on the left side below the video and it says show more. So there's actually words there on a computer screen, laptop, etc. So click on show more, it'll open it up. So that's where these links will be. So in the links, I'm going to have links, uh, to the most recent shows about COVID just so you don't have to go, you know, looking for those, uh, links to the information about COVID and B and T cell memory which has been in the news lately. A couple around, you know, you've got COVID or you're ill, you know, what are some helpful hints there? The vitamin D exposure data, you know, basically showing that the better your vitamin D is when you go into COVID, the better you weather it. And then we'll have all of the links I'm about to talk about with this Omicron variant. So first off, I'll show you a picture, um, and again, if you're on an audio stream, you can go to YouTube and take a look at the picture. But Omicron is, of course, a variant of COVID SARS-CoV-2, and it has 3 subvariants which we are going to shorten up to call BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3. Okay, now BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3, as I said, have longer numerical identifiers, but we'll just call them 1, 2, and 3. That's what most people are doing, and they're called clades. C-L-A-D-E-S. So you can think of them like there's Omicron and then there's like triplets of Omicron. Okay. So they're not really new or separate variants. They are literally like if you had you know, a triplet splitting of one genetic variation, you're going to have all 3 of them have a common core, and then you're going to have each of them have some unique genomics around them. And this is how they can tell whether it's a BA.1, BA.2, or BA.3 as you go along. Now, I'm gonna not do a whole lot of graphics here because you all know that we, we do kind of low-tech graphics here on this program. But I just want to show a couple of things really quick. On this top one I'm pointing to, I highlighted in yellow Omicron. So back here is the original Wuhan strain, and you see that most of the genomics for Beta, Delta, Gamma, and all the others are down here. And then Omicron is like its own little world up here. Now, why might that be a benefit to the world of this SARS-CoV-2 virus? We've talked about this a lot before. If you're evolving forward as a virus, you really don't want to kill everybody, so you want to get less pathogenic, but you want to infect everybody so you can replicate, you can have more virus in the world. This is why most of the data scientists say that Omicron is the gateway to not only better herd immunity, but also to endemic nature as opposed to pandemic. So, you know, people, the data scientists are basically saying, you know, endemicity is around the corner, and that's basically like influenza for the most part is an endemic virus. We haven't had an influenza pandemic in a long time where we had a new influenza and it you know, goes all over the world. It's endemic. It makes a return trip. Now, people are arguing about, well, will it return every 4 months or 6 months or 12 months? We don't know that yet. That's something in the future. Now, in, uh, giving you and showing you that wonderful graphic I did, um, if you look, the majority— that, that fuzzy big part at the bottom— that's most of COVID that we've had up until, uh, you know, up until the winter. Then you see there's this genomic tree that goes way up high, separate. That's Omicron and its 3 clades, BA.1, 2, and 3. So the ability for Omicron to infect more people, to evade, uh, the vaccine status of people, uh, and even prior infection status, so to evade immunity But to infect people and largely not kill them is the next logical step for most viruses out in an evolutionary point of view. So that's why Omicron is doing what it is. That's why most of the virologists and data scientists around most of the world are saying this is not only our gateway to better herd immunity, it's also our gateway to burning the pandemic out. Because the idea is if, if we infect everybody with one variant family— so the 3 clades are a family— we have a broader amount of immunity and we're less likely to have a couple of things. We're less likely to have new variants. We could have a new variant and it could be worse or it could be better. We could have a new variant, but we're less likely the more rapidly we infect around the world. And that's the way that the— that's the way viruses like to evolve. They don't have to, but they like to evolve that way. So that's one thing. Now the next thing, if we look here, um, this next little thing here is basically showing that, uh, we have the original Wuhan over here, and this is sort of like a family tree. At the top we have all the originals: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. And then down here we have a separate family line for Omicron, and then down below, uh, we have the Omicron splitting into B.1, B.2, and B.3. In the notes down below in the description box, there's, there's 2 places I got the graphics, and I'll give you their websites in case you're curious about those wonderful graphics. Now I have another graphic I want to show, but before I do that, the graphics got me so excited I dropped my show notes here on the