A former World Health Organisation (WHO) official has claimed that the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron has a basic reproduction number (R0) of around 12 (each infected person passes it on to 12 others), making it as infectious as measles, the most contagious disease known, and nearly six times as infectious than the original Wuhan strain (with an R0 of 2.5). Here’s the report in MailOnline.
Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading epidemiologist in Australia, said BA.2 is 40% more transmissible than the original variant.
He claimed it would have a basic reproduction number (R0) of around 12, meaning if left to spread unchecked every infected person would pass it to a dozen others.
It would make the sub-strain five times more infectious than the original Wuhan virus and one of the most contagious diseases known to science.
The claim would explain why the mutant virus was able to outstrip its parent strain in the U.K. in about a month and undermine China’s Zero Covid policy, which has until now managed to suppress every version of the virus.
Explaining his methodology, Professor Esterman said: “The basic reproduction number (R0) for BA.1 is about 8.2, making R0 for BA.2 about 12. This makes it pretty close to measles, the most contagious disease we know about.”
The R0 number is the average number of people each BA.2 patient would infect, if there was no immunity in a population or behavioural changes.
But most scientists say there is no reason to be concerned over the variant because it is just as mild as the original Omicron.
The BA.2 subvariant is now behind almost every case in England, or 83% of infections last week, according to official estimates.
It became dominant three weeks beforehand, accounting for 52% of all infections in the week to February 20th.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates cases have been rising since mid-February, with one in 25 people in England estimated to have been infected last week.
Hospitalisations are also creeping up, but the majority appear to be incidental – when someone tests positive after admission for another illness.
But how accurate are these estimates of infectiousness? The UKHSA (and previously PHE) publishes estimates of the secondary attack rates (SARs; the proportion of contacts an infected person infects) of the coronavirus variants in its Technical Briefings. I have plotted some of them in the chart below.
While each data point comes from a PHE or UKHSA Technical Briefing, I should emphasise that these data are not entirely ‘clean’. In particular, the start dates for the studies vary. Also, the first two data points are “direct” SAR, then the next seven are overall SAR, and the rest are “household” SAR – ‘direct’ appears to be broadly comparable to ‘household’, while overall is similar to ‘household’ because the large majority of contacts are household contacts. Thus the anomalous dip in the Alpha SAR results in part from the start date switching to March for six data points. However, despite these limitations, the values are instructive as they give an indication of how the secondary attack rates of different variants change over time and compare with one another.
They show, for example, that the household or direct SAR of any coronavirus variant, as recorded by the U.K. Government, has not exceeded 16%. Alpha when it first appeared had a direct SAR of 15.6%, and Omicron had a household SAR of 15.8%. This means no variant has infected more than 16% of household/direct contacts, and equivalently 84% of household/direct contacts have remained uninfected. We also see that this SAR for each variant declines rapidly to around 10-11%, where it remains. The Delta variant shows that the decline doesn’t necessarily continue, and its SAR actually rose slightly as we went into autumn – a seasonal effect perhaps – sustaining its wave at a relatively low level throughout the second half of 2021. We also see subvariants AY.4.2 (Delta) and BA.2 (Omicron) emerge with higher SARs, which help to sustain their respective waves. BA.2 in particular had an SAR of around 14% when it first appeared, giving the Omicron wave its recent boost. Note, however, that BA.2’s SAR is still under the original Omicron’s initial SAR, and indeed that of Alpha in December 2020. It’s hard to reconcile this with the claim that BA.2 is several times more infectious than the Wuhan strain or Alpha variant, or as infectious as measles. UKHSA data suggest rather it is less infectious than Omicron was in December.
It might be argued that there is more population immunity for later variants, so that the SARs are not directly comparable. However, Omicron has shown significant immune evasion when causing infection, plus it’s hard to see increased population immunity making a huge difference for BA.2 compared to Omicron within a few weeks. Also, it could be argued that households are typically exposed all at once due to difficulties in avoiding exposure when living under the same roof, limiting the impact of population immunity on household transmission rates.
On the other hand, it may be true that population immunity is stunting the spread of new variants within households. It would be worth quantifying the size of this effect. But either way, the SARs as measured by UKHSA and PHE are significant indicators of the actual level of infectiousness of each variant in the current population. And, importantly, they show a disease that has not yet managed to infect more than 16% of household contacts.
