I don’t know my Greek so I have no idea what comes after omicron in the Greek alphabet. I do think though that in the coming weeks the Omicron variant may/should begin to force a re-reckoning of how we deal with Covid and all its variants.
My non-expert, totally anecdotal, experience in the past few weeks is that we may be in the midst of turning some kind of corner with Covid but our public health rules, and personal approaches to Covid haven’t yet recognized that.
Over the holiday season, both here and in Ireland and England, most everyone I’ve encountered has been very apprehensive and careful about the extremely contagious omicron variant. A big new development is that for the first time I’ve encountered people using widespread self-administered Covid tests as a preventative measure.
My extended family had our traditional Christmas Eve gathering this year after skipping it last year. The two keys that put peoples minds (somewhat) at ease were that all attendees were vaccinated and boosted AND all attendees did their own home Covid test before the event. A few folks didn’t make it. My brother and his wife skipped it because he came down with omicron Covid and one of my nieces and her family chose to stay home out of concern about their un-vaccinated baby.
It was a wonderful night. We got to meet four of my new grand nieces/nephews for the first time. That was particularly striking because these babies all live in the metro-Boston area and were nearly a year old but it was our first time seeing them due to Covid. The good news, this sizable intimate gathering resulted in no new cases.
International travel to Northern Ireland via London was a bit of an ordeal. All passengers needed to have a certified negative Covid test within two days of the flight. When we booked the tickets to fly over on Dec 26, none of this was on our radar. The week before the flight, when we realized what the rules were we had a problem. It meant that we would need to be tested on Christmas Day or Sunday morning (the day after). There were absolutely no available testing appointments on those days that we could find anywhere in Eastern MA at the normal venues. We did eventually solve the problem by throwing money at it. My wife found a service that would come to our house on Sunday morning, administer two tests in our home, and charge us an arm and a leg.
When we arrived in Belfast, we couldn’t leave the airport until we got a Public Health Dept administered Covid test. We were instructed to self-quaranteen when we arrived until we got an all-clear a few hours later from the National Health Dept. What was particularly striking was that we were sent on our way with two FREE boxes of 10 Covid home tests. These free home tests were widely distributed to the public but over the holidays we did read reports that they were getting hard to find. Back home these same Covid tests were $25 for two, which definitely discourages using them except for special events.
Once we arrived in Derry we began hearing reports from various of my wife’s relatives that Covid cases were popping up in various of their households. As a result we didn’t get to see some of my wife’s relatives that we were hoping to, and others we had good visits while shivering outside in their front yards. In my brother-in-law’s house we were staying, all was well until our second day. When my other brother-in-law began coughing, he took a quick test, came up positive. Bob then retired to the guest room for the rest of the week with trays of food left at his door – i.e. crazy uncle Bob locked in the attic. Meanwhile the rest of our household remained negative for the remainder of the week and continued with daily testing.
The following week we moved to Belfast where another brother-in-law gave us the use of his empty house. Much the same unfolded in Belfast. Various of our friends we were hoping to see were reporting scattered cases in their families. We did end up having a wonderful week in Belfast and caught up with lots of old friends, a couple at a time, with all sorts of testing and precautions involved. At that point our biggest concern was not so much getting badly sick but if we tested positive we wouldn’t be able to board the return flight on Saturday and would be stuck in Belfast for 10 more days and I wouldn’t be able to return to work on Monday.
My Takeaway – I once again preface this with a disclaimer that I have no expert knowledge of any kind so this is just my layman’s observations. What I’ve seen over the last few weeks is about a dozen, fully vaccinated, people contracting a case of Omicron Covid. Not a single one of them has had worse symptoms than a garden variety cold that we typically deal with at least once a year and think nothing about it – i.e. a minor annoyance. What’s a bit surreal though is that when these people contract “a cold” they are locked away for a week, if you cross paths with someone with “a cold” you should stay home for days until you’re tested. You’re not allowed to board an airplane is you’ve had “a cold” recently. Millions of tests are being sold/or distributed to see if you may have an un-diagnosed “cold”.
Something seems totally out of whack at the moment. Of course this isn’t “a cold”. What complicates this greatly though is that for the 30 – 40% of the American population that is not vaccinated the health outcomes from a case of Covid are often far worse, even for this milder Omicron variant.
So what should we do? Damned if I know.
Interestingly, the vaccination rate here in Newton is 95%+ Does that or should that change anything about our approach to dealing with Covid?
The good news here is that the Omicron variant may be signalling the beginning of a turning point in the course of this pandemic. The combination of this milder, more contagious variant spreading widely along with vaccination of the public may be signalling the beginning of the transformation of Covid from a horrific pandemic that has killed 100,000s of Americans into one of the numerous endemic contagious diseases that we have always dealt with in the course of our normal day to day lives. That transformation can’t come fast enough for me.
