COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

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Why does there seem to be a reoccurrence of red this week?

I think we bottomed out due to vaccines, and now it's starting to spread among the unvaccinated again. It doesn't have the real estate due to expand too much anymore, but unless we manage to get more people to sign up for the vaccines, it might trend up for a while.

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That dude is nothing but an anxiety machine. He spreads fear porn to get people to keep reading him.

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Happy fourth of July.  Freedom over Faucism!

You’re a Canadian troll trying to divide the American people.
Make no mistake, this attempts by the Canadians to hijack our free elections are very disturbing, and I am calling for an invasion of our Northern agitators as a preemptive measure.

Finally, I can go to the West Edmonton Mall without going through border security.

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You're a legend, Dr. Arch! Thanks for all you did for this forum.

Sadly, I fear this thread will become all but unreadable without the daily anchor, but it's a good time for a number of reasons.

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I saw an article earlier (I think it was CNN) that said 99.96% of new cases in Los Angeles County were among the unvaccinated. I'm flabbergasted that anyone is still trying to reinstate masks or lockdowns for people who are already vaccinated.

Link?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/citing-rise-delta-variant-los-angeles-reports-165-percent-increase-n1273552?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

99.4%, but close enough.

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Yeah, right now all I've seen is Israel reinstating some limited mask mandates.

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How likely is it the country locks down again? I recently got a job at our local movie theater and our business is booming. We had our best weekend yet with Black Widow and Space Jam 2. I would hate for us to close down again.

Biden has consistently said he's against nationwide lockdowns. Things may be different with your state/local officials.

Unless we start seeing hospitalizations and deaths skyrocket again, I imagine any local government would have a very hard time authorizing another lockdown without protests that would dwarf anything seen before.

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WHO calls for a moratorium on booster shots

The World Health Organization is calling for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine booster shots until at least the end of September, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday. 

“Even while hundreds of millions of people are still waiting for their first dose, some rich countries are moving towards booster doses,” Tedros said. “So far more than 4 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally. More than 80% have gone to high and upper middle income countries, even though they account for less than half of the world’s population.”

Germany, the UK, and Israel have all announced plans to provide booster shots for certain vulnerable populations.

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-08-04-21/h_ac3c02e64fbb8b0bd50ccd5073493b1a

Yeah, that'll be a no.

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Even though he is gay and cute, I am not particularly fond of my local alderman in Hoboken (all hat, no cattle most of the time, whose MO is to cast aspersions on other people' motives when he probably is the prime suspect in that department), but he has come up with what I think is a good idea. Bars who agree to require Vax ID's to get in, get a waiver of their outdoor street and sidewalk seating municipal fees.

https://patch.com/new-jersey/hoboken/councilman-wants-incentives-bars-requiring-customer-vaccines?utm_term=article-slot-1&utm_source=newsletter-daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Much better-handled than De Blasio's fiat, which seems mostly driven by his bizarre animus towards the restaurant industry.

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Moderna did a review of people who were 13 months out from their trial and found only 1% breakthrough infection rate(162 out of 14,000) and even lower numbers of severe cases and hospitalizations.

This is the way a vaccine is supposed to work, and it all makes sense now that we know that Pfizer watered down its vaccine to make sure no one got a headache and a mild fever and was then immediately surrounded by a hundred news cameras to talk about their horrible side effects.

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They say that Covid won't be Eradicated completely even by 2024/ we will still be in masks and social distancing, this is our future

Nope.

COVID was probably never going to be completely eradicated, but nobody is putting up with this for that long. They barely do now.

I went to Oktoberfest in Cincinnati yesterday, and everyone was packed together with no masks. People even packed onto the streetcar with no masks, even though the streetcar claims to require them.

The fact that you're constantly cheering this on in this thread is a little odd. We get it, you're sick of COVID. Give it a rest.

Cheering what on? I've never seen Bandit post anything anti vax so what's the problem?

Bandit is an odd poster in many ways, but his concerns about the response to the pandemic have always seemed reasonable to me. And he has mentioned that he got vaccinated.

Yeah, some of his pre-vaccine comments were a bit much, but his post-vax attitude is very much in line with mine. We are not the problem anymore and I have no tolerance for pandemic responses that treat us as the problem.

