Your Omicron Facts
As the Omicron variant spreads, conflicting information has been abundant. So here is a concise fact sheet with reliable information to help clear up any confusion!
Omicron has been detected in 25 US states. Some of the cases involve people that have not traveled recently, indicating that community spread is already underway.
A preliminary study from South Africa indicates that two-shots of Pfizer only has a 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection from Omicron. In the same study, Pfizer still protected well against severe outcomes like death though.
Even if vaccines are less effective, they are still useful, especially with boosters. In a UK study, a Pfizer booster increases protection to around 70-75% against symptomatic infection. If you haven’t yet, get your booster!
Omicron has spread extremely rapidly. In South Africa, Delta’s R0 was less than 1, and Omicron’s R0 has been greater than 3. As a result, case counts in South Africa have exploded. R0 is the reproduction number of a disease’s pathogen.
Omicron is likely to replace Delta. In South Africa, more than 90% of new cases in the Gauteng province are Omicron.
Preliminary results from South Africa indicate that Omicron may be less severe than previous COVID variants. While scientists are still trying to clarify Omicron’s disease severity, Omicron might be the first step in SARS-CoV-2 adapting to become a less dangerous disease. Still, Omicron is not harmless. We saw excess deaths in South Africa nearly double in the last several weeks.
COVID Pill Access Likely to be Low for Developing Countries
Struggling countries have been at a disadvantage throughout the pandemic. It is not any different now. While the USA has 136.9 doses of the Covid vaccine for every 100 people, countries such as Egypt have yet to administer 50 doses per 100 people. Other countries have even lower numbers.
We will most likely see this issue again with the new Covid pills developed by Pfizer and Merck. These pills can help unvaccinated people keep from getting too sick once they’ve been infected by Covid.
Pfizer and Merck have licensed this new treatment so that generic companies can sell them at lower prices in order for struggling countries to have better access to treatments.
However, the countries that struggled to obtain Covid vaccines will also have to wait longer for new treatments such as the Covid pill. It will take manufacturers several months to produce the pills and low-income countries may not be able to afford the prices from the generic companies even though the prices have been lowered.
Inadequate testing in these countries may also render the pills useless because the pills have to be administered within days after developing symptoms. Basically, many disadvantaged countries will not have any access to new treatments for a while.
With the new Omicron variant, who knows what type of situations this could cause, but scientists are hopeful that it is a less severe variant.
AI Scribes
Robin healthcare, a company developing an AI based scribe recently received $50 million in funding to develop its AI scribe. The scribe, called Robin, is basically a smart microphone that listens to the conversation between doctors and their patients and takes notes, like a human scribe. The idea of such a device is to reduce administrative costs of running clinics and allow doctors to spend more time on treating patients instead of completing paperwork. Currently the American healthcare system spends about 15-25% of its total expenditure as administrative costs. While many of these are unavoidable, some can be reduced by speeding up processes. Robin healthcare says that their system can help doctor’s save about 90 minutes per clinic. This is time that can be spent on seeing more patients or spending more time with each one. It will definitely help with physician stress.
Physician burnout is a rising problem in the healthcare system and part of this can be attributed to the sheer amount of paperwork that physicians have to do these days. Robin can help alleviate some of the workload by automating processes such as coding and auto generating patient reports that can then be verified by the physician.
An obvious question here is whether patients would like the idea of their conversations being recorded by a machine. Medical information is often sensitive and many, rightfully so, would not be comfortable with a machine listening to it. While Robin healthcare says that 98% of patients consent to its use, it has only been used in a limited number of clinics so far. Robin healthcare did do a lot to ensure that patient data remains private by adding encryption and other fail safes to their devices; however, how the general patient population will react to this remains to be seen.
Featured Fake News
Edited videos like these are circulating on the internet this week on the CEO of BioNTech not taking the vaccine
This is not true. These videos are taken from December 20, 2020 and at that time, his vaccine was not legal in Germany (where he lives). However, as of it becoming legal in Germany, Dr. Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, has received both doses.
There is, unfortunately, no conspiracy here.
Last Week in a nutshell
The founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, took the stand in her trial. Meanwhile, a new at home tool to diagnose sleep apnea, the Accupebble, showed promising results and could potentially save consumers and hospitals massive medical costs. To read more about it, you can check out last week’s issue on our website!
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