Where We Stand

There’s a good status report on COVID-19 by J. Emory Parker at STAT:

For the last four days, New York has posted all-time record case numbers of Covid-19. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new forecast that estimates that the Omicron variant is already the dominant variant in the U.S. Meanwhile, cases have been climbing in the Northeast and Midwest for the last several weeks. The nation’s Delta wave isn’t over and an Omicron wave has just begun. Here’s where things stand.

Lot of good graphs and other infographics. I found this one the most evocative:

At this point it appears to me that we don’t really know where we stand. If the omicron variant is very contagious but less virulent than, say, delta, it could be the best thing that ever happened to us. If, on the other hand, it’s just as likely to become a serious, life-threatening illness as prior variants, it could be a disaster. It’s too early to tell.

The word I’m getting from the United Kingdom is that the country is teetering on the brink of following the lead of the countries on the Continent and returning to widespread lockdowns. Boris Johnson’s present political weakness makes any action difficult—he needs opposition votes to accomplish anything. As of this writing Chicago and Illinois are not putting any additional restrictions in place. The editors of the Chicago Tribune write in opposition to suspending in-person public education:

The pandemic has upended virtually every facet of our lives. Work from home is still the norm for many. The diversions we need to augment our days — dining out, heading out to a performance, seeing a favorite team in person — continue to require an assessment of how much risk is involved in doing something we once took for granted.

For children, however, the pandemic has had a disturbingly far-reaching effect. Remote learning veered the educational experience off track for many students. Chicago Public Schools, and its parents, cannot afford to let the damage build up. The prescription for avoiding a return to remote learning is simple. Mask up, test, and vaccinate.

As I have been saying since the start of the pandemic the public school systems actually serve multiple constituencies: children, parents, and teachers, just to name three. Suspending in-person education primarily serves risk-averse teachers. We’ll see what happens this time around.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal make the point that events have driven Joe Biden to a more restrained position:

At long last, a sense of reality seems to be settling in at the White House that we will have to live with Covid-19, even if President Biden didn’t say so explicitly in his speech Tuesday. He can’t “shut down the virus” as he claimed in the campaign. But at least he isn’t shutting down the economy or schools.

Mr. Biden was at pains to say Tuesday that this is no time to panic, even as the Omicron variant spreads. He advised Americans not to abandon their holiday plans if they’re vaccinated, though he repeated his dire warning about the unvaccinated. He even offered a grace note to Donald Trump for producing the vaccines, which must be a first.

Then again, there isn’t much the Administration can do at this point. It plans to distribute 500 million free at-home tests, though not until January because ramping up manufacturing takes time. Mr. Biden hammered the Trump Administration over long test lines, but now the reality is his.

Last year the major challenge was a shortage of testing reagents. Now it’s a shortage of workers, which is also hamstringing the vaccine booster campaign. Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandate may be contributing to the testing snarls. Ditto hospital staffing shortages. Some governors have called in their National Guard to assist at overburdened hospitals, some of which have lost unvaccinated staff.

concluding:

The reality is that the virus will eventually become endemic, like many other pathogens that humanity lives with. Immunity from vaccines and infections over time should lessen its severity. Omicron may accelerate this process, and we will be fortunate if it turns out to be less virulent, as some evidence suggests.

South Africa has reported that only 1.7% of cases were being hospitalized during the second week of the Omicron wave compared to 19% during the Delta surge earlier in the year. Hong Kong researchers have found that Omicron replicated 10 times more slowly than the original strain in samples of human lung tissue, which may reduce the risk of pneumonia.

Some schools and colleges are going virtual again, but even most Democratic governors are ruling out more lockdowns, unlike European politicians. For that we can thank public insistence more than the most quoted public-health experts, who appear all too willing to force the public back into isolation even two years into the pandemic. The people are wiser than the experts.

Things are working out pretty much as I predicted 18 months ago. “Zero COVID” was, is, and will be an unrealizable fantasy. People need to assess their own circumstances and risks and take appropriate actions, whether those actions are getting inoculated against COVID-19 or avoiding public contact. I have had two inoculations against COVID-19 plus a booster as has my wife. That was our assessment of our circumstances and risks.

Urging daily testing of the entire population IMO is a continuation of the fantasy. Not only will it be costly and produce mountains of waste it won’t be effective.

The time for lockdowns has passed. They were supportable in March 2020. It’s darned hard to make the same arguments now.

Elected leaders must keep their actions within the confines of the law. COVID-19 is no longer emergent. It has emerged. Maintaining emergency powers at this point is a stretch.

Rather than thinking that this is the end of the world we should be deeply appreciative that we were fortunate enough to live during a period unlike any other in the history of the world when contracting a deadly disease was as unlikely as it was. It’s still not the end of the world but contracting such a disease is a little more likely now.