floor at my feet, so I'm just going to disappear off the Yeah. Grab my show notes back. That was— well, I was really excited about those graphics for you today. But I just want to show this last one. This is kind of a colorful one here. Okay. And this looks like a Venn diagram where you have crossing, and so it's supposed to show the commonalities. And so if you look at it, you have BA1 at the top, BA2 over here. and BA.3 here. And what do we see? They have a huge area of commonality, the multicolored area in the middle. And then, for example, over here with BA.3, you've got commonality with 1, and then you've got uniqueness. Over here with BA.2, you got commonality with 1 and then uniqueness. Then over here we have BA.1, the original Omicron, and we have commonality with everybody, there's a little bit of mixing in there, and then uniqueness. So they aren't the exact same virus, otherwise they would have only one identifier, but they have much more in common than they don't. That's the real point of these genomic maps, is to show what's in common. Now, there is some discussion that the Omicron BA variant, when we get— so Those 3 triplets are called clades, just a distinction made in biology. So for example, SARS-CoV-2 is a clade of the coronavirus family, Coronaviridae. And so SARS-CoV-2 is one clade, and SARS-CoV-1, or the original, is another, and then the other coronaviruses are different clades. And then if you take down— break SARS-CoV-2 up, it goes into smaller clades. Okay. just means family, like a clan, right? Now, in looking at it, uh, and as you know, I try to put, uh, you know, original source material from data and publications. Because we're looking at Omicron, there's stuff published, but there's less, and those will certainly be in there in your references. But, um, there's a— there was a really good summary, and I'll put a link into it, in the New Zealand Herald that basically said that As of, I think this is about 10 days ago, BA.2, so the new clade of Omicron variant, BA.2, not BA.1, which was original Omicron, is found in at least 40 countries, including the United States. And it is considered stealthy, although it makes you sick. So that's not the stealthy part. Stealthy part is if you're doing a PCR test, it evades some of the PCR testing, uh, because of its— it has some unique genomics that don't match up with the way that the PCR test is set up. But the bottom line is that they are finding it. They, they have it genetically sequenced. And, um, although it is in the US right now, like original BA.1 Omicron, it's lagging in the US behind Europe, Asia, And in Denmark, it's somewhere in the middle. It's about 45% of all cases. But that is over doubled from a week ago. So it's on the rise. So BA.2— and one of the ways that they're looking at this is that if you didn't get Omicron with the first wave through, one of the other clades, the BA.2 or BA.3 clade, will probably be available to you. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to get it. They're saying that it will have 100% exposure over time, but it doesn't mean you will get sick. sick from it. It just means you, you will probably have the opportunity to be exposed. Now, biologically speaking, uh, there's an interesting little change between BA.1, original Omicron, and BA.2, and, uh, that is that it's a little bit more similar to the original, uh, SARS virus, the SARS-CoV-1 1 in its entry. So Omicron kind of has a throwback to the genetics of SARS-CoV-1 in its entry, and that's what they believe is allowing for more rapid transmission through the upper respiratory airways and getting in the cell a little bit faster than, than say Delta did, or Alpha, or Beta, or Gamma. And I'll put a link into that if you're interested, but they talk about this paper by Martin et al. looking at the mutations and what, what does all that mean. So if you're really into that sort of a thing, I'll list the paper there. It's a bit of a snooze though, because once you get past that one point, that's pretty much all, all you need to know. So now, uh, I quote a study, and then I also quote, uh, some Denmark data that was summarized in, uh, in a news release, a press release. So there's a study and a news report, press report from scientists about, uh, BA.2 spread and severity, because this is what really goes back to, are, are we, you know, do we want to believe the alarmist reports? Do we want to believe, uh, the bit more hopeful, you know, let's build herd immunity with a lower virulence, lower danger virus. And so if we look at that and we look at the scientific publication, and then we also look then at this press release from some scientists— so it's pretty much like a scientific publication, just not peer-reviewed— the scientific publication says we did a comparative analysis of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Lambda, Mu, and then the Omicron triplets BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3. And we found that BA.2, this new one of the 3 triplets of Omicron, is about 1.5 to 4.2 times as contagious as BA.1. So compared to original Omicron, it's, you know, between 1.5 and 4 times as contagious. This again follows the natural progression of evolution of a virus where it wants to be as contagious as possible. Okay. And it says