The Omicron variant

Yes, sounds like the wall of defence for mass surge testing and genome sequencing will be coming back to try and limit transmission outbreaks as much as possible. Exactly times like this that the extra capacity comes in useful.

Jaysus! And Danny O'Reilly was thinking of changing the bands name to the 'Omicrons' a few months ago

😋

First case discovered in Italy.

It's probably been in Europe for a while.

Austria reporting a suspected case now.

And Czechia

Boris was rattled ! He had been told the inside information !!! If he is worried we must be entering the doomsday scenario.

They're bringing back mandatory masks in shops and on public transport. They know something they're not telling us.

Or they are just showing the sort of caution they should have shown in the beginning/alpha and Delta

Meh, nah, not really. It's just the worst type of pandemic because of the way society is currently set up/conditioned. I'm not saying that death has ever been welcomed but we live in an era where there is waning belief in anything more than this physical reality so the price of life has become so high. If there was a real feeling that we existed beyond this physical dimension there would be less of a fixation on keeping people alive in and around and often long past their life expectancy. This I am sure of, it might not be happening on a conscious level but certainly factors in to the measures we have taken to curb the virus. Maybe not a bad thing depending on your perspective but a huge sacrifice being made to keep as much people as possible alive for a little longer.

The worst type of pandemic is one which actually affects a significant proportion of the population and perhaps results in a gruesome prolonged and painful death. We could go back to living a relatively normal existence if we accepted the fact that people die but for many justifiable reasons we don't seem to want to accept that fact and thus, we are in the current situation. It seems that now we've just taken an arbitrary decision point on the capacity the healthcare system can withstand and deemed that to be the straw that broke the camels back and in need of extraordinary measures to curb a collapse. In Ireland we've always had seasonal pressure on the healthcare system with the abundance of diseases that spread this time of year, it would never have even been contemplated that we would lockdown the population because of that, rather questions were raised about mismanagement and under funding in the healthcare system.

The Belgium case came from someone who had returned home after going to Egypt and Turkey 11 days ago. Quite obvious it will be spreading everywhere by now.

Maybe this variant didn't originate in South Africa but was just first discovered there?

Have you been reading 'Piers Morgan' 's tweets?

Edited: - This was posted before a thread refresh with more replies

Just because Morgan is a spectacularly awful human being most of the time doesn't mean he isn't right some times.

We don't know where Omicron came from, and it doesn't even matter where it first originated anymore, it's in the wild now. what matters is how we deal with it