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More BS modelling.
More WHO 🐂💩
You walk down the street and you might get run over or get you brains blown out. Who gives a f***, it is the risk that makes it all worthwhile.
Try to stay off London Bridge and the risk of being slaughtered drops fairly sharply.
How many of the peeople shitting themselves actually bothered with health, wellness, fitness, immunity. As far as I can see the histrionic people seem to be the sort of vegetables that would be wiped out by a slap in the face. Work on your body and your mind and etheric body then you won’t give a shit about viruses.
That is what has frustrated me most, queue up for a jab in the arm and then back to McDonalds for breakfast, idiots.
I think you are spot on in the main but I do think the elderly have been abused and manipulated by the government ,nudge unit/BBC etc .Now a fair percentage are just plain petrified .I see them most days all probably triple jabbed and still masked up inside and out .Very sad and a truly despicable result of the Pig dictators policies.
And probably wearing their mask in bed and in the bath.
I agree – My elderly parents follow MSM religiously and they have done a sold job of scaring the living daylights out of them
They were never at risk from the virus. What has indubitably harmed them greatly is the triple jabbing – I can literally see the damage to my mother’s body which she jut puts down to ‘old age’
Sorry, but … well-known prophet of Corona’s witnesses repeats ever-repeated claim about new variant … yawn. They’ve said this everytime. It always turned out to be wrong. Hence, it’ll turn out to be wrong this time again.
Professor Adrian Esterman is much more infectious than measles. With every so-called new Corona variant (and they don’t even have variants anymore, they’re now trading subvariants[*]), he’s going to infect 100% of the people listening to him with this idea.
[*] If they can keep this nonsense going for long enough, they’ll simply rename Sars-CoV2 every day. After Sars-CoV2 2022/03/15 comes Sars-CoV2 2022/03/16, something we absolutely don’t know anything about yet but ICUs are quickly filling up with terribly sick children …
I am starting to worry about what will happen when there really is a deadly pandemic.
Cry Wolf…
Example for that: When Biden started talking about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, I immediately discounted that as propaganda story likely intended to deflect from the domestic Corona-mess. I couldn’t imagine that anything our dear political leaders said could possibly be something other than more COVID-related BS.
It’s all been done before – in 1997 Hollywood- Wag The Dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8
Coming soon according to Billy.
Some of these boffins are going to suffer from the attention seekers’ version of postpartum syndrome, once they have to go back in their boxes.
Well isn’t that what Original Antigenic Sin would look like? They better hope that the “benefits” of “vaccination” eventually wear off after they stop being “boosted”. It’s a good job it is currently such a comparatively mild virus.
The removal of the idea of reincarnation was very convenient for the powers that be, especially if it was replaced by a belief in a heavenly future. I know for certain that reincarnation is a reality. If we could resurrect this idea it would change everything. We are all coming back. If you begin to understand karmic forces then you will see this clearly.
Don’t believe in either no heavenly future no reincarnation this is it so make the best of it.
No, there’s far, far more to existence than merely this life on Earth. It’s not about what you merely ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’; the actual nature of reality (which includes the proven fact that we all survive [in our immortal spirit body form] the death of our physical body ‘coat’) is the way it is, regardless of what uninformed sceptics merely ‘believe’.
See my post to Jabby McStiff, above.
And NO, I’m most definitely NOT a ‘christian’. I am, however, a factually-informed Spiritualist.
I don’t want to come back. I’ve had enough.
You are absolutely right. What a great pity that there are still so very many spiritually-UNenlightened people on the planet.
There are many thousands of high-quality, scholarly books that have been published on this ultimate truth of existence (the proven fact that we all survive [in our immortal soul/spirit body form – which has in fact been SEEN, by the many people around the world who are lucky enough to possess clairvoyant vision; and the latter includes some doctors and nurses] the immensely illusory event that’s wholly incorrectly termed ‘death’, AND that reincarnation is indeed a very real truth; we are each an eternal soul which has many, many lifetimes), and a large percentage of those many thousands have been written BY the many PROPERLY-enlightened, spiritually-enlightened scientists, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc etc, around the world.