What do you think?
Jerry. :Thanks for taking the time to compose this detailed and troubling personal assessment from Northern Ireland. The Irish Times is reporting almost identical developments from the Republic.
More than 2 decades ago, I stumbled upon two recent books by Laurie Garrett, widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on plagues and pandemics. The two book titles reflect her conclusions at that time. The books were—“The Coming Plague. Emerging Diseases in a World Out Of Balance” —and — “Betrayal of Trust. Collapse of Global Public Health”. She stated emphatically that there would come a time when a really super killer virus would come on the scene that would be deadly, elusive, highly contagious and enormously disruptive to civilization as we know it now. In a recent New York Times editorial, she reiterated these concerns and talked about t;he “Years of Death and Collective Rage” that lie ahead. She’s quite blunt in stating that not nearly enough has been done to address this threat since she published her two books
I’ve looked in vain for sources that take issue with anything Garrett has said or written. I can’t find any, but would be extremely relieved to know if anyone might have come upon such critiques. Newton’s done a commendable job with this virus. Even if this cycle is on the wane, however, safety for this City or any other place on the planet may be short lived if Laurie Garrett’s big one finally makes its way here.
Laurie Garrett’s “big” one is already here. It’s called Covid-19 and it’s subsequent variants. We’re coming up on 900,000 people dead in the US alone within two years. There has to be a global approach for any possibility of it to end. While I appreciate this story, it is told from the perspective of people who have the means to “throw money at the problem” and access to “empty homes” where they could stay safe or space where “Uncle Bob” could quarantine without infecting others. This is not the case for many around the world or even in the US. But more than that, those who have the resources (access to vaccines, money to get private testing, travel) and contract “the cold” may be inconvenienced but could be deadly to those who don’t have those things. This is a GLOBAL, PUBLIC Health emergency and until we have the strategic goal of getting everyone in the world protected we will continue to stay in this pandemic particularly with those can travel who can be a danger to entire countries (e.g. the first case of CV-19 entered South Africa from someone traveling from Italy in March, 2020). Please widen your lens, think larger than your town of Newton, and see how – given all the resource and access you have – you can do more to help the least resourced. For when we put the most vulnerable as the priority we all benefit.
Here’s a funny Covid anecdote. My daughter just ‘fessed up to this last week.
She started her first year as a college freshman this past August when she flew by herself for 20+ hours to Seoul Korea. She got off the plane, took a taxi to AirBnb that was registered as her quarantine location, and then lived by herself in an apartment on the 23th floor of a high rise for two weeks, living solely on delivered take out food. At the end of the two weeks she moved to the dormitory at the college.
In Korea they take Covid public health quite seriously and all cafes, restaurants, are off limits unless you can produce proof of vaccination. My daughter and a few of her fully vaccinated American college friends were dismayed to find that the Koreans wont accept their little paper American vax cards because there is nothing secure about them and they are easily faked. Despite the fact they were all vax’ed they were being treated everywhere as if they weren’t and their social lives were extremely constrained as a result.
After putting up with this for a while they decided to sign up to get vaccinated in Korea, as if they were not yet vaccinated. They were thinking it would be the equivalent of getting a booster. They went for their first shot and realized they had to come back for their second shot and also realized that the regular boosters are a lower dose than the original vax shots. After frantically searching “vaccine overdose” etc on the Internet they went back and had their 4th full vaccine doses. All’s well, no problems, and these are now three of the most heavily vaccinated girls on the planet.
Another funny Covid anecdote – As I mentioned above, my brother-in-law Bob spent the entire week self-quarantining in the guest room upstairs. New Years Eve, downstairs in the living room we hatched a plan. I said “Did you see Get Back? The Beatles wanted to do their first live show in years and were wrestling with where and how to do it. They ended up just taking the equipment to the roof and started playing to astonished passersby”.
New Years Day we brought an electric piano out on the front lawn. Invited a couple of musically inclined people over. We brought the piano playing Bob down from his upstairs prison cell to the front lawn and began an impromptu covid-safe front lawn concert. It was so much fun as neighbors began sticking their heads out doors and coming round to see what was happening.
Not quite the Beatles – but we will be releasing an eight hour documentary about it soon ;-)
During the past couple weeks I’ve spoken to perhaps a dozen people who have had the Omi. These cases ranged from asymptomatic, to a normal cold, to a light flu with 24 hours of fever. All were vaccinated with two shots. None had a third shot.
I also get the feeling we may be turning a corner, on our way to endemicity. But I’m an optimist. This is partly because the public health messaging seems more consistently based on honest info at this point. For example, differentiating between hospitalized “for” or “with” COVID, especially with kids, and finally admitting that most of the masks worn by folks over the past couple years have been useless… at least since the onset of the extremely virus-potent variants Delta and Omicron. This doesn’t mean I think we should force people to wear N95s!
