Omicron is insanely contagious. Where I live, cases are doubling every three days. There are places where the doubling rate is two days.
It appears optimized for blowing through vaccines and natural immunity, which is to be expected. We partially immunized the world, but didn’t wipe out Covid, and it mutated to adapt. Because, in many places, a majority had vaccination and natural immunity, the virus adapted to this.
The first big breakout variant, the UK strain, was specifically adapted against masks. It was much more contagious, so minor mask lapses were more easily exploited. It spread more evenly, relying less on super-spreader events, and was more infectious to children, who mask poorly.
The next big breakout was the South African strain, which was part of the family of Covid strains that contain a mutation colorfully labeled “Eek,” which evades antibodies, especially from natural infection or weaker vaccines, because that was/is becoming a bigger impediment than masks.
Now that MRNA vaccines are becoming the tool of choice, if the virus is allowed to continue to circulate in a partially-vaccinated Western population, it is only a matter of time before that becomes the biggest impediment to Covid’s success, and viruses are selected for resistance to it.
(Cue swelling music). LIFE, LIFE finds a WAY!
So, that prediction (not mine, but adopted by me because it made sense), came true.
Now, it’s still unclear how virulent Omicron cases are, because there are a lot of confounding factors. While vaccines don’t protect nearly as much against it, they do make you a lot less likely to die or wind up hospitalized. My sense is that it’s probably about as virulent as the original strain, but not as virulent as Delta.
Omicron appears to be excellent at re-infecting. Odds are you can get it multiple times.
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We also don’t know, yet, how much Long Covid it produces. Bear in mind that, in about half of those people with symptomatic cases of original or Delta, there’s lung scarring even if they don’t have “Long Covid” symptoms. Brain damage is pretty common too, and Covid often damages kidneys. People who are young and fit have gotten this; I have an acquaintance whose brain damage was so bad he got aphasia — he now sounds like a stroke victim and is in speech therapy.
So I’d take this seriously, especially since we don’t know Long Covid works. It may be that your chances of getting it increase each time you have Covid, or just that you have a chance each Covid infection. While Omicron does defeat vaccines better than previous strains, mRNA vaccines (ideally three doses) do provide protection; ventilation will work, etc.
Omicron should never have happened. There should have been a coordinated global effort to eradicate the virus, using basic epidemiological principles that have worked where applied, like in China and New Zealand, combined with travel bans, quarantines, and worldwide vaccine rollout.
Sadly for you and me, but not for our lords and masters, Covid was hugely profitable to the richest people, so it was allowed to spread. Billionaires have seen their wealth double and you just can’t pass up that sort of profit event, certainly not for something as trivial as millions of people dying and possibly being crippled for life. “Hard decisions,” y’know?
(One silver lining of all this is that Omicron is so contagious it seems to be busting through elite cordons. Bill Gates is in isolation now, and if he gets it and dies, it will be exactly what he deserves.)
The deaths and suffering are about a lot more than Covid, as well. To use the simplest example, a lot of surgeries and procedures have been delayed during the plague, and people are suffering and dying because of that. Where I live, I’ve seen response to cancer discovery go from about two months from initial finding to surgery/treatment to well over four months (not sure how much over four months yet, finding out the hard way). That will turn some people’s treatable cancer into a death sentence. The same is true of heart issues, and so on.
This is what our elites do. They make themselves richer and more powerful, and they do so by hurting and killing other people. Whatever you think of the CCP, and there’s a great deal I do’t like, after initial denial and foolishness, they treated Covid seriously and not primarily as a profit event. Since a few Western states did likewise, we know this isn’t a case of “only totalitarian governments can,” but it’s still an indictment that a single party authoritarian state has handled the plague better than almost every “democratic” nation.
Grim news for the Christmas season, and totally unnecessary, but like with climate change and ecological collapse, it’s where we are. Because we let our elites kill us, but never even consider returning the favor.
Be as well as you can be, and I hope you remain untouched by all this.
