That’s what Fauci said at the beginning of the month. Gonna be a wild 2 1/2 weeks (not to mention the few weeks after that).
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I haz question - have we ever had an epidemic before this one where a significant number of cases were asymptomatic or close to it? Are there possibly a lot of flu cases like that, and we don’t know about it because we don’t test for it?
NIH and CDC messaging has gotten messy. We have brilliant scientists and good people up against political hucksters out to abuse anything they say. For f— sake, hire a crisis communications firm. Otherwise, the whole world will be retweeting the essay that hit the Wall Street Journal a few days back (that vaccine mandates are now pointless.)
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Omicron may be the evolved Corona variant that is in balance with the human population. Think of Ebola, which has spontaneous but localized outbreaks.
A terrific book for the lay person is David Quammen’s “Spillover,” published I think in 2014, which is remarkably prescient about what we are currently experiencing.
It details the history of fresh meat market sources of earlier viral outbreaks in the human population, and then the genetic mutations that evolve in the new target on the level of 1 to 4 in terms of virulence.
A “4” is the most virulent and a huge percentage of the targets die, and that is not a good long-term outcome for the virus. It would rather check in somewhere between “2” and “3” to ensure its ongoing success in being able to continuously replicate in a target population which itself is still able to replicate (and provide new non-immune hosts) on an ongoing basis.
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Speak clearly and use 3rd grade English. Phrases like this are a great way to lose your audience.
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“Most Americans will get COVID” means how many people? (response to the Judis article)
Can I have your bike?
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With how much it has already spread, that is unlikely and not an effective use of vaccine production capacity. If omicron reaches 50% of the population, that half will already have a fair bit of immunity to limit both hospitalization and death. Further, if boosting using existing vaccines limit hospitalizations, then developing a variant specific vaccine under these circumstance would offer little additional protection.
The decision that needs to be made is whether a vaccine for an upper respiratory infecting virus is needed for the general vaccinated population (the answer will likely be no, it isn’t). So efforts then need to return to vaccines which will impair or impede nestling in known entry points of lung tissue (which is what made the earlier variants so deadly).
In the meantime, I suspect we will have regular boosters and all the anti-vaxxers who are susceptible to doing so, will die off.
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What you say seems to agree with what Pfizer had to say. When they announced they could have an omicron specific vaccine by the end of March, they were also quite clear that they recognized there might not be any demand for one.
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My father was, for a time, the clinical V.P. of Epidemiological Research for Pfizer in the 70’s. When dad talked about his work, you picked up on a lot of it with out realizing it. You might say, his lessons were infectious.
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If you were to count on the basis of excess deaths, the US is already well past 1 million. Closer to 1.2 million actually.
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Sadly, it took one goddamned columnist in the UK to popularize the term “breakthrough infection” lending an interpretive, and very wrong, tone that it means that the vaccines aren’t as effective as advertised.
A lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.
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Bingo!
Now, for extra points, can you tell me what underlying feature is at play here?
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No amount of messaging will alter the path in the US because too many folks refuse to listen. The only way the US will, in any way snap out of this is the emergence of clear, unassailable asymmetric infection/death patterns between states AND the clear evidence of other countries successfully putting the crisis behind them.
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Might even be preferable in some cases.
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Communist Fake News.
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This would be a good way to lose the next election in spectacular fashion.
It’s really just weird to me. I don’t believe for a second that Josh is sexist. I assume it’s more about frustration with some of the messaging and he was unfortunate enough to post a criticism at exactly the wrong time.
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Covid’s just given America another way to fat shame. Good thing men die more readily of covid than women, or it would be another way to shame women as well.
And let’s not get into the sick amongst us. I suppose having cancer gets a pass (maybe), but most everything else can be said to be your own fault according to a certain way of thinking. So no heart disease for you if you’d eaten right. And no lethal covid if you hadn’t given yourself heart disease.
And round and round it goes.
But clearly covid has put sick shaming on the agenda too. All because Americans want to believe they’re immortal and/or can stay young and beautiful forever and anything short of that has to be something they can fix or avoid. That’s a good part of why there’s such resistance to believing in the power of covid to kill you to begin with. But believing it will only kill you if you’ve eaten too much or didn’t exercise enough or whatever is so American it’s almost laughable.
Enter Dr. Oz, running for Senate.
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Ohfer…
YES, it DOES mean more illness. There are MORE PEOPLE being hospitalized, and yes that does specifically include children because they are hit harder with Omicron than with previous variants, than there were with Delta. (Look up COVID + Croup as just one example.) One of the doctors I work with described working in the ED as feeling like “COVID soup” because all the patients have COVID, regardless of why they are there. Broken leg? Also COVID. Pancreatitis? Also COVID. Pregnant teen? COVID!