Omicron Variant

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It's luck of the draw but broadly speaking the vulnerable people should be obvious. The elderly and others with diabetes, heart problems ect.

This isn't two years ago Kraftie, over 270 million confirmed cases and likely over a Billion people infected, we have the data on this.

Latest official UK figures (Oct/Nov) show over 50% Covid cases on ICU are now vaccinated. Around 66% in hospital for Covid treatment, vaccinated.

A huge surge in the stock market, over here in Australia.
Almost at the same level before the Omicron scare.

It always bounces back.
Best of luck for you.

A new study says that while the COVID-19 omicron variant infects the human body 70 times faster than previous coronavirus strains, the infections appear to be less severe.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong’s LKS Faculty of Medicine found that after 24 hours of infection, the omicron variant multiplied in the human bronchus 70 times faster than the delta variant and original coronavirus strain.

They also discovered that omicron infection in the lungs was “significantly lower” than the initial COVID-19 strain, “which may be an indicator of lower disease severity,” according to a statement from the university.

The strain replicated in human lung tissue at a rate that was more than 10 times lower than the original COVID-19 strain, which suggests that it may cause less-severe illness.

The research, however, is still under peer review for publication. The researchers examined lung tissue removed for treatment that was infected with the omicron variant.

Michael Chan Chi-wai, the lead researcher on the study, noted that virus replication is not the only factor that determines disease transmissibility.

“It is important to note that the severity of disease in humans is not determined only by virus replication but also by the host immune response to the infection, which may lead to dysregulation of the innate immune system, i.e. ‘cytokine storm,’” Chan said in a statement.

He also said that even if a virus proves to be less pathogenic, its highly infectious nature could cause more severe disease and death, which is why he said the threat from the omicron strain is “likely to be very significant.

A new study out of Columbia University says the Omicron variant is “markedly resistant” to vaccines and boosters might not do much to help, spelling bad news for the country as Omicron spreads and COVID-19 cases rise nationally.

“A striking feature of this variant is the large number of spike mutations that pose a threat to the efficacy of current COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapies,” according to the study authored by more than 20 scientists at Columbia and the University of Hong Kong.

19 cases by Christmas, 15K weekly deaths by Jan. 8
A new study out of Columbia University says the Omicron variant is “markedly resistant” to vaccines and boosters might not do much to help, spelling bad news for the country as Omicron spreads and COVID-19 cases rise nationally.

“A striking feature of this variant is the large number of spike mutations that pose a threat to the efficacy of current COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapies,” according to the study authored by more than 20 scientists at Columbia and the University of Hong Kong.

The Omicron variant was first detected in South Africa in November and is widely believed to soon become the dominant strain in the US, eclipsing the Delta variant.

The scientists express concern in the study published Wednesday that the variant’s “extensive” mutations can “greatly compromise” the vaccine, even neutralizing it. The report said the booster shots prevent some of the neutralization, but the variant “may still pose a risk” for those with their third shot.

“It is not too far-fetched to think that this [COVID-19] is now only a mutation or two away from being pan-resistant to current antibodies,” it says. “We must devise strategies that anticipate the evolutional direction of the virus and develop agents that target better conserved viral elements.”

The percentage of people in New York City testing positive for COVID-19 doubled in three days this week, and a top advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio said it was an indication of the omicron variant evading immunity in a way the virus never had before.

But the city's soon-to-be mayor threw cold water on the idea of any sort of lockdown to deal with the threat.

Um, we've never seen this before in #NYC," Varma tweeted, noting that the daily positivity rate on Dec. 9 was 3.9% and appeared to have doubled by Dec. 12 to 7.8%.

"This is #SARSCoV2 evading both vaccine & virus induced immunity *against infection* unlike any variant before. That's only explanation for dramatic jump in positivity. Consensus for now (but subject to change) is that immunity *against severe disease* should be far better," he went on to tweet.

(A new British study released Thursday suggested the omicron variant could cause symptoms that might be mistaken for the common cold. That comes amid growing research indicating that omicron causes milder illness than the delta variant, but will sicken many more people, threatening the stability of healthcare systems.)