more capable than BA.1 or Delta to escape current vaccination immunity. So what it appears is if you had a vaccine and then Omicron BA.1, You have some carryover immunity. If you had Omicron BA.1, you have some carryover immunity. But if you had just vaccination or just infection with Alpha, Beta, or Delta, you may not have as much immunity, and you may not have as deeply severe if you have prior immunity, but you may have a cold-like illness. So it'll, it'll essentially give you a booster. whether you be— whether you're vaccinated or not, sort of like a universal booster. And then they also in that paper have some other things about the current monoclonal antibody treatments. There's only one of them that's probably going to be appropriate for BA.2, and that is a monoclonal antibody developed by Glaxo. So they, they're letting everybody know that in the medical world. Um, and then in the, uh, statement from the Statens Serum Institut— this is, uh, in Denmark, this is the big infectious disease institute— they're saying, uh, BA.2 is well over 1.5 times more contagious than BA.1. That's, that's what the paper said there above. But there is no evidence it causes a more severe disease. So when you look at some of the things which we're going to get to here in just a couple of moments. When you look at some of the kind of alarming stuff on social media, what, what they would kind of say is, on the alarmist end of things, is we need to be very careful about BA.2 because this may be, you know, the, the time where we let our guard down and then boom, we get hit with BA.2 and it spreads faster. It's going to make everyone more sick and And we're doing a really bad thing by, you know, relaxing mandates and all that. And this is at a time where, you know, here in the States, uh, mandates are changing. Uh, Europe is dropping many, many of their mandates in many of the countries, uh, and, and other places around the world as far as, um, well, a number of things. Okay, then of course that's geographically, uh, unique to where you are, so please look that up. I don't want to speak to what everybody's doing, but you probably heard that on the news. So where would the— and I, I will say, you know, these, these are people I listen to, these are people I gather information from, and I don't, you know, I try not to silo myself and only listen to people that think one way or the other. Um, and so I try to, you know, to listen to people who kind of have different global points of view around, you know, virology and pandemics and stuff of that nature, because it helps for you to keep an open mind. And so one of the reasons I was, uh, triggered to, to want to have this discussion today was, uh, some of the people, uh, who, you know, have good credentials and I like to listen to and get their point of view, who tend to come a little bit more from an alarmist point of view, uh, which is nothing wrong with, you know, if there's bad things happening in the world, sometimes you want to be you know, shaken out of your comfort zone. Um, but I started to see them characterizing, uh, this new clade of Omicron BA.2, you know, the sister of BA.1, our original Omicron, as a seriously bad viral, uh, change. Okay, so what did they say? Well, one of the quotes that I lifted out of somewhere on the social media world, uh, BA.2 is seriously bad news. Well, that doesn't sound sound very good. Okay. And this really— what got my attention was it was like, well, the majority of the pretty conservative data scientists, virologists, etc., that I'm listening to around the world are saying BA.2, uh, is— yes, it's going to be more transmissible, but that's it. It's just going to take us to herd immunity faster. So when I hear, you know, these other folks saying it's seriously bad news. So they go through and they break it down. It's faster transmission, okay? Um, and it evades prior immunity, which we said from that paper above, vaccines and, uh, and natural infection from the older versions, you know, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta especially. So there is that, but then it goes on and it says if you have this and it's easier to transmit, and then you have this very, very resistant to natural immunity infection. The next conclusion they draw from that, which if you think of their first 2 conclusions makes some logical sense, is this will be a whole new viral problem. So even if, like, you know, I had BA.1 Omicron, I could just get BA.2 now, okay, because it's going to walk right through that immunity. We already know it, you know, it's going to walk through a lot of vaccine immunity. Well, there was on one of the social media outlets— so I put in the, uh, the paper they're basing this on— and on one of the social media outlets, another physician replied and said, well, be careful about saying that because this, um, statistical difference in, um, you know, resistance to natural immunity didn't even exist in the paper you're quoting. So in the notes, I give you the paper they're quoting, and then I give the comment by the other physician. And if you look it up, indeed, this difference in infectivity across natural immunity, so acquired herd immunity, didn't exist in the paper, but they're quoting it to make it sound worse. So whenever you see that, and