I am getting to that point as well. Has the CDC actually stated what are the possible outcomes are that'll put an end to this?
I just took a quick trip to Austin from Los Angeles and it blew my mind how 95% of people indoors (not eating/drinking) don't wear masks indoors when in groups/crowded areas. Seeing full elevators full of unmasked elderly folks in their 70s and 80s was totally crazy compared to life in LA. I went to Papadeux for lunch and half the dining room was closed because so many of the staff is out with covid and their other location was closed completely for the same reason. Given the 26% positivity rate in Texas now, I can't imagine things looking good 1-2 weeks from now.
CDC is a joke. Anyone who says Biden is going to shut down etc. needs to just look at what the CDC is actually doing. Making it a 5 day quarantine and not needing a negative test. Right now is bad. Too many people are getting sick at once and it’s clogged up the health care system. We have two waves right now with omicron and delta. If omicron confers resistance to delta for the unvaccinated and omicron truly is milder which all evidence anecdotal and published shows (maybe due to combination of prior infection and virus vs intrinsic differences) then this is the ball game until the next pandemic.
It certainly appears to be the case, and we can hope. The problem is at what point will the power is it be declared that?
Hopefully we'll have another dip by February. I get it that most vaccinated young folks will be fine but seeing all the elderly and obese folks not taking things seriously blew my mind. To each their own I guess.
Yes, life is almost normal here. Seems like the majority of people still wearing masks here are college kids. California might as well be a different country right now. Also, it seems like this omicron spike has tapered off in South Africa and surrounding countries.
The NYT is reporting that studies are showing that Omicron doesn't affect the lungs as much as the other variants but concentrates in the upper respiratory tract. That is why it's more contagious but possibly less deadly. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html Studies Suggest Why Omicron Is Less Severe: It Spares the Lungs Compared with earlier variants, Omicron may cause less damage to the lungs, new animal research suggests. A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus. In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty. “It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway. In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations. Previous research had shown that some of these mutations enabled coronaviruses to grab onto cells more tightly. Others allowed the virus to evade antibodies, which serve as an early line of defense against infection. But how the new variant might behave inside of the body was a mystery. “You can’t predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations,” said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge. Over the past month, more than a dozen research groups, including Dr. Gupta’s, have been observing the new pathogen in the lab, infecting cells in Petri dishes with Omicron and spraying the virus into the noses of animals. As they worked, Omicron surged across the planet, readily infecting even people who were vaccinated or had recovered from infections. But as cases skyrocketed, hospitalizations increased only modestly. Early studies of patients suggested that Omicron was less likely to cause severe illness than other variants, especially in vaccinated people. Still, those findings came with a lot of caveats. For one thing, the bulk of early Omicron infections were in young people, who are less likely to get seriously ill with all versions of the virus. And many of those early cases were happening in people with some immunity from previous infections or vaccines. It was unclear whether Omicron would also prove less severe in an unvaccinated older person, for example. Experiments on animals can help clear up these ambiguities, because scientists can test Omicron on identical animals living in identical conditions. More than half a dozen experiments made public in recent days all pointed to the same conclusion: Omicron is milder than Delta and other earlier versions of the virus. On Wednesday, a large consortium of Japanese and American scientists released a report on hamsters and mice that had been infected with either Omicron or one of several earlier variants. Those infected with Omicron had less lung damage, lost less weight and were less likely to die, the study found. Although the animals infected with Omicron on average experienced much milder symptoms, the scientists were particularly struck by the results in Syrian hamsters, a species known to get severely ill with all previous versions of the virus. “This was surprising, since every other variant has robustly infected these hamsters,” said Dr. Michael Diamond, a virologist at Washington University and a co-author of the study. Several other studies on mice and hamsters have reached the same conclusion. (Like most urgent Omicron research, these studies have been posted online but have not yet been published in scientific journals.) The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy. Dr. Diamond and his colleagues found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants. A similar finding came from researchers at the University of Hong Kong who studied bits of tissue taken from human airways during surgery. In 12 lung samples, the researchers found that Omicron grew more slowly than Delta and other variants did. The researchers also infected tissue from the bronchi, the tubes in the upper chest that deliver air from the windpipe to the lungs. And inside of those bronchial cells, in the first two days after an infection, Omicron grew faster than Delta or the original coronavirus did. These findings will have to be followed up with further studies, such as experiments with monkeys or examination of the airways of people infected with Omicron. If the results hold up to scrutiny, they might explain why people infected with Omicron seem less likely to be hospitalized than those with Delta. Coronavirus infections start in the nose or possibly the mouth and spread down the throat. Mild infections don’t get much further than that. But when the coronavirus reaches the lungs, it can do serious damage. Immune cells in the lungs can overreact, killing off not just infected cells but uninfected ones. They can produce runaway inflammation, scarring the lung’s delicate walls. What’s more, the viruses can escape from the damaged lungs into the bloodstream, triggering clots and ravaging other organs. More at link.
That's kind of how things have been in the free states for 6 months now and it hasn't led to catestrophic repurcussions. To me it's crazy to think how many people stayed locked down and masking up (most of which being nothing but a facial decoration) this whole time for essentially no reason. Early on when we thought COVID was more serious than it turned out being, I could understand it...hell I championed it even, but once it was pretty clear that anyone under 50 has essentially nothing at all to fear from it, that's when all the draconian measures should have been dropped. Now I'm not advocating people be irresponsible, don't go around licking door knobs, but the vast majority of normal life is fine. If you get sick, stay home for a few days same as you would a cold or the flu and head back out afterwards. People who have special considerations should contineue to take extra measures....just like they literally always should anyway. If you or someone you are frequently in close contact with have severe enough comorbidities to where COVID might get you or them, those kinds of extra measures should be second nature to you already anyway.
Yep. I posted a few similar articles on the last page in response to Cheetah's mindless drivel. It seems like all news is pretty good on omicron. @robbie380 , those areas, such as South Africa, that are seeing a decreased spike in omicron, what is replacing it?
I haven’t checked to see if there is positive test rate data but it just looks like cases are declining. No other variant is replacing it.
I saw a picture of Mickey Gilley at a crowded restaurant in Dickinson yesterday. I’m taking him as my first pick in the 2020 death pool.
When the hospitals are not overwhelmed and we have a normally functioning health care system again. That is the only endgame here.
I agree with that for sure. I think that is coming within the next 3-6 months if we play our cards right here. Problem is, I don't trust those making the decisions to inform the masses as to the right decisions. And even if they do, as at times they have in the past, history will repeat itself, and a decent percentage of the masses will reverse course and find some conspiracy to believe in somewhere. Would be quite comical to see the left become anti maskers and the right become mask enforcers because the government said everyone should go back to normal.
I agree that conspiracy theory BS is problematic....but it wouldn't be as big a problem if those in power weren't constantly lying to the people and calling people "conspiracy theorists" that are just exposing the truth. All that does is lead more people to believe the BS conspriacy nonsense. There's a pretty long running list of things that were deemed "conspiracy theories" a year ago that are now pretty much a given. You'd be banned from social media if you sugggested that vaccinated people could spread covid....now we know that's absolutely true. People that talked about the lab origin of covid were demonized as "conspiracy theorists", now just about everyone admits that is by far the likeliest origin. Telling the truth is the best way to combat "conspiracy theorists", even if the truth isn't great for narratives you want to promote, they are better than destroying credibility by getting caught in lies.