Subsequent to Varma's screenshot, the city updated its data to show the positivity rate was actually 7.3% on Dec. 12, falling to 6.5% on Dec. 13 -- still about double what it was a week prior, in any event.

But Mayor-elect Eric Adams, asked at an unrelated news conference about the COVID surge, suggested the city wasn't about to go back to the restrictions it saw in early- and mid-2020.

“It’s going to take a lot for me to lock down the city," Adams said, adding that he would again utilize the Javits Center to house COVID patients if need be.

To get an early sense of what the heavily mutated Omicron variant has in store for the United States, look no further than Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

On Tuesday, Dec. 7, Cornell conducted 5,456 tests and reported 27 COVID-19 cases on campus. That translates into a positivity rate of 0.49 percent. So far, so good.

But just six days later, on Monday, Dec. 13, the school reported 10 times as many cases (276) — despite conducting roughly the same number of tests (5,832).

In other words, Cornell’s positivity rate soared from less than half of 1 percent to almost 5 percent in the span of a single week.

When charted on a graph, a curve that steep doesn’t look like a curve at all. It looks like a vertical line.

Cornell has never experienced anything like it. More than 97 percent of the on-campus population is fully vaccinated; as a result, the school detected just 456 COVID cases during the spring 2021 semester and just 465 additional cases during the first three months of fall.

Yet now Cornell has logged 986 new cases over the last four days alone — and Omicron is probably to blame.

“Just last evening our COVID-19 testing lab team identified evidence of the highly contagious Omicron variant in a significant number of Monday’s positive student samples,” Cornell president Martha Pollack wrote Tuesday morning in an email announcing that the school would be shutting down campus and moving finals online, effective immediately. “The Omicron variant ... appears to be significantly more transmissible than Delta and other variants.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the two states with the highest spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant are New York and New Jersey.

Fast-paced New York City is seeing a faster spread of the new Omicron variant, compared to the vast majority of the country, according to just-released CDC findings.

As CBS2’s Dave Carlin reports, not just the city, but all of New York and New Jersey ramping up cases of the variant.

The CDC says the Omicron variant is detected in 3% of samples on average nationwide, but for New York and New Jersey, the Omicron rate is 13% for both, about four times the national average.

“New York is always going to be packed, like, no matter what happens in the world, so you just have to be responsible for your own protection,” said Humaira Younossi, of New Castle, Delaware.

America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.

Will the new and rapidly spreading variant overwhelm the U.S. health-care system? The question is moot because the system is already overwhelmed in a way that is affecting all patients, COVID or otherwise. “The level of care that we’ve come to expect in our hospitals no longer exists,” Lowe said.

The real unknown is what an Omicron cross will do when it follows a Delta hook. Given what scientists have learned in the three weeks since Omicron’s discovery, “some of the absolute worst-case scenarios that were possible when we saw its genome are off the table, but so are some of the most hopeful scenarios,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. In any case, America is not prepared for Omicron. The variant’s threat is far greater at the societal level than at the personal one, and policy makers have already cut themselves off from the tools needed to protect the populations they serve. Like the variants that preceded it, Omicron requires individuals to think and act for the collective good—which is to say, it poses a heightened version of the same challenge that the U.S. has failed for two straight years, in bipartisan fashion.

First, the bad news: In terms of catching the virus everyone should assume that they are less protected than they were two months ago. As a crude shorthand, assume that Omicron negates one previous immunizing event—either an infection or a vaccine dose.

Second, some worse news: Boosting isn’t a foolproof shield against Omicron. In South Africa, the variant managed to infect a cluster of seven people who were all boosted. And according to a CDC report, boosted Americans made up a third of the first known Omicron cases in the U.S. “People who thought that they wouldn’t have to worry about infection this winter if they had their booster do still have to worry about infection with Omicron,” Trevor Bedford, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. “I’ve been going to restaurants and movies, and now with Omicron, that will change.”

