Learned about another 4 acquaintances that are waiting on results. This is nuts. Again, no major side effects but this variant is spreading like a wild fire.
Super infectious, overall fewer severe cases percentage wise but still leading to a major surge in hospitalizations due to sheer number of people getting sick all at once. Hopefully like South Africa peaks and declines in the next few weeks.
Opinion: My epic, infuriating quest for a covid test https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/27/covid-test-shortage-pandemic/ excerpt: Nearly two years into the pandemic, finding out whether I had covid should have been easy. Quick-turnaround PCR tests — which take a couple of hours to run — now exist. Websites list dozens of places doing them, and they’re generally covered at no expense to symptomatic patients. But my search turned into an infuriating, five-day scavenger hunt. Across the country, test lines are hours long and results so delayed they are often of limited use. Blame is cast widely: The Food and Drug Administration has been slow to approve at-home tests, which are useful in some situations. The Biden administration recently bought half a billion for free distribution but, with manufacturing time, those won’t be available until January — too little too late with omicron surging. The underlying problem: We’ve expected the market to resolve a public health crisis, but that’s not the market’s priority. Markets respond when they see actual demand, backed by appealing dollars. Public health, like homeland security, needs to be projecting future threats and working proactively. Serious virus variants were predictable. more at the link
Just got a text from my sales manager. “Hey, can we skip your 1 on 1 today? Wife is down with Covid”.
I live in a liberal wealthy enclave with people who both took COVID seriously and had the means to reduce unnecessary risks. Yet all my neighbors tested positive last weekend before Christmas. They stayed home instead of seeing the grand parents. But the upside is they all had nearly asymptomatic courses. My household is still spared for now. But it’s only a matter of time.
Can you provide a link to something that isn’t a 10 second clip without any surrounding context? I am pretty sure that Fauci took a cautious stance about the potential spread of HIV early on, before we had more information. That is very different from your statement that he said it will spread just from close contact.
Did some googling on the as-infectious-as-measles rumor.... https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea...contagious-as-the-measles-Here-s-16717381.php Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, said omicron was not quite as contagious as measles, but certainly more catchy than chicken pox. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, said there are “many parallels” between measles and more recent COVID-19 variants. Respiratory droplets from measles patients can remain airborne for up to two hours, he noted — which means a person can become infected by lingering virus in a room even if the initial person is no longer there. “Whether or not omicron can be as adept as measles in unbelievable transmissibility remains to be seen,” he wrote in an email. “Omicron is likely aerosolized the same way measles is — small droplets are created that can linger in the air like dandelions — and it will certainly give measles the toughest competition of any SARS CoV2 variant to date.” Contra Costa County officials said Monday that three omicron cases have been identified there, and that the variant has likely been circulating in the community for weeks. San Francisco said on Friday that it had 30 probable but unconfirmed omicron cases, in addition to the confirmed, first-in-the-country case shortly after Thanksgiving. But the extraordinary speed of omicron — which was first detected in the U.S. less than a month ago — means that numbers from a few days ago are virtually meaningless. The reproductive number known as R0, pronounced “R naught,” measures a disease’s transmissibility at the beginning of a pandemic with no preexisting immunity, said Warner Greene, a virologist and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. It represents how many people one sick person will infect. According to a study released in October, the original COVID-19 strain that emerged from Wuhan has an R0 value of 2.79. The delta variant has a value of between 5 to 6 — about twice as contagious as the original strain. Chicken pox has an R0 value of 9-10. The R0 value of measles is estimated at 12 to 18. Greene said to really know the true R0 value of omicron, more information is needed. He cited an estimate from Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School Of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, that omicron could have an R0 of 10. Chin-Hong said “a lot more fully vaccinated people will get breakthrough infections, but will not likely get very ill and are very unlikely to die.” For unvaccinated people, the situation is much more serious. So even when it's compared w/ measles (90% infection rate) it prob as deadly with unvaccinated. All the failures we'll continue to have will point to Those People, but don't hurt their feelings, pretty please. They don't know better and stand for higher principles that everyone else has to care about.
It'll be interesting to see the difference in probability of a serious case of Omicron infection between a vaccinated and unvaccinated person. The IFR of measles prior to the invention of vaccine is about 0.01%. Yet, you won't find anyone (I hope) that says measles is 'just like the cold' and the vaccine is unnecessary.
I don't know what is more idiotic... citing clownworldtoday as a source or folks protesting restaurants trying to keep their customers and employees safe and healthy...