we all do this, you know, we look for the data that our, you know, our brain, you know, we have selection bias. Uh, we look for the data that our brain is kind of after, and we sometimes overlook these things that say, well, that actually wasn't really statistically meaningful. But I'd like to just take a step back from the alarmist versus hopeful discussion and say what kind of research were they basing their alarmist claims on versus do we have any better research? So as I will quote in there, the first paper I call the hamster paper, uh, because they're basing this on a paper that looked at 2 things. One is, uh, basically in vitro, so in, in the test tube sort of reactions with the virus, and then The in vivo animal part were hamsters. Okay, so if you don't have any human data, any actual human data with Omicron BA.1 versus 2, etc., then a hamster paper is pretty nice because it's better than just a test tube paper because it's got an animal involved. But what if we had actual human data? from the area where we first had the largest amount of BA.1 Omicron, that in the scientific order of things would trump a hamster paper or, or a test tube paper, certainly, because it's real life, real world data. So do we have any of that? Well, yes, we have this paper called Clinical Severity of Omicron Sublineage BA.2 Compared to BA.1 in South Africa. Now, why is it nice that it's from South Africa, other than it's good that they, you know, they're publishing things, etc.? It's because that was— we don't know really where it started, but that's where we first noticed it was in southern Africa. So if we have BA.1 and we have its original stomping grounds for infection, and we have data on BA.1 versus BA.2, that is pretty high-level level credible data as far as is this stuff, the BA.1 versus BA.2, really a big deal as far as the, uh, you know, the immune evasion and pathogenicity, etc. So they looked at disease severity first, which is very important because if you're looking on the alarmist side of things, they're saying BA.2 is going to be so severe it should be its own variant. Now, that would be doable. It'd be unusual to take a clade that's a triplet and parse one out, but certainly if BA.2 turned out to start killing everybody or something, that, that would be the way that they would do that. Well, um, what they did is they went through and they had a way genetically— remember, uh, on I'll just show you one more time here on this little, you know, Venn diagram thing. Remember, the stuff in the middle is in common, but then each one has like a unique or 2 genetic thing that doesn't share with the others. So through genomic analysis, which we do now at the drop of a hat, used to be extremely hard, they're able to pick out, okay, BA.1 has this and BA.2 doesn't. and BA.2 has this and BA.1 doesn't. And they're able to look for the gene absence or presence and say, okay, we had all these Omicron people, let's do a genetic regression analysis and say, okay, these people were BA.2s, these people were BA.1s. So that's— with a lot of science words, that's basically what they did. So they looked at the odds of being admitted to the hospital between BA.1 and BA.2, and there's no difference in hospital admission, which— hospital admission is a pretty reliable marker that you have a worse variant or worse clade or worse subtype. So if BA.1 and BA.2 had no difference in hospital admission, then we kind of know how severe BA.1 Omicron is much less than Delta, for, for example, and BA.2 is not worse than BA.1 on hospital admissions. Okay, also among hospitalized people, after controlling for other diseases, which is a really good thing, the odds of severe disease in a hospitalized person was no different. So if we truly were going to be on the alarmist side, like my colleagues have decided to do, which is their prerogative, it's the way they read the data, but if my alarmist colleagues are correct, then we really, in, in real-life human studies like this one, using the genomics to say, is it BA.1 or BA.2, what we should see is that BA.1 was much less likely to be hospitalized and Once you're hospitalized, you're much less likely with BA.1 to have severe disease. And what we see is BA.1 and BA.2 have the same hospitalization basically, and the same rate of severe disease, which is actually quite low. Okay. So what they're saying is, while, um, the data show That BA.2, the newer one— now they're all kind of, they're triplets, so that one's not really newer, but the newer, newer one on the scene, BA.2, that everyone's alarming about— it has a competitive advantage. It's, it can infect better and faster than BA.1. It does not have any difference in its illness. So this kind of then goes back to Does the current data, and especially the higher quality data, match an alarmist attitude that says BA.2 is gonna, you know, be the end and, uh, it's gonna get us all and it's gonna walk through everybody's, you know, prior immunity and we're gonna get real sick and die with it? Or does it match more of what most of the rest of the world's virologists are saying, which is BA.1, BA.2, maybe even BA.3? Who cares? It's all Omicron. It's all got about the same level of disease. It's just that BA.2 is going to spread even faster and to more people. The data would