Third, some better news: Even if Omicron has an easier time infecting vaccinated individuals, it should still have more trouble causing severe disease. The vaccines were always intended to disconnect infection from dangerous illness, turning a life-threatening event into something closer to a cold. Whether they’ll fulfill that promise for Omicron is a major uncertainty, but we can reasonably expect that they will. The variant might sneak past the initial antibody blockade, but slower-acting branches of the immune system (such as T cells) should eventually mobilize to clear it before it wreaks too much havoc.

To see how these principles play out in practice, Dylan Morris suggests watching highly boosted places, such as Israel, and countries where severe epidemics and successful vaccination campaigns have given people layers of immunity, such as Brazil and Chile. In the meantime, it’s reasonable to treat Omicron as a setback but not a catastrophe for most vaccinated people.

That’s for individuals, though. At a societal level, the outlook is bleaker.

Omicron’s main threat is its shocking speed as my colleague Sarah Zhang has reported. In South Africa, every infected person has been passing the virus on to 3–3.5 other people—at least twice the pace at which Delta spread in the summer. Similarly, British data suggest that Omicron is twice as good at spreading within households as Delta

More positively, Omicron cases have thus far been relatively mild. This pattern has fueled the widespread claim that the variant might be less severe, or even that its rapid spread could be a welcome development. “People are saying ‘Let it rip’ and ‘It’ll help us build more immunity,’ that this is the exit wave and everything’s going to be fine and rosy after,” Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease physician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, told me. “I have no confidence in that.”

To begin with, as he and others told me, that argument overlooks a key dynamic: Omicron might not actually be intrinsically milder. In South Africa and the United Kingdom, it has mostly infected younger people, whose bouts of COVID-19 tend to be less severe. And in places with lots of prior immunity, it might have caused few hospitalizations or deaths simply because it has mostly infected hosts with some protection, as Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, explained in a Twitter thread. That pattern could change once it reaches more vulnerable communities. (The widespread notion that viruses naturally evolve to become less virulent is mistaken, as the virologist Andrew Pekosz of Johns Hopkins University clarified in The New York Times.) Also, deaths and hospitalizations are not the only fates that matter. Supposedly “mild” bouts of COVID-19 have led to cases of long COVID, in which people struggle with debilitating symptoms for months (or even years), while struggling to get care or disability benefits.

And even if Omicron is milder, greater transmissibility will likely trump that reduced virulence. Omicron is spreading so quickly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals. To avert that scenario, the variant would need to be substantially milder than Delta—especially because hospitals are already at a breaking point. Two years of trauma have pushed droves of health-care workers, including many of the most experienced and committed, to quit their job. The remaining staff is ever more exhausted and demoralized, and “exceptionally high numbers” can’t work because they got breakthrough Delta infections and had to be separated from vulnerable patients, John Lowe told me. This pattern will only worsen as Omicron spreads, if the large clusters among South African health-care workers are any indication. “In the West, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner because most countries have huge Delta waves and most of them are stretched to the limit of their health-care systems,” Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, told me “What happens if those waves get even bigger with Omicron?”

The Omicron wave won’t completely topple America’s wall of immunity but will seep into its many cracks and weaknesses. It will find the 39 percent of Americans who are still not fully vaccinated (including 28 percent of adults and 13 percent of over-65s). It will find other biologically vulnerable people, including elderly and immunocompromised individuals whose immune systems weren’t sufficiently girded by the vaccines. It will find the socially vulnerable people who face repeated exposures, either because their “essential” jobs leave them with no choice or because they live in epidemic-prone settings, such as prisons and nursing homes. Omicron is poised to speedily recap all the inequities that the U.S. has experienced in the pandemic thus far.

Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone—vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise. The collective threat is substantially greater than the individual one. And the U.S. is ill-poised to meet it.

America’s policy choices have left it with few tangible options for averting an Omicron wave. Boosters can still offer decent protection against infection, but just 17 percent of Americans have had those shots. Many are now struggling to make appointments, and people from rural, low-income, and minority communities will likely experience the greatest delays, “mirroring the inequities we saw with the first two shots,” Arrianna Marie Planey, a medical geographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. With a little time, the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna could be updated, but “my suspicion is that once we have an Omicron-specific booster, the wave will be past,” Trevor Bedford, the virologist, said.

