On the menu today: The good news is that Omicron doesn’t look deadly at all, but the bad news is that it looks super-contagious and will end up putting a lot of people in the hospital, which will pose its own set of risks to human life; Time picks a particularly un-woke figure to be the magazine’s person of the year; and, go figure, it turns out that enforcing a vaccine mandate is a lot more difficult than the Biden administration first expected.
Omicron: An Explosion of New Cases . . . a Handful of Deaths?
A top headline in the New York Times this morning declares that, “Omicron Is a Dress Rehearsal for the Next Pandemic.” I can’t help but notice that we’re not quite done with this pandemic. “The next pandemic”? What, did somebody spot someone sneezing outside another Chinese bioresearch lab?
Omicron is giving us a mixed bag of news. The best, and arguably most important, news is that so far, this variant has killed almost no one. I write “almost” because the United Kingdom reported its first confirmed death from Omicron yesterday:
The UK recorded 54,661 new coronavirus cases on Monday, as well as 38 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.
There are 4,713 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant but [Health Secretary Sajid] Javid said the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimated the current number of daily infections was around 200,000.
Omicron has risen to more than 44 percent of cases in London and is expected to become the dominant variant in the city in the next 48 hours, he said.
The 200,000 figure for Omicron infections is based upon UKHSA modelling. BBC medical editor Fergus Walsh said with Omicron doubling every two to three days, it could go from a small to a huge number very quickly.
A lot of news organizations are reporting that as the first confirmed death from Omicron globally, but that word “confirmed” is doing a lot of work. South African scientists announced the discovery of the Omicron variant on November 25. Since then, the country has had more than 230,000 Covid-19 cases, but just 377 deaths. And as of this writing, none of those deaths are confirmed to have resulted from Omicron. Globally, the world has had 124,413 Covid-19 deaths since November 25. There’s a pretty good chance there are some Omicron-driven deaths in that mix.
Meanwhile, down in South Africa, there’s further evidence that Omicron is not a game-changer when it comes to death and the vaccinated:
No one has died from the Omicron coronavirus variant in a study of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in South Africa, one of the co-lead investigators of the study said on Tuesday.
“Although we have had a lot of breakthrough infections there has been very little hospital admission in comparison to the Delta period. And as of today we have had no one who has died from Omicron from the J&J study, so that’s the good news, it shows again that the vaccine is effective against severe disease and death,” South African Medical Research Council president Glenda Gray told a news conference.
Omicron is going to spread fast, and it’s going to be mild in the vast majority of cases:
The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.
The bad news is that Omicron spreads really fast, which means it is probably already spreading quickly here in the U.S. — at the University of Washington, the percentage of likely Omicron cases in tests went from 2.7 percent on December 6 to 6.5 percent on December 7 to 13.3 percent on December 8.
At the beginning of November, the U.S. was averaging a bit more than 70,000 new cases per day. As of yesterday, we’re averaging 118,000 new cases per day. At least some of that rapid rise is probably because of Omicron.
The problem is that a variant that spreads quickly and widely can still send a lot of people to the hospital, even if it is less likely to prompt hospitalization than the earlier versions of the virus. The good news is that so far, Omicron hasn’t triggered a massive rush to America’s hospitals — at least on a national scale. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, as of this morning, 76.9 percent of the country’s hospital beds are being used, which is about the same rate as a month ago (76.7 percent). Just 8.8 percent of hospital beds are being used by Covid-19 patients, when a month ago that figure was 6.9 percent. The percentage of the country’s ICU beds that are in use is about two percentage points higher than a month ago, and the percentage of ICU beds in use by COVID-19 patients has increased from 15 percent to 19 percent.
Once again, the states seeing the highest increase in Covid-19 hospitalizations are in the north, where the weather is now cold, snow is starting to fall, and people are spending more time indoors. In the past two weeks, Connecticut has seen a 79 percent increase in Covid-19 hospitalizations, Delaware and New Jersey have seen 67 percent increases, Rhode Island has seen a 62 percent increase, the District of Columbia has seen a 59 percent increase, and Massachusetts has seen a 58 percent increase. That doesn’t mean those states did anything wrong or bad, or that their governors made the wrong decisions. It means that winter arrived, people began to spend more time indoors, the virus spread quicker — among generally highly vaccinated populations — and ended up infecting people whose systems weren’t quite strong enough, resulting in an uptick in hospitalizations.
Meanwhile, eight states have seen their Covid-19 hospitalizations decrease over the past two weeks. North Dakota has seen a 9 percent decrease, Alaska has seen a 10 percent decrease, and Montana has seen a 26 percent decrease. North Dakota, Alaska, and Montana are no strangers to cold weather, so why are they seeing a decrease? Because the Delta wave has completed burning through their populations, I suspect.
On the New York Times chart, the average number of new cases has jumped 49 percent in the past two weeks. Yes, I’m the guy who keeps emphasizing that the number of cases is no longer the most useful measuring stick for determining the severity of this pandemic. But I do notice the daily number of new deaths, and that number is up 40 percent in the past two weeks as well.
The dynamics of this pandemic have not changed — if you’re elderly, immunocompromised, or have one or more comorbidities, you have a higher risk of having a hard time fighting the virus off. If you have more than one of those conditions, you’re definitely at higher risk and probably ought to be particularly careful. It is likely that certain genes also make you more vulnerable to Covid-19. (My last novel was about a plot to develop an “ethnic bioweapon” that only targeted individuals with certain genes. If recent research revelations from Oxford scientists check out, then Covid-19 is closer to an ethnic bioweapon than we ever expected, since “a single gene that confers quite a significant risk to people of south Asian background” was pinpointed. This doesn’t mean that Covid-19 was or is a deliberate bioweapon. But I suspect that the world’s more unethical and genetically homogeneous regimes will be very curious about the practical applications of this knowledge.)
If you’re young and healthy, you’re probably going to be fine — which is what you could say about a lot of things in life. But you may want to be on alert for the possibility of catching the virus and inadvertently spreading it to someone who is elderly or immunocompromised.
The U.S. has now had more than 51 million cases of Covid-19, and while most news organizations characterize the U.S. as “about to surpass 800,000 deaths,” on Worldometers, we’re already past 819,000.
The Scent of Musk
Time’s Person of the Year just isn’t as big a deal as it used to be, but it is a little intriguing that this year, the magazine selected Elon Musk, who has more than his share of detractors on the left. That said, I don’t think Musk actually had the biggest impact on the news in 2021, which means this year is another indicator that the magazine picks someone who will sell copies if his face is on the cover. As I put it yesterday, “Elon Musk is a perfectly justifiable choice for Time’s Person of the Year, but try imagining the state of the world today, in late 2021, without those who made the vaccines to protect against the worst effects of Covid-19.”
Hey, Remember Vaccine Mandates? Whatever Happened to Them?
From the Pentagon to Amtrak to federal workers to the states, enforcing vaccine mandates is proving more difficult than President Biden expected.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday I joined Stu Burguiere of The Blaze to talk about our recent interview with Bob Costas on the Three Martini Lunch, the upcoming Olympics, and public figures who may be less liberal than their reputations suggest.