I think SCOTUS is likely to rule against the federal employer mandate, which was a stretch to begin with AND counterproductive in that it only increased skepticism about the shots, which have certainly reduced severe disease but do not protect others from infection.
Hopefully the next variant is no more virulent or transmissible and the decoupling of cases and severe illness continues to widen — while more treatments emerge.
But after two years of this, I am utterly exhausted and can’t predict where this is going. Best case I guess is an endemic mutating virus with an impact that resembles a really bad flu year. And we should be allowed to make choices about how we want to handle such a risk, rather than being coerced into certain behaviors.
I’m jabbed and boosted, btw, and think anyone over, say 50, would be wise to do the same. But it should be a choice.
Happy new year, everyone.
It’s obvious that, nearly 24 months into this pandemic, predictions are mostly useless. Each time we think we’ve turned a corner (and we have made progress), COVID throws us a curveball. It’s like Michael Corleone’s lament from Godfather 3. Just when we think we’re out, we get pulled back in.
It’s fine to be grateful for our resilience and to lament the divisions the pandemic has made worse, and to call out those promoting quackery about the virus. But the experts haven’t always been correct, haven’t always clear and convincing in their explanations, and clearly underestimated the many deleterious effects the pandemic has had on all of us. Even Europeans are protesting more lockdowns.
If COVID Is here to stay, the only prediction that’s likely to hold up, the question for this year should be what – and who – we are willing to sacrifice in order to live with it. Are we ready for the answer?
We also flew to Europe on the 26th of December so we were in the same testing predicament as Jerry, given that the PCR test sites all shut down on the 23rd and the rapid-antigen clinics were all closed that weekend. Luckily at the beginning of December we’d ordered a six-pack of home tests with online consultations and downloadable results –
https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en
We scheduled a long land-side layover/nap in Amsterdam so we had to test twice, once before our flight from Logan to the Netherlands and again before our flight from the Netherlands to Italy. The online testing was a mostly smooth experience facilitated by proctors in Manila, Mumbai, and Bogota. One of them failed to upload a result so we were panicking before our Amsterdam-Florence flight but simply ended up doing another test (the six-pack came in handy for two adults).
The funny thing is, nobody ever checked our test results – not at the Delta checkin in Boston, not at customs in Amsterdam, not at the KLM checkin at Schiphol, and not at Galileo Airport in Florence. I thought that we had maybe gotten a pass because I was traveling on a European passport, but in fact everybody who’s been in a red country such as the US in the 14 days before arrival is subject to the testing requirement, EU citizen or not.
Another interesting formality was the Certificazione verde in Italy and the Pass sanitaire in France – they have apps and QR codes for locals, but we just ended up flashing our decidedly low-tech, unverifiable, and (as Jerry points out) easily-faked CDC vaccination cards paired with our US passports – never had a problem.
I have to go back to France at the end of the month and just found out that as of January 15th they’ll only consider people to be vaccinated if they’ve had a booster shot (or if their second dose was within the last 7 months). They’ll also apparently be more strict about making sure that foreign tourists get an official Pass sanitaire issued by a French pharmacy.
I know a lot of people who have gotten COVID over the past month, including people who were vaxxed + boosted and some who were vaxxed + boosted + had a previous COVID infection. One got pretty sick (not hospital sick, but ho isme for ten days sick and still coughing almost three weeks out) but everyone else ranged asymptomatic to mildly fluish.
I’m not sure how much longer I can avoid it. I work with the public, kid is in school…it’s just a matter of time. I’m still doing what I can to not get it because it’s minimally a big hassle, but I think this is just something we need to live with.
I agree with Andy’s overall assessment about this being a point where it’s simply becoming endemic.
An expert on NPR opined that unless everyone, i.e. more than 95% of the entire population, gets vaccinated and stays boosted, the Covid Pandemic might continue to spiral almost out of control. We could see new and potentially threatening mutations for the foreseeable future. True, most of the fully vaccinated who get breakthrough cases have mild symptoms, but I’d rather not be among the few with long-term consequences.
My daughter’s in-laws had a large holiday gathering that included some unvaccinated relatives “totally done with Covid,” Not surprisingly, more than half in attendance got Omicron at this super-spreader event. So far, all have recovered though one had difficulty breathing for a stretch.
A sensible society would mandate that all citizens be vaccinated and boosted, insist that the common good matters more than some absurd notion of personal freedom. Claiming the right to stay unvaccinated is akin to claiming the right to drive while intoxicated. Why is such behavior acceptable?
Bob, it’s entirely clear that the shots do not stop infection/transmission with this variant (and to a lesser degree with Delta). The CDC admits this. The spike protein, which the mRNA targets, has too many (50ish) mutations.