Omicron may also be especially difficult to catch before it spreads to others, because its incubation period—the window between infection and symptoms—seems to be very short.

The various measures that controlled the spread of other variants—masks, better ventilation, contact tracing, quarantine, and restrictions on gatherings—should all theoretically work for Omicron too. But the U.S. has either failed to invest in these tools or has actively made it harder to use them.

The longer-term future is uncertain. After Delta’s emergence, it became clear that the coronavirus was too transmissible to fully eradicate. Omicron could potentially shunt us more quickly toward a different endgame—endemicity the point when humanity has gained enough immunity to hold the virus in a tenuous stalemate—albeit at significant cost. But more complicated futures are also plausible. For example, if Omicron and Delta are so different that each can escape the immunity that the other induces, the two variants could co-circulate. (That’s what happened with the viruses behind polio and influenza B.).

Covid felt like nothing else I've ever had in my life, so I should know about it even if I get a mild case.

South Africa delivered some positive news on the omicron coronavirus variant on Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions and signs that the wave of infections may be peaking.

Only 1.7% of identified Covid-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of infections in the fourth wave, compared with 19% in the same week of the third delta-driven wave, South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said at a press conference.

Health officials presented evidence that the strain may be milder, and that infections may already be peaking in the country’s most populous province, Gauteng.

Still, new cases in that week of the current wave were more than 20,000 a day, compared with 4,400 in the same week of the third wave. That’s further evidence of omicron’s rapid transmissibility, which a number of other countries, such as the U.K., are also now experiencing.

South Africa, which announced the discovery of the variant on Nov. 25, is being watched as a harbinger of what may happen with omicron elsewhere.

Scientists have cautioned that other nations may have a different experience to South Africa as the country’s population is young compared with developed nations. Between 70% and 80% of citizens may also have had a prior Covid-19 infection, according to antibody surveys, meaning they could have some level of protection.

As cases of COVID-19 surge at Cornell, local health officials say every single student sample they tested was the omicron variant, underlining how quickly the highly contagious virus is spreading.

Tompkins County health officials said late Friday they checked 115 samples from COVID-positive students ages 18-24 and every single one of them was the omicron variant, which was unknown to science less than a month ago.

None of the students in question are severely ill, they added.

At a community testing site at a local mall, 18 of 44 positive samples were omicron, suggesting community spread well off campus too.

In the week through Dec. 16, Cornell reported 1,502 COVID cases on campus -- up 7x from the prior week and nearly 20x from two weeks prior.

Though much remains unknown about omicron, experts are beginning to understand more about the variant and how it affects people who are vaccinated, unvaccinated or who have had a previous Covid infection. For example, people who are exposed to omicron appear to get sick faster and may have symptoms that are different than those of other variants.

Early evidence suggests that for most people, at least for those who are up to date on their Covid vaccines, omicron appears to result in mild illness that can resemble the common cold, another form of the coronavirus. Poehling, who is also a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which helps guide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decisions on vaccines, said there appear to be prominent symptoms from omicron:

Cough
Fatigue or tiredness
Congestion and runny nose
Unlike in previous variants, the loss of taste and smell seems to be uncommon, she said.

But Poehling and other experts say those symptoms are based on early reports of omicron cases, not scientific studies.

"Anecdotal reports represent just one person," said Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health. "We have to take them with a grain of salt."

What's more, they may only reflect certain segments of the population: young and otherwise healthy, as well as those who are fully vaccinated.

"It is clear that if you're vaccinated, particularly if you’ve had a booster, omicron tends to produce milder infections," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

"What we haven't seen yet is a substantial body of information about what omicron will do in unvaccinated people," he added.

Indeed, at least one person who was not vaccinated is reported to have died of omicron. Officials in Houston announced Monday that the unvaccinated man in his 50s succumbed to the virus.

