Doctor Bonnie here in BC said yesterday in the presser, that it’s not a matter of IF people are exposed to the virus. But WHEN they will be exposed.
hence the bum rush on testing kits, just before everyone congregates with family for Christmas.
news: self-test kits will be available at:
people: 
That would appear to be the thinking - the Florida of the North
I am reconciled to the likelihood that by the end of February, we will virtually all have been exposed. My youngest will have his 2nd shot first week of January, after that there isn’t really much that can be done to shift the odds.
Covid Office Party Stories, #487
Ok, so the in laws, with whom we are scheduled to be having xmas dinner were both at an office party two days ago and now at least one of the guests has tested positive.
The in laws refuse to get tested, and it turns out that it’s extremely complicated in Florida anyway. We could make an appointment at Walgreens, but that would take three or four days. I’m used to being able to take an antigen test on every other street corner and get the result in 20 mins.
The general attitude seems to be total apathy in this country despite the fact that 1,300 people a day are dying.
Weird times.
my son got his shot an hour ago, first one. not his first vaccination, but it was a shitty decision to have to make
isn’t that scale in 100K intervals? So updwards of 130,000 people a day?
who is processing that scale of tests? someone is getting rich!
To paraphrase @Arminius isn’t omicron looking like the ideal variant? Highly contagious but mild. Will erase most, if not all, other variants and will provide virus exposure and increased immune response to damn near everybody. You look at these studies of hospitalizations, it’s looking pretty favorable.
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The UK is testing over a million per day. The government threw over £20 billion at it last summer. We’ve got test kits coming out of our arses.
Ideal is a stretch though. Hospitalizations are low, but not that low. Once you control for vaccination, prior exposure, and age, it is looking like maybe a 60% reduction? That’s great, but not if you have 10x the cases.
My perversely optimistic point of view is that the next month will be hellish, but it is going to infect everyone in such a short time and produce active antibodies that it will burn itself out, and take Covid-19 with it. Someone could have the killer Tau mutation appear in their body in February, but unless it has massive breakthrough advantages, it will just kill that one unfortunate host.
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Technically yes. But firstly, its still too early to call it favorable and let it spread uncontrollably as there is not enough time to do that. Give it another month or two and probably the stats will be more telling. And secondly, for example, 2% hospitalization of 10million infections is worse than 10% of 1 million infections. And if that happens in a short time, it can easily overwhelm a healthcare system and more deaths will occur.
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10k intervals but also a 7 day rolling average so todays figure is likely to be considerably higher again. Basically I think we’re near 150k new cases today and that’s likely to be increasing very rapidly. I can see us hitting 200k cases per day soon.
I think you’re using it wrong 
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Not quite that high. Just under 120k new cases today.
Hospitalisations will and are over stretching many health systems already due to the shear numbers getting infected. It’s out of control. Fingers crossed those being hospitalised are released quickly in general so we get a leveling out. I fear for USA and UK where the policy seems to be to encourage infection since quite a while. That trend will be horrendous to reverse.
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Yeah, we’re back to about 1200 deaths per day in the US., Never dipped much below 1000 anyway. In human terms it’s a lot of deaths, but we have over 6000 hospitals so it remains invisible to the average person. Have to see what this new variant brings, as cases are beginning to increase quite markedly here now, too. UK seems to have done much better in terms of deaths. High cases since July but very low deaths. This round goes to the NIH!
US is in total denial
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It’s not so much the deaths as the numbers in hospital and in France the numbers being admitted with Covid has dramatically increased these past few days (with I presume the new variant being the main cause). Many of these will survive but they take up resources.
One of the things that is emerging very clearly from the data with Omicron is that prior infection with another variant has a strong influence on severity. In South Africa, in a population estimated at 75% prior exposure, the numbers have been very low. In the UK, more significant, but not dramatic yet. In Denmark, with relatively low prior exposure, lower than Delta models would predict, but still scary. Given where I live is closer to Denmark than the other two vis-a-vis exposure, I think the next 4 weeks will be rough.
Worst game of hind-and-seek ever. I am not sure when the right time to have caught covid was, but between a natural R somewhere between 4-7 and at least here not much policy reaction, we are all going to get this variant.
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Yep! that’s my guess as well, just hoping it will take some time, enough for hospitals to cope ‘properly’ if that’s at all possible.