This is a cautionary tale about the spread of the virus among the vaccinated and tested at a holiday party in a restaurant in Marin county, CA:
All guests are vaccinated and many are boosted. All were tested the day of the party. No one wore masks though at the holiday party.
Most importantly from the article:
Most of the people who tested positive after the holiday gathering in Marin have had minimal to no symptoms, and none have required hospitalization, county Health and Human Services spokeswoman Laine Hendricks said Wednesday.
“They had less severe outcomes than if they had forgone the vaccine altogether,” she said.
I suspect we’re all going to have to deal with it sooner or later. As I’m seeing more of these stories coupled with the possibility of getting really good immunity post Covid after having been vaxxed to lessen any potential bad blow from it, I worry a lot less about catching it TBH.
Paxlovid gets EUA:
Interesting, because one of the conditions of attendance was vaccination. Must have been staff.
I think it was theoretical, based upon odds.
They must be mixing and matching what they are commenting on without clarifying. That quote you pulled is verbatim, in order. It must not be about the party though, because if everyone followed the guidelines, there wouldn’t have been anyone that had “foregone vaccine altogether.”
I’ve never been a big fan of how the media covers science. Add a pandemic to the mix and the reporting gets even sloppier. Misinformation is a pandemic in and of itself.
Which is why I think it’s theoretical. If these same people hadn’t been vaccinated, some would likely have been hospitalized and more would have had symptoms. It’s a guess based upon what we know between vaxxed results and unvaxxed results. The exact same person can’t be in both groups.
I agree everyone there was vaxxed according to the article. It’s a good data point for having everyone be vaxxed at these types of gatherings.
Ahhh, I gets it now. 
Omicron seems to break through vaccination (against the ancestral variant) easily, although vaccinated people tend not to have bad cases. While the hosts also required guests to have negative rapid test results the same day, it is possible that a false negative could have occurred, or a guest was on the threshold of becoming contagious (not contagious when tested, but became contagious after arriving at the event). Guests were not masked (they were dining), but typically staff at restaurants are masked. However, many people wearing masks do not use better quality masks or wear them optimally. The event also had all of the windows and doors of the restaurant open to maximize air flow.
More detail from local news:
Besides the death of the man in TX have any unvaccinated people had severe cases of Omicron?
There were some deaths in the UK.
Some deaths of COVID-19 may have been of unknown variant (Delta is still common in the US).
It would make sense where Omicron is the most dominant that it would also be among the hospitalized. Not being “as bad” with higher numbers overall still puts many in the hospital unfortunately.
It will be nice when we see data on it though.
For now, here’s what I see published:
This is another good Omicron article IMO:
The sheer numbers Omicron gives us, esp in unvaccinated, could be problematic. Time will tell.
In the city of Cambridge, everyone is masked. The case load is relatively low. Boston has a mask mandate. In the suburbs, where the case load is very high, many, even most, are not masked. My small town has 91 cases.
Cambridge is reporting their data on a 14-day moving average, whereas most others are using a 7-day moving average. (Which is what most recommend on a fast growing virus.) Since omni has boomed over the past days, Cambridge’s positivity appears lower than it really is. For example, Cambridge reports a positivity rate of <2% (under a 14-day average) but its surrounding County, Middlesex, reports a rate of 4+% under a 7-day average. Is there really that much demographic difference?
Interesting info. I got my figures from the state site. Yes there is a demographic difference between Cambridge and Middlesex County, in my opinion, not to mention living situations. But my main point was that residents there seem to be masked, and not so much elsewhere. I am in Essex County which is not doing well right now.
Most commentary has assumed Omicron is more transmissible than Delta, as the explanation for why it is growing so fast. But Professor Francois Balloux of University College London, who is quite prominent in BBC news reports (we are in the UK for Christmas) believes that it’s due to a reduced intergenerational interval (ie you become infectious more quickly). See for example this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/1472565162137817088
If that’s true then the wave will burn itself out very quickly without much impact on hospitals and deaths. He stated on a radio interview yesterday that new infections have already peaked in London and predicted that reported cases here will start to fall in the next week, like in South Africa. It appears the UK government (at least in England) is listening to him as they are taking a wait and see approach to any further measures.
The CDC has announced relaxation of quarantine guidelines for HCWs. It will only be a matter of time before they are relaxed for more and more groups of people.
1NJParent - I was at a holiday party (inside, no masks). Five of 20 people there tested positive - all boosted. I can tell you from talking to them regularly that it was not objectively mild. One could hardly talk, another needed an inhaler. No hospitializations- but not nothing, either. All are okay now, but just throwoing this out there as a cautionary experience.