There is also emerging evidence that omicron tends not to burrow deep into the lungs as much as previous variants. A study, which was posted online by the University of Hong Kong and not yet peer-reviewed, found that while omicron is less severe in the lungs, it can replicate faster higher up in the respiratory tract.

In this way, omicron may act more like bronchitis than pneumonia, said Dr. Hugh Cassiere, director of critical care services for Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital at the North Shore University Hospital, on Long Island, New York.

"Usually patients with acute bronchitis tend not to be short of breath. They tend to cough and produce sputum," he said. "Patients with pneumonia tend to be short of breath and feel more fatigued than bronchitis in general."

Still, it's virtually impossible for people to rely on symptoms to self-diagnose an illness. In addition to omicron, the delta variant continues to circulate, along with increasing cases of the flu.

According to early data, the time it takes for an infected person to develop symptoms after an exposure may be shorter for omicron than for previous variants — from a full week down to as little as three days or fewer.

Given the potential for a shorter incubation period, Vanderbilt's Schaffner advised that anyone who has been in contact with an infected individual get tested about 72 hours following the exposure.

For the millions of people without any known Covid exposure, but who are getting together with friends and family over the Christmas holiday, Schaffner said, it would be prudent to get a rapid test the day of the gathering.

Though much remains unknown about omicron, experts say the variant could lead to long Covid, even with a mild case.

Previous research, however, suggests that vaccination can greatly reduce the risk for long Covid.

The major question for everyone right now isn't whether omicron is going to hit their area. It will," said Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious disease expert and associate dean for global health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

"The question," he said, "is how much disease will it cause?"

This is going to hit us hard," Poehling, of Wake Forest Baptist, said. But she added that the sheer speed of omicron's spread could mean that the variant will run its course quickly. "If you look at South Africa, they seem to be doing much better now. I don't anticipate this as long lasting

Major hospitals in the New York region say they have stopped using monoclonal antibody therapies because they have run out of the one treatment that appears to be effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus, leaving doctors without a vital tool to treat severely ill Covid-19 patients.

New York University and Valley Health System in northern New Jersey notified doctors Sunday that they are suspending monoclonal antibody programs and will not offer the treatments until they receive more shipments from state and federal health agencies. The hospitals said it was unclear when they will be resupplied.

Meanwhile, Mount Sinai Health System in New York said it would stop offering monoclonal antibodies in its emergency departments. It did not specify whether the policy was a result of supply issues.

Monoclonal antibodies, which are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the immune system’s mechanism for preventing the virus from entering healthy cells, have been used to treat patients at high risk of becoming severely ill from the coronavirus. But only one of the available antibodies — sotrovimab, made by GlaxoSmithKline — appears to be effective against the omicron variant, which accounts for the majority of new Covid cases in the U.S.

Hospitals in other parts of the country say they have very limited supplies of sotrovimab given how new it is, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. He said the organization has been told that supplies will increase significantly over next few weeks as production scales up.

The first U.S. omicron case was reported on Dec. 1. It took the heavily mutated variant less than three weeks to establish its dominance in America -- and nowhere is its unprecedented infectiousness more evident than in the New York area.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday a "staggering" nearly 11,000 new COVID cases across the five boroughs. He said the daily rate would likely continue to rise for the next few weeks, at least, as the new variant sweeps the region.

"Intense surge, limited impact," de Blasio said regarding the severity of omicron cases thus far. "That does not suggest doing the same things we did last year. That suggests a different game plan. Vaccination is the game-changer."

The CDC estimates more than 90% of current cases in the metro area -- one that for its genomic surveillance purposes includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands -- are associated with omicron. That's up from 25% last week.

The five boroughs' rolling daily case average is up more than 141% over the rolling average for the prior four weeks, while hospitalizations are stable by the same metric. The latter did increase a bit over the last month, but officials say most of that rise is associated with people who are not vaccinated.

Statewide, Gov. Kathy Hochul reported record-breaking daily COVID cases for four straight days before the number fell a bit Tuesday (22,258). Hospitalizations, though, topped 4,300, the highest total since April 7 and a 125% jump since Nov. 1.