seem to favor the less alarmist, more sort of silver lining. We're building herd immunity, and Omicron might— I'm not saying it will, but it might be the biggest step towards endemicity As opposed to a pandemic virus. So I think that's important. And the other thing, you know, that you always have to look at is if I'm gonna, you know, get worked up and be alarmist about something, and I'm basing that, as you know, all of these colleagues on both sides do, on data, um, you want to use the highest quality data that you possibly can. And so I would prefer if we have real live data from one of the original hard-hit areas of Omicron where they pulled apart who had BA.1 and 2, and it shows that BA.2 might spread a little faster, but there's no, no difference in disease state, no difference in hospitalization, no difference in severity really. I'd rather have that human data than these weird extrapolations from test tube and hamster data. which you can do and certainly are appropriate if you don't have any human data. But it's kind of hard to make a, you know, an alarmist, you know, point of view from the hamster data when you have pretty high-quality human data to base it on. So what I want to say at that point Is if you feel more comfortable with the more alarmist side of things, that's, you know, that's your choice, certainly. Um, I'm feeling, based on reading this and based on, you know, listening to the opinions of both sides and some pretty high, you know, high-quality scientific minds, um, I'm very comfortable looking at this data and listening and and falling on the side that says BA.1 is just going to be— so BA.1 spread faster than any prior, but it killed less people, had more disease state that was easier to deal with, so lower, you know, overall disease state. BA.2 is even faster spreading. It's going to overtake BA.1, and it's going to probably spread through people who didn't get BA.1 the first time around, thereby either providing, uh, actual booster to natural immunity, booster to immunization immunity, or booster to combined immunity as well. Okay. So do we have— speaking of transmission danger, all that sort of stuff. Do we have anything from anywhere other than Southern Africa? Which of course is great to have the Southern Africa data because that was the first place we had a lot of Omicron that we know of. So we do. We, we have some Danish information and we actually have some U.S. information from the CDC. Now the CDC has been getting sort of beaten up Probably rightly so, you know, in the in the public media for essentially not publishing a lot of things and not sharing a lot of things. But they did a really nice job on this. I mean, credit where credit's due, and I will give you with all the links. You'll see this. This will be easy to pick up because it's CDC.gov, and it's from their morbidity and mortality. Weekly report, which they usually do a wonderful job with. But there's that data, and then there is also a Danish study. So if you remember, you know, the, the Danish data is always really nice. And it's not that other European countries don't have, you know, Omicron BA.1 or BA.2. It's just that the Danish, uh, science machine and data collection is really tight and really you know, works well. That's not to say other European countries don't do that. They just— like, the, the Danes are just, you know, right on it. So in the, in the Danish study— and since I'm giving this from the United States, I'll, I'll go to the U.S. data here in a second— but they looked at, uh, 8,500. So again, a big sample size, Danish households between December and January. And if you recall, you know, us here in North America were on the upswing with Omicron, then they were in the kind of in the thick of Omicron there, December and January. Infectivity was definitely easier with BA.2 than BA.1. And so in those 8,500 households, when they again looked at the, you know, who got BA.1 versus BA.2, BA.2, the middle of the triplets, the new clade that everyone's talking about, was about 33% more likely to infect another person compared to BA.1. Now, BA.1 Omicron infected other people pretty easily. Okay, so this is another reason why the, the virologists and data scientists are saying, uh, what Omicron didn't do with BA.1, it may do as far as worldwide cleanup, infection, and transmission with BA.2. And BA.2 spreads easier. Okay, now the other thing was that, uh, BA.2 spread easier, and it was even more of a non-respecter of vaccination status. And they go into that in the paper, but essentially it just said part of the reason it spread even faster is BA.1, the original, had a little respect for, for prior immunity and vaccine status. BA.2 had less respect for prior immunity and vaccination status. So it just means it's, it's spreading faster. But again, they make these, uh, you know, comments that while it spreads faster and it's less of a respecter of prior immunity, it, uh, does not have a bigger or worse disease state. So if you do get it and you don't have underlying conditions or co-infections or other things, it's likely to be like a cold. Okay, maybe a bad cold, but more like a cold. Well, now when we're looking through and looking at, you know, where are we and do we have anything closer to home, if you're listening or