People who ‘disbelieve’ in survival of ‘death’ and reincarnation will one day discover that both those statements ARE indeed the truth. It’s the way life/existence truly works. All the many (sadly) uninformed sceptics will, on the eventual day on which they do what is so very incorrectly termed ‘die’, discover that the actual nature of ‘death’ is so very, very different to what it merely seems to be, when interpreted on its immensely illusory face-value mere appearance.
We actually live in a multi-dimensional cosmos; ie, there is far, far more to existence than merely this physical dimension.
Question: what other no-to-low symptomatic infectious disease / “disease” have we ever tested / “tested” for as thoroughly as the coofs?
For example, what’s the R number of viruses so mild that we’ve never even noticed that they exist?
It’s another yawn.
1
So what? it’s even less virulent than omicron. Stop with the incessant fear porn you snivelling idiot.
The supposed argument behind this is that this (effective virulence) doesn’t matter because it’s sooo infectious that it will infect sooo many people that the health system will sooo collapse nevertheless. Exactly what used to be told when the would-be infection controllers wanted to a second Christmas in lockdown last year.
Ease-up, buddy. You’re talking about his career here.
You want him to start crying?
“What do the data show”…..
Where did you get the picture of Neil Fergusson at work …
Brilliant – I needed a good laugh!!!
“Leading epidemiologist”…..”WHO scientist”….LOL.
Fantasist, liar, attention whore.
A bit unkind to the hookers they do at least provide a service
The common cold is probably as infectious as measles isn’t it?
The issue is whether it is as dangerous, which it obviously isn’t.
My mother sent me to stay with a school friend who had measles.
Saved queuing up to see a doctor.
Athletes Foot is highly contagious but hasn’t killed anyone.
Bit like Omicron.
I stopped reading after I read this Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading epidemiologist in Australia,
Not surprised considering how australia has put their citizens under house arrest
Oh God – yet more embarrassment.
We are living under totalitarian dictatorships – please read officially published material (governmental and all MSM) accordingly.
It quite possibly is this infectious — in the vaccinated.
My unjabbed self did my level best to catch ‘it’ (thought I might as well get it over with/get the antibodies etc) after my triple jabbed hubby succumbed to whatever a couple of weeks ago, but I remained in rude health; unless I had it so mildly I didn’t even notice. Similar to last summer when my jabbed daughter ‘caught it’ and I didn’t, nor my unjabbed son.
Does it matter any more who caught what and when and from whom? None of the official data is worth jack shit, and as for that coming out of China, I mean, really?
About twenty years ago I had real ‘flu, swirling pits, head felt full of thick soup, in bed for four or five days. Knew I’d get better and did.
I now have the footprint of ‘flu in my DNA because my immune system records and retains it do it can nail it next time it appears.
But if I was to get tested I would be clocked up as a ‘positive’ case and the Feds would be sending the white coats to lock me away, as a danger to the nation.
Almost every doctor knows this is a scam but they are too chicken-#hit scared to say it is a scam.
Oh how I miss my old doctor, Frances Mules of Bromley. A good old-fashioned, Brexit-voting, forty a day smoker, always with an open bottle of decent red wine on the table. She’d have sworn blue murder at what politicians have wrought.
Hubby had real flu in 2019, symptoms exactly as you say, and I came down with the same within a day – both of us completely floored.
I then had ‘long flu’ (lol) and wasn’t right for months, but nobody gave a shit. How I miss those days 😉
So bloody what! Its a cold! Measles is dangerous, this is not.
More scare mongering to keep the fear alive. Ex-WHO …ex-Gates employee…say no more.
For academia and science in general covid is big business even now. Friends who work in research are dropping other projects to concentrate on covid. They need to keep Ovid in the media to keep the shitshow going
There’s a wolf coming ….. a wolf I tell you, a wolf.
(Yawn).
Contagious ≠ dangerous. Modelling ≠ actuality. Forecasts = rollox!
Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic. You will be alright. Just keep taking your hiv boosters, I mean your covid boosters. You will be fine.
But I thought panic was the order of the day. Every day.
Another bloody “scientist” seeking 15 minutes of fame.