After almost a month of “Omicron is coming” stories… it’s here. And it’s about to spread everywhere as America’s families, the fully vaxxed and the unvaxxed, gather in person for Christmas 2021 next weekend.
Cornell University shut down a few days ago after a total of 900+ positive Covid test results (mix of symptomatic and asymptomatic). Total cases among the Cornell academic community and their families is likely now to be well over 1,000. A “significant” portion of these are reported to be Omicron. And, note, Cornell’s student population is estimated to be 97-98% vaccinated. So this is nearly all “breakthrough” Covid. (If that New York mag article is behind a paywall for you, here is another from CNN.)
We are experiencing, in real time, a collision between the academic disciplines of public health and applied sociology. What people should do if protection from Covid is their highest priority… versus what they’re actually willing or unwilling to do, and whether or not they even value protection from Covid as a high priority at all.
It’s going to happen so fast. Next weekend. Tens of millions of American families will gather together in their private homes, for at minimum a two-hour shared table meal, and at maximum a week-long stay. Some of these folks will be traveling long distance in crowded conditions, in order to do this.
Latest and ongoing research suggests that, once infected, the average Omicron Covid patient experiences a milder track of disease than a Delta Covid patient. That’s hopeful. What is less hopeful is the rate of transmission. “2x” (twice as infectious as Delta) doesn’t sound like much… until you run the numbers, and then the problem shows itself. Copy/pasting from one of my comments below:
If a person with Delta covid infects an average of 2 persons and a person with Omicron covid infects an average of 4 persons … run ten rounds of that. 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 1,024. 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 1,048,576. (They don’t know exactly the average infection rate for Omicron but it’s probably not far from each infected person then causing 3-4 new infections in others)
The Atlantic has several good pieces (and one infuriating one) up this week on what it all might mean:
Don’t Be Surprised When You Get Omicron, writes the fully vaccinated Yasmin Tayag who is recovering from a breakthrough infection of her own, one she believes she got over Thanksgiving.
Now that the Omicron variant is here, many more Americans may soon have to deal with breakthrough confusion. There’s a lot we don’t know about the new variant, but it’s spreading fast. Although the unvaccinated remain most at risk, vaccinated America isn’t in the clear: While the shots still seem effective at preventing hospitalization and death, early reports suggest that they are less effective against milder cases. So if you do get a breakthrough infection right now, what should you do?
The article contains solid advice on handling a breakthrough infection and quarantining. Good to have this, for the many of us who aren’t self-imposing a total lockdown and who will indeed get Omicron Covid in the coming 0-2 months.
America Is Not Ready For Omicron, writes Ed Yong, the magazine’s Pulitzer-winning Covid coverage writer. Yong has been a reliable bellwether for the next twists and turns of the pandemic since its inception. He writes:
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.
Gen Z Is Done With The Pandemic, reports Christian Paz. While there are wildly diverse and divergent attitudes among individuals within every generation, there’s likely a lot of truth to what he writes. A large % of young adults and teens have had it with the strictures and negative changes to their worlds. They just want to reboot, reset, and live their post-pandemic lives:
… almost everyone he [William & Mary junior student Taylor Robertson] knows is living a “normal” life. His parents’ house was full for Thanksgiving this year, and he’s gathering with family again this winter at a ski resort. “People don’t want to talk about COVID anymore,” he told me. “It’s just not a thing that people enjoy doing, really. What is there to talk about with it that isn’t just a drag from the rest of the life that we want to be getting on with?”
Robertson echoes a feeling that has permeated the minds and lifestyles of many young people who have missed out on experiences, friendships, and milestones over the past two years of coronavirus disruption. There is a sense of needing to make up for lost time and reclaim a sense of normalcy, even as case counts rise and new variants take root. For these cohorts of Gen Zers and “Z-lennials” (those born roughly from 1993 to 1998), they’re once again learning and working in-person; they’re dining, drinking, and dancing indoors; they’re traveling and celebrating birthdays and holidays; and they don’t have plans to stop anytime soon—Omicron variant be damned.
Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid writes Matthew Walther from rural southwest Michigan.
What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.
Indeed, in my case, when I say for a long while, I mean for nearly two years, from almost the very beginning. In 2020, I took part in two weddings, traveled extensively, took family vacations with my children, spent hundreds of hours in bars and restaurants, all without wearing a mask. This year my wife and I welcomed our fourth child. Over the course of her pregnancy, from the first phone call to the midwife a few months after getting a positive pregnancy test until after delivery, the subject of the virus was never raised by any health-care professional, including her doula, a dear friend from New York.
Hate what Mr. Walther is saying, if you will, but is it more accurate than inaccurate? Meanwhile Omicron is coming fast and, as a virus 0.125 microns in size, it doesn’t have sentience. It cannot know or care whether its growing numbers of human hosts in towns and cities and churches and shopping centers and airports and trains — and, next weekend, Christmas dinner tables — are humans who care about Covid or not.
Putting all of the above together, we get a fast-approaching, real-time wave of Omicron Covid across America that cannot and will not be stopped. And it will spread magnitudinally over the Christmas holiday.
I’m not urgently personally worried in terms of health or mortality. It appears that a fully vaccinated and booster-shot-armed individual like myself, 50-something with no significant health issues, probably doesn’t need to fear hospitalization from Omicron Covid. But the societal numbers are alarming if Omicron spreads across America as virulently as many experts predict it will. Delta Covid is already stressing and straining ICUs in many regions of the country, and now there is this Omicron wave about to happen. And many Americans are still unvaccinated; a “probably milder than Delta” form of Covid will still be much more lethal to an unvaccinated American than a run-in with the flu.
I also wonder if the new way we’re doing everything is distorting the numbers. Everyone I know here in Brooklyn is now doing at-home rapid testing when there’s a concern. If they test positive at home, and dozens in my life have tested positive lately — do they all escalate it to a testing site that feeds a positive PCR result into “the statistics”? Or do they just go on Facebook or Twitter to disclose it and then go into quarantine for a week-plus, not wanting to expose everyone else in the waiting line at a testing clinic?
And I wonder, if Omicron is destined to infect many of us vaccinated people, what will it mean if some classrooms and businesses and parts of America tend to shut down in response, while others defiantly say “well, welcome to the new normal — we gotta live our lives.”
It looks to be an intense winter, pandemic-wise. With Christmas next weekend in position to escalate everything. Good health to us all.
=== 5pm update, yikes, New York City won’t need to wait for Christmas, Omicron is here and now shattering the all time record for daily new cases. 8,300 cases reported today (Thursday 12/16). If that number continues to double every three days, it will be around 75,000 cases by Christmas Day and nearly half a million cases by New Years.