watching from the U.S., uh, the CDC published this. Again, I'll give you the link. They've got some great charts in there. And, uh, you know, I will say, you know, for for all the, uh, for all the crap that people have been giving the CDC, which they do deserve really for a lot of the stuff they've done, uh, they did a great job on this data. So what they did is they looked at people who had an Omicron cluster by going, uh, to a convention. So this is where you have people in one state at a convention who are not likely known to each other, and they came from 13 different states and converged on one location. And I think there was, you know, a couple of hotels. It was a big convention. So they looked at that, and then they looked at downstream when all these people went home with Omicron. Did they give it to their friends and family who they had close contact with? And then the other thing that they did is, did it make much of a difference if the person had, say, a particular type of vaccine, history of COVID infection, or even their booster? Now, this is something that, you know, especially with boosters, has been kind of hard to get, you know, new data, etc. Well, so CDC— really knocked out of the park as far as I'm concerned. So, um, they have a group, um, so in the original group, remember, it's, uh, 13 people from 13 states converging on one state at a, you know, like a convention center. So most people are staying at one or two hotels and they're all together in this thing and they get, you know, they're spreading Omicron around and then they go home with Omicron. What do we know about it? Well, of the original group of 13 state people who came to the one state, the median duration of symptoms was 11 days. So again, close to 2 weeks, between 1 and 2 weeks. So median indicates that some people had less and some people had a bit more. Most commonly reported symptoms were nasal congestion, fatigue, cough, and sore throat. So cold or flu symptoms. Incubation period was figured to be 2 to 5 days based on the latest— earliest and latest exposure. So one of the reasons why, you know, COVID, SARS-CoV-2, has spread around the world is you don't get sick right away usually. So you get exposed and the incubation time, 2 to 5 days. You might have done a lot of things, been a lot of places in those 2 to 5 days. So, um, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the original group. So again, this kind of goes back to our original idea that this, this is, you know, and I, I will always say, you know, had an Omicron patient die in the hospital because of co-infections, but Generally, Omicron is not sending you to the hospital and not killing you. It's a, it's a cold or flu-like illness. Now, what about this other group of people? So they had another group of people who were called the household contacts. So when you got back home and you had your, uh, you know, Omicron BA.2 there, um, were you likely to give it to the rest of the family, essentially? So the symptom duration was a little longer, about 2 weeks, 13 days, and most people had nasal congestion, fatigue, cough, runny nose, and some change in taste. So the original folks, for some reason, didn't have quite as many symptoms. Hard to tell why that might be, but that's just the way it reported out. Also, there were no hospitalizations or deaths reported in this group either. So you definitely had your original group, 13 states converged together on a convention, they spread around Omicron BA.2, and then they give it to each other, and they go home not knowing they have it. Usually they, they wind up also giving it downstream to everybody. Now, between the positive And negative people. There was one I, I really liked that they did this. Uh, they asked people, uh, to divide up, were you wearing a mask or not throughout the convention? And I think that the most telling, because it's the most number of people, said that they always were masked at the convention. Okay. We do need to be careful because, as you know, there's lots of different kinds of masking. If you're using something, you know, like an N95 or whatever, there's different ways to more or less appropriately use those masks. But the interesting thing was that the 75% of people who wore a mask all the time at convention were, were turned out positive, SARS positive. 25% turned out negative. So the action alone, which you see at, you know, at most, you know, hotels, airports, conventions, etc., of just wearing a mask did not seem to change the transmissibility. I don't think it made it more likely. I just think it didn't Do very much there. Most of these people, like all, all but one, had no history of COVID-19 prior infection. So this is a pretty COVID natural infection naive group. Most of them, which I think you find around the US now, had the Pfizer vaccine. Second most common was Moderna. Last place was the Johnson Johnson with a minority of people. Pfizer had 70% vaccinated positive and 30% negative, so more vaccinated got the infection. And then what about people with boosters? It essentially was about 50/50. It's a smaller number, and the people with their boost, so their third shot, basically had an equal propensity for infection. Remember, with, with just general, were you vaccinated or not, it was 70% vaccinated