Which Way Will Omicron Go?

Maybe this time, we will stop listening to ignorant idiots?

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 28, 2021

The next few days are going to be exciting but not in a good way. With luck, this will be of only short-term interest as another bump in the pandemic road. Anxiety among the literate will spike, the death cult will denounce reality while their apparatchiks devise podcast conspiracies to feed the residents of Meta’s Facebook universe and extract dollars for themselves.

At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Source: Science

Omicron has popped up around the planet, starting from South Africa. On Friday, the stock markets went into a dive; governments enforce travel bans from Africa and look at emergency measures, and mainstream media is surprisingly quiet. So is it the calm before the storm?

Officially there is too little known of this variant, but its thirty-plus mutations on the spike protein alone make it “insane.” Messaging from scientists discussing this includes words like “bonkers.” Nothing good comes from viral changes that are bonkers.

The status now is that it will take two or three weeks to determine if this variant will significantly bypass current vaccines and be seriously more contagious and possibly more lethal. If it does, it will take one hundred days to update to new mRNA boosters and some time to distribute. We should be getting good at this, but we’ve left most of the plane in the lurch. Another lesson finally learned?

South Africa has seen relatively few cases recently, so a series of superspreading events could have led to the rapid increase of Omicron. “I suspect that a lot of that signal is explained by that and I desperately hope so,” Andersen says. Source: Science.

We owe a debt to South Africa as most of the work identifying new variants has been done there. Before the death cult, racist podcasters blame it all on South Africa; the scientists there have been leaders in identifying and working to understand the SARS-COV2 variants. Unfortunately, South Africa is being punished with travel bans that…