[native_samples]

Yes they have. They have not been saying it's still a serious disease. Literally the very first thing they said was that it was "very mild"

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/safrican-doctor-says-pa...

A month and a half later she was still saying the same thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFXC-t6JSxw

"The South African doctor who first spotted the new Covid variant Omicron, Dr. Angelique Coetzee says the United Kingdom is “panicking unnecessarily”. She describes the symptoms of the highly mutated variant which has sparked global panic over fears that it is more contagious than other strains as “extremely mild”."

Hospitalized with Omicron is effectively meaningless. Over half the people in the UK classed as hospitalized with Omicron definitely caught it in the hospital itself, and most were asymptomatic. The word doesn't mean what it normally means.

[_djo_]

You are selectively cherry-picking data here. Dr Coetzee is one doctor with a relatively small number of patients, and she was always clear in stating that her observations were for her patients only. Nor has she or any other set of prominent South African doctors or scientists claimed that Omicron is no worse than the common cold.

Dr Coetzee was also clear to state that her patient base was all relatively young in a country where many of the elderly have been vaccinated and there are high rates of seroprevalence amongst the youth. A level of seroprevalence that was bought at the cost of one of the world's highest death tolls from the virus.

The broad studies that have been done suggest that Omicron may have been about 70% less likely to cause severe disease than Delta in South Africa. As for "hospitalized with Omicron is effectively meaningless", they found that the risks of death once hospitalised were the same for Omicron and Delta. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...

They also caution that it's preliminary research without the ability yet to rule out other contributing factors. For instance, when Omicron hit South Africa it was in between waves and at the tail end of a massive and devastating Delta-wave, which created substantial seroprevalence in urban areas. This is unlike the case in the US and Europe, where a Delta and Omicron wave have coincided. South Africa's Omicron wave also peaked and subsided extremely quickly, faster than is being seen in Europe and the US.

Many of the elderly in the most affected areas had also been vaccinated, and they further caution that they can't predict Omicron's behaviour in a population with relatively low vaccination and low seroprevalence levels.

Again, even if Omicron is substantially 'milder' than Delta, with the right conditions it doesn't matter because the increased infectiousness is enough to overwhelm hospitals anywhere. As we're seeing in the UK, parts of Europe, and all over the US.

[native_samples]

"Nor has she or any other set of prominent South African doctors or scientists claimed that Omicron is no worse than the common cold."

No? She said "They really don't get that sick ... they're happy ... they're all happy". The symptoms and severity match that of a mild cold or more or less any low severity seasonal bug: "muscle aches, fatigue, a scratchy throat and night sweats".

This particular doctor has been interviewed on TV news to describe Omicron and has seen quite a few patients who had it. What exactly is your definition of "prominent"?

"they found that the risks of death once hospitalised were the same for Omicron and Delta"

That's what you'd expect, right? It means that of the people who are turning up with one of the two at the front door (vs getting it in hospital), they are being admitted based on clinical need not a random coin toss. I don't quite see why you think this says anything about severity amongst the general population.

"They also caution that it's preliminary research without the ability yet to rule out other contributing factors ... they further caution that they can't predict Omicron's behaviour in a population with relatively low vaccination and low seroprevalence levels."

See, this attitude is why so many people have learned to ignore researcher's claims about infectious diseases. In March 2020 "preliminary data" was used to justify incredibly extreme measures. Now it's being used to justify keeping them. The pseudo-scientists that dominate public health have no consistent principles and nothing they say can be taken at face value.

As for the latter part, of course they can predict it. South Africa is only ~25% vaccinated which compared to western countries is indeed relatively low. As for seroprevalence, what do you think vaccines are meant to create? The only scenario in which information from actual doctors in South Africa is misleading is if vaccines make Omicron drastically worse. Is that what you're arguing?

[_djo_]

This is ridiculous, you're not discussing this in good faith.

Without any actual expertise in this area you reject out of hand the results of an actual scientific study looking at hospital admissions across the entire country and instead prioritise that of a single GP, just because it aligns closer to what you want to be true. You're also selectively quoting her words, as she never said that the severity matched that of a 'mild cold', as well as leaving out that she only saw a relatively small number of patients, who were young, and none that were hospitalised.

Nor are the results in one place automatically transferable to another, given differences in population density, recency of infections & vaccinations, movement, and other factors. We're already seeing that difference, where the US, UK, and EU are seeing much higher hospitalisation rates, older patients, and a longer wave duration with Omicron than South Africa did. So even if it is milder than Delta, hospitals are still being overwhelmed.

Everyone wants a way out of this as soon as possible. But wishful thinking isn't a useful strategy against a virus.

[native_samples]

Please don't toss around naive insults like "not arguing in good faith". I am arguing in excellent faith. Claims like I'm believing what I want to believe are especially stupid because they're so easy to turn around - you're clearly desperate to believe COVID is not a mild disease.

OK, you really don't like that South African doctor and think she's some sort of outlier. Today we find this story reported by the BBC of all places:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60039138

South African scientists - praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant - have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was "dramatically" milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic.

Two of South Africa's most prominent coronavirus experts told the BBC that Western scepticism about their work could be construed as "racist," or, at least, a refusal "to believe the science because it came from Africa".

"It seems like high-income countries are much more able to absorb bad news that comes from countries like South Africa," said Prof Shabir Madhi, a vaccine expert at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.

"When we're providing good news, all of a sudden there's a whole lot of scepticism. I would call that racism."

Prof Salim Karim, former head of the South African government's Covid advisory committee and vice-president of the International Science Council agrees.

"We need to learn from each other. Our research is rigorous. Everyone was expecting the worst [about Omicron] and when they weren't seeing it, they were questioning whether our observations were sufficiently scientifically rigorous," he said, while acknowledging that the sheer number of new mutations in Omicron may have contributed to an abundance of scientific caution.

And it goes on like that. Omicron is "less severe, dramatically" etc.

Hospitals have never been overwhelmed by Omicron, and arguably not for COVID at any point, but the word "overwhelmed" is so vague and so heavily abused that it's not worth arguing over that.