The Omicron variant

This is about getting away from a doubling time of 2 to 3 days.

Between today and January 1st there are 22 days. So there's potential for somewhere between 11 and 7 doublings to occur at the current rate.

I'm not sure how many probable SGTF cases they had today, but it was over 900 yesterday so lets run with that...

Doubling every 3 days:

900×2×2×2×2×2×2×2=115,200 omicron cases per day by January 1st

Doubling every 2 days:

900×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2=1,843,200 omicron cases per day by January 1st

If it's closer to 2 days than 3, then even if only 1 person per thousand ends up in the hospital then they'll be under pressure.

So as I said, which you called stupid, they don't have the luxury of waiting for hard data. Exponential growth is a geebag.

What would i do? Masks in indoor public spaces for starters and antigen tests for nightclubs etc. but no Covid certs. There is enough public awareness so no need to hammer on and blaming anti vaxxers. Beyond that there is not much more you can do to stop the spread. Boosters might protect the vulnerable but won't stop infections. We just have to roll with it. That is different from saying:' let it rip' which was always rather disingenuous. And its not like a thermostat in which lowering the dial leads to a predictable outcome much like the Co2 argument.

It would have been good to have special Covid clinics to separate Covid patients from the rest but i was told the health service was worried resources might be taken away from regular health care and i assume thats why they never happened, to our detriment. And of course everyone hoped it would all just go away.

Now, currently, the good news coming from South Africa and Botswana seems to suffer a counter attack highlighting only possible negative outcomes. It seems in the light of evidence an extremely skewed position and i suspect a deliberate attempt to steer people away from that by pushing the fear factor up which doesnt take much effort especially given the support by state sponsored media and other drama outlets.

Plus, we HAVE been hammered by especially Delta so the fear is still there.

I was hoping for a little more balance after the initial scare when the Omicron news broke. We started to see that happening which might have triggered some groups into thinking about ways to steer the public towards the R number, exponential growth, projections, models, the usual tactics.

And it worked..

"The companies believe that vaccinated individuals may still be protected against severe forms of the disease."

They don't know ****.

It's that type of hyperbole that undermines science, like a good proportion of modelling estimates. Exponential growth, ad infinitum, is not how this virus is being transmitted in the real world. Better off not to equate it as such.

Over two weeks since first known reporting, expectation is that it was around for as long as that before being detected. So a month into this and the deaths can't come quick enough for shareholders and Govt officials.

What's an acceptable rate of death in this instance? As a factor of Delta?

Or will every death be used as a stick to drive home new restrictions as needed by Governments and health officials?

That's exactly what they said. The first line in the tweet and the tweet headline both say "Preliminary lab results...". If you're reading certainty into that then that's just an inaccurate comprehension of that they have said.

They haven't said they know one way or the other, they're telling you what they have learned so far. Preliminary means something done early before the main event. What did you take the word preliminary to mean in that context?

2,324 Global Confirmed cases {BNONews}

Yes and the issue arises when we try to demonstrate what doubling actually means. There's an example doing the rounds now where you offer someone the choice of a million euro today or one single cent that doubles every day for a month. Which would you choose?

It's a cool thought experiment but people are not inanimate objects like money. People's behaviour changes and we react to new information. So we can impose restrictions and even if we didn't, we would run out of new people to meet and infect.

The idea of doubling every few days is interesting and it means we need to take action. It doesn't mean the virus will actually continue to double until its infecting 20m people a day in Ireland.

Booster is just a term used for a vaccination, that's all it is, another vaccination with a different term used, and vaccination was never going to stop at 1, 2, 3 or even 4 - vaccinations are seen as permanent, though health officials wont admit this. Now we have certificates for permanent vaccinations, and oblivious are the people because the term has changed to "Booster".

The more and more people who get infected means less and less uninfected people out there.

At the start, if people were only meeting 10 people and infecting 4, further on on the wave, someone goes out and meets 10 people, but 6 have recovered, they are hardly likely to infect all 4 of the uninfected. More like only 1 would get infected.

Severe illness in South Africa's Omicron outbreak lower than in past waves, initial data suggests

Early hospital data from South Africa shows fewer than a third of patients admitted for Covid during the latest wave linked to the Omicron variant are suffering severe illness, compared with two thirds in the early stages of the last two waves, Reuters reports.

Data released by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) for Tshwane, the metropolitan area which includes Pretoria where the first suspected Omicron outbreak occurred, showed 1,633 admissions in public and private hospitals for Covid between 14 November and 8 December.

Of those, 31% were severe cases – defined as patients needing oxygen or mechanical ventilation – compared with 66% early in the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic and 67% in the early weeks of the first.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/dec/09/covid-news-live-england-moves-to-plan-b-three-pfizer-shots-can-neutralise-omicron-lab-tests-show?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-61b212748f08cfef2cf62ff8#block-61b212748f08cfef2cf62ff8

^^^ No media reports on a second case in Ireland?

Edit 17:30 ~ Second case now confirmed.

^^^ UK Cases

You better check that data again.

I mean dig a little deeper. What you'll find is that people going into hospital for non Covid related health issues were tested and found Covid positive. Some of them already had severe comorbidities and Omicron was not a big factor.

All in all looking at the % of inpatients DUE to Covid in relation to total population and you also get a different picture..

The SA government also keeps a tight grip on the data coming out, some of that not correct like the one The Guardian article highlighted. People did NOT come in with severe Covid. It paints a false picture. They came in because of severe illness, not severe Covid symptoms. I cant stress enough what a huge difference that makes.

Better to check w actual on the ground people in those hospitals like the video i posted earlier and other sources..

On a personal note: my next door neighbour has been in and out of hospital w severe illness in the last few years He contracted Covid in hospital at some point. He is still in and out. Luckily Covid didnt take him...