He's more anti-mask than me, but mostly because...well, I just don't care that much about masks.

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Lockdowns have never been effective except in slightly slowing down the case rate during the worst of the early crisis. Any success they had abroad was a combo of geographic isolation and hardcore authoritarian tactics backed up by legal force.

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Colorado has long struck me as a state with a particularly good COVID response.

Polis has had one of the more reasonable and sensible responses of any Democratic Governor. He's avoided the more onerous restrictions that some of them imposed, while also avoiding the mistakes made by Republican Governors.

Ralph Northam as well. It's largely what allowed him to survive his scandal and rebound in popularity. They're probably the best Dems on the issue.

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https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1445220954813128705

This is discouraging.

The vaccines are a lifesaver, but they need to last longer to be practical.  Most people aren't going to get a covid shot twice a year.

Pfizer under-dosed everyone to avoid bad headlines about side effects. We still need reports on how Moderna's higher dose is holding up.

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According to the Washington Post here, Florida now has the -lowest- covid case rate in the country.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/

Almost as if few of the measures actually matter besides the overall health of the citizenry, vaccinations, and how the elderly are protected.

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Seems like the decline in US covid cases has stalled out in the last week.  Probably too early to draw and strong conclusions, but this does seem a little concerning.

Things are getting colder and people are spending more time indoors. It's about when I'd expect the decrease to slack off, but hopefully another surge isn't coming.

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Anyone have a read on how the antivaxxers are reacting to the Pfizer pill news?

As best I can see, a lot of them are cheering it on and arguing that this proves the vaccines were never needed. They're weirdos.

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Certain people are certainly still cheerleading for, if not lockdowns, an increase in distancing measures and business restrictions. It usually takes the form of scaremongering articles that undermine vaccine confidence. But there's no political will to enforce it by any governor, nor would they be able to without massive protests that would dwarf anything in 2020.

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NO MORE LOCKDOWNS!!

There literally hasn't been anything that could sanely be called a "lockdown" in the United States in more than a year. What are yall on about with this nonsense.

That's not quite accurate. Places like NY and CA did have major businesses like amusement parks and indoor dining closed into 2021 in some cases.

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NO MORE LOCKDOWNS!!

There literally hasn't been anything that could sanely be called a "lockdown" in the United States in more than a year. What are yall on about with this nonsense.

It’s not quite a lockdown, but most of the fast food restaurants in my area still have never reopened for in-person dining.

I feel like that's a business decision that might be as tied to the labor issues as anything else. In NJ, most of the big fast food chains have but I know a lot of local restaurants that haven't.

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My guess is that it would have been DEVASTATING had it existed in 1519 or 1719 than 2019.  It might have wiped out the entire human population.  

Latter seems unlikely since so many people as asymptomatic.

Yeah, this is a virus with a fatality rate of under 5% - well under, it seems like - and the variants seem to be gaining steam in spread but not really in fatality. The biggest threat hundreds of years ago would have been a breakdown of societal order as a result of the plague, but

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What if this just keeps mutating more and more until civilization as we know it ends?

Lockdowns are far more likely to end civilization than the virus is.

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My local supermarket was already being stripped this morning by Omicron-panic shoppers who seemed to think a lockdown is coming.

It would be hilarious if the response to the news that the pandemic was on its last legs as Covid became more widespread but less threatening was met with blind, incoherent panic.

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So dramatic. As someone who is pretty skeptical of restrictions at this point, I’m not going to claim that there are many at the moment.

And I live in a state that mandates masks indoors. If you don’t, then you have almost no restrictions at this point.

Imagine thinking that eating out at restaurants means life is back to normal.

It's more significant to it than you might think. It's a huge sector of the economy, and was one of the biggest threats towards a massive unemployment crisis. It's a big part of why Murphy nearly lost and why De Blasio is so hated.

There are no restrictions on it anymore, which is a big thing, and they can't be allowed to come back.

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No, but he should minimize his public role. Fauci's ascent to being the "voice of the pandemic" was an accident of history due to Trump's alarming incompetence. Fauci's trade is worst-case scenarios, and that's no longer what the public needs to hear.