It's not clear why, but no deaths have yet been connected to the Omicron variant. Perhaps it hasn't been long enough for the first few cases to progress. Preliminary results from South Africa suggest Omicron is three times more likely to cause reinfections compared to Delta and Beta. Omicron continues to spread in South Africa. The percentage of tests coming back positive for covid has increased to 22.4 percent from 16.5 percent. Both Australia and the US have confirmed locally transmitted cases, so who knows what may be coming here. Dr. Fauci says it will take two weeks while other experts say it will take longer to answer questions about Omicron's transmission, immune evasion, and severity. A positive note is that on the day after the first Omicron case was discovered in the US, there were more covid vaccinations than on any day since May. Over one million of the 2.2 million doses administered were boosters. This fits with the advice from the governor of New York to "...get vaccinated, get boosted, and get ready."
Omicron does seem to be more transmissible than Delta, and it is quite possible that future variants will continue to get more transmissible. The original coronavirus had an R0 of three. Alpha's R0 was four to five. Delta's is six to eight. Says a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of Bath, "There's no reason to believe this won't go any higher. Measles, which is one of the most infectious human-to-human diseases, has an R0 which has been estimated to be as high as 18. There's certainly still room for the R0 of Covid to increase." It's not clear if there is a limit to how infectious something can be.
The FDA has authorized Eli Lilly's monoclonal antibodies treatments for infants and children under the age of 12 who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill because of an underlying condition such as diabetes. It should be noted that this would not take the place of vaccination for children old enough to be vaccinated. It would be a treatment for children once they have covid.
The question has been raised of why vaccines couldn't be tailored to a variant. A follow-up question is what to do when a new variant evolves. And if variants are geographically distributed, who will make the decisions of which vaccine(s) to deploy where?
A Labour Member of Parliament has reported Prime Minister Boris Johnson to police for hosting at least two parties during restrictions last year, saying, "I believe they broke the law. Most of my constituents followed the rules; those that didn't faced penalties.Johnson is not above the law, despite his bloated self-entitlement."
Is Omicron as bad as some say it could be, more transmissible, harder to protect against, and more severe? What if it's two of those three? Is more transmissible covid that can bypass the immunity offered by reinfection or vaccination something we can live with if its symptoms remain mild and few people die? What if few people die but those who do contract Omicron have more long covid symptoms? Is there any combination of possibilities that we could live with? Stay tuned. It might be 2022 before we know enough to answer those questions.
1 comment:
We don't get to choose, omicron is what it is and if next week something else comes along, there's nothing that we can do about that either. I am not going to worry about things that I can't do anything about.
It's not only the Christmas parties, it's that they may (or may not) have been caught in a lie about them. Breach of trust in a politician (for me at least) is a deal breaker.
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