got it. Right. and 30% didn't. With a booster, so presence of a third shot, it was about 50/50, but it was a smaller number. What about when the people got back home and they had some that were obviously positive and negative? Interestingly, you had a flip. The original conference or convention attendees, had twice as many positives as negatives, and, uh, the families back home had twice as many negatives as positives. So going downhill to the family, uh, it was transmissible but less so than the people concentrated at the conference. Uh, so again, most of the people had Pfizer, a little bit Moderna, and a little bit Johnson Johnson. And boosters, again, you had people with boosters. It was— remember, on the primary group it was 50/50. On this group it was 40% positive and 60% negative. And that held true all the way through. So that's kind of the state of where things are. I think if I was going to Summarize, I would say we want to remember that the Omicron at the moment, we have it divided up into 3 subfamilies: BA.1, original; BA.2, the current one sweeping the world; BA.3, we don't know a whole lot about. They're called clades, kind of like a clan, but they're just part of Omicron. So remember the— that little little peace sign Venn diagram there. They have a lot of genes in common, some genes separate, but they're more common than not. And as we would expect with viral drift and viral, uh, you know, action going around the world, um, if I'm a virus, I want to infect you faster and broader, more people, more quickly, but I don't want to kill you because if I kill the host, I'm dead too as a virus. So what we want to see, if we want a real effective virus to get us from pandemic to endemic, is one that goes through and burns itself out in the population. And that's what most of the data scientists are saying that Omicron is doing for us. Uh, BA.1 did it it really effectively. BA.2 is now doing it even more effectively. But we also want to remember that these in general, not universally, but in general, are lower pathogenicity. They're lower danger organisms, and that goes along with faster spread, less severe disease and death. Okay. So I think that that's important. Someone asked me to update because they just did, and I'll put a link into this, the Alberta hospital system, because they actually, you know, have new cases, active cases and hospitalization, and are you vaccinated, 1, 2, or 3 doses. Very few systems have this, or no, no vaccine. Um, In hospitalized patients now, as of 2 days ago, 30% have 3 doses, 35% have 2 doses of vaccine, 5% have 1 dose, and 30% are unvaccinated. So like I was saying, you know, as opposed to with Delta, where in most hospital systems it was the majority of hospitalized folks were unvaccinated, Now what we see with this Alberta hospital data, the majority of the folks who are hospitalized really have between 1, 2, and 3 doses of the vaccine. Now I've had people write in and say, well, you're, you know, you're being anti-vax or you're being this or that. Please don't put words into my mouth or thoughts into my head. I have enough of my own thoughts. I'm just sharing this information, just like I did with the CDC. It's important that we know that as virus changes over time and as we get these different variants, the data changes. And one of the things that I try and do is just present the data. You make your own conclusions. Whatever you do is between you and your healthcare provider or your healthcare team. I don't tell people what to do with their health. And remember, as I always say, Don't take medical advice from people on video apps or YouTube or anywhere else. It's stupid. Um, you need to do these things with all of the facts and in consult— consultation with whoever does your healthcare because they and you have the relationship. Uh, I like with the CDC data and the other stuff, it's just nice to see kind of the direction things are going and to see kind of the way that things are playing out. So, um, I in no way am, you know, being anti-vax. I'm in no way telling people not to get vaccinated. I'm just sharing information that is in the data. I give you the references and the links. You make your own decisions. You make your decisions with your healthcare providers. So, uh, please don't, uh, either aggressively or passive-aggressively leave comments about how I'm, you know, this, that, or the other thing. What's interesting is there are people that think I am on one end or the other of the spectrum. So I've been accused of being anti-vax and pro-vax at the same time. I am pro you staying healthy and alive. I'm pro you doing everything that you possibly can, but also being informed. This is not about You know, the fantasy world that a lot of people live in using, you know, data from a year and a half ago, or just making stuff up apparently on the internet, like some of the stuff I pointed out. This is about looking at the facts. Do your due diligence. Protect yourself and stay healthy. All right, I'm just about out of time. Whatever format you're watching this on, but especially YouTube or your Podburners, please like, share, and subscribe. Thank you. Subscribe, uh, do notifications. And I am Dr. A. I'll be back on Medicine and Health next week for another podcast. Thank you.