On Wednesday, the New York Times – and others – published what appeared to be good news. “Omicron infections seem to be milder, three research teams report” read the headline. Many readers must have been relieved to see this news, especially with cases sky-rocketing even as the holiday season is in full swing.

As someone living with post-viral conditions exacerbated by Long Covid, I read the story carefully. I noted the preliminary nature of the data from South Africa, Scotland and England, and the prediction that the greater infectiousness of Omicron would still likely land many people in hospitals already strained to capacity.

But despite these caveats, I felt little relief or reassurance after reading the article. It contained no mention at all of Long Covid. Not one. This is not a benign oversight; it’s a fundamental and dangerous misread of our global predicament and the future that awaits us.

We’ve still got a lot to learn about Covid-19, including this new variant. But one thing we know for certain is that “mild Covid” can be debilitating and lead to long-term or permanent disease and disability.

We now know that at least 10-30% of those who survive any Covid infection (from asymptomatic or “mild”to severe) will go on to live with (and sometimes die from) long Covid – a long-term, lifelong, or even life-threatening or fatal, disabling chronic syndrome, the biological pathways of which are still largely unknown.

As Omicron entered the news in November, early reports from South Africa noted that many cases were mild. In some ways, this was utterly predictable – the nation has a relatively young population, and more severe disease often takes several weeks to develop.

But the rapid dissemination of this speculation was not politically neutral. And the potential consequences are not mild at all.

The “mild” theme was quickly picked up by leaders who have vowed to never repeat the lockdowns and other restrictions of previous waves. A faster-spreading strain in the lead-up to a holiday travel season in many areas of the world would have drastic economic implications.

And few reports on Omicron even mentioned long Covid as a concern. If we were in the early, terrifying days of 2020, perhaps we could forgive the beleaguered general public and frazzled world leaders for not also referencing long Covid as a terrible consequence of a Covid surge.

After all, those of us living with post-viral conditions – such as ME/CFS, dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (Pots) – are used to being ignored, disbelieved, or misadvised. We were on few radars before Covid; even now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)‘s Recover Initiative on Long Covid has all but ignored post-viral researchers and sidelined patient advocates.

On 15 December, South Africa’s Dr Salim Abdool Karim, who co-authored Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant: a new chapter in the COVID-19 pandemic in the Lancet, told a global Zoom audience:

“I have no idea what’s in store for us as far as long Covid is concerned … It’s a really important question, and it’s particularly so because Omicron is spreading so fast and so widely so quickly – the number of people getting infected is so big that … if it’s a common consequence of even mild infection, you can imagine, even if in 10% of people, there’s going to be a lot of people with long Covid. It’s certainly something we want to keep a beady eye out on.”

As comrades in a terrible journey, people with post-viral conditions have shared all we have learned with people with long Covid – like the importance of resting and pacing instead of pushing through ME/CFS fatigue, and the jarring reality that ME/CFS has the lowest amount of NIH research funding relative to the burden of disease in the population.

We now shudder to think that more will be joining our ranks. There is nothing mild about the massive wave of loss and suffering washing over our world. As a global community, we parrot phrases such as “the majority of cases are mild” at our peril.

We’ve already lost too many lives from the false hope that Covid-19 will become more mild or subside. We’ve gone months without significant investments in indoor ventilation, distribution of effective masks and global vaccine access. We need sustained systems of benefits, housing security and basic income support for avoiding Covid infection or dealing with post-viral illness.

It’s time to choose our words, and our policies, much more carefully. Let it begin by including analysis of long Covid and post-viral illness in any reporting, speculation or policies, starting with this Omicron wave.

Anyone got stats for vaccinated people going to ICU with omicron?

The virus really isn't killing enough humans, especially the anti vaxxers with their venomous smug attitudes who spread the disease and cause more variants. I despise the human race, and if just being surrounded these pea-brained naked apes hasn't made me extremely ill by now I don't know what will. I don't understand why most people don't seem to hate and at least tolerate the human race, especially when the pandemic has proved how idiotic so many of these meat-bags are.

"Because the world is perfidious, I am going into mourning"