What is clear is that the shots do prevent, in general, severe outcomes, because there are deeper levels to immunity than simply antibodies. So there is no way to stop communal transmission at this point… but we CAN protect ourselves.
As I mentioned, anyone middle-aged or older, who does not have natural immunity, is — in my opinion – foolish not to take the treatment ahead of infection. But we’re all going to have to deal with COVID at some point.
Good to hear your voice!
Thanks, Andy, and happy New Year! I wish that you were still in charge at the Tab, alas for all of us. There’s more to this Covid business than our perspectives, but I will bow out and leave the podium to those in the scientific and medical communities.
Andy,
Thank you for your measured, thoughtful words. Most people are now coming around to the fact that catching a highly contagious airborne virus is not a moral failing.
In my opinion the next step in moving forward should be to invite anybody who wishes to avoid covid to wear an N95 mask in public settings. For everyone else, masks should be completely optional.
The only way to get back to normal is to get back to normal.
Happy New Year Jerry et al.
This morning, I was able to download my “COVID-19 Smart Health Card” from https://myvaxrecords.mass.gov, onto my smartphone from the official Massachusetts Immunization Information System. It contains a QR Code which allows the user to share vaccination information with employers, restaurants, etc. that require proof of vaccination. It is supposed to ensure privacy and was easy to access.
Happy New Year Ted.
I did the same last night and it was very quick and simple – just a few minutes to do it.
Andy, until we are at the point where COVID is endemic and we have reached that equilibrium with natural immunity, the health care system is going to be under considerable stress. Nobody is being held down and forced to get shots against their will, but I think a certain level of coercion is fine until we get to a safer place. I’d selfishly like a hospital bed to be available for me and people I care about in the case of emergency (either COVID or non-COVID)
Adam, fair point and I share that concern about hospital capacity. My understanding is that the issue close to home isn’t so much about the number of actual beds but rather so many staff being out sick. In other words, some beds are closed down for lack of doctors, nurses.
It seems to me that the mandates put in effect just now in places such as Boston are policy driven by the facts on the ground… in June(!) when the vaccines were having great success against the Alpha strain. That changed by summer with lagging efficacy, the onset of Delta and now Omicron.
What the mandates are saying now is: “Take this shot — even if you are young, healthy and almost definitely not going to need hospital care — or you are a bad person who can’t eat or shop or work here.”
Coercion hasn’t worked and it won’t work.
I pray endemicity is on the way by spring and that we all stay healthy so we can get back to arguing about… whether the Newton Centre triangle lot is a huge waste of space. (It is!)
@Andy-
1 – the crunch in hospitals is both due to so many patients and so many staff out sick. But Covid is the cause of both those things. We need to get it under control.
2 – Messaging about vaccines has never been clear enough that they were developed and tested in clinical trials for their ability to prevent serious illness/hospitalizations and deaths, not for their ability to prevent mild or asymptomatic cases. At that point early in the epidemic, testing clinical trial participants frequently for anything that wasn’t severe just wasn’t feasible since we didn’t yet have home tests. we didn’t have the testing capacity (shortages of reagents, etc.) to add tens of thousand of weekly tests, and the trials wouldn’t have been able to accrue enough participants quickly who had the time and willingness to go get those horrible nasal swabs that feel like they’re hitting your brain every week. The vaccines have been impressively successful at what they were designed to do – keeping people from ending up hospitalized or dying.
3 – in a public health emergency, vaccination needs to be mandatory. Just like kids are required to have proof of a bunch of vaccinations before entering public schools. I’m old enough to remember having measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella and it was miserable and dangerous. And protecting others from getting sick is a valid public health reason – after all, it’s the main reason we vaccinate against rubella, which is only dangerous io those who are pregnant.
4 – young people who get Covid can still end up hospitalized. They definitely can end up spreading it. They can also end up with long Covid – something that hasn’t been emphasized enough and is a serious concern that needs more study. We don’t know what proportion of Covid cases result in long Covid, nor if vaccination lessens the risk. And saying that unvaccinated people can’t go to the office or restaurants or bars isn’t saying they’re bad people; it’s saying that they are dangerous to everyone else in that location and we want to avoid super-spreader events.
Meredith, I remember chicken pox and it was nasty. Fever and then itching for days. I was maybe 8 or 9. I think I had mumps and can vaguely remember that also. Not fun.
But the difference with those vaccines, which all my kids were inoculated for, is that they are actual vaccines. They have essentially eliminated those diseases.
What we are dealing with now is a very different situation. The Pfizer and Moderna shots are not stopping communal spread. That doesn’t mean they haven’t saved thousands and thousands of lives, especially of older folks. But the vaccinated are spreading this disease now.
If a vaccine is eventually developed that mostly eradicates COVID, over a period of a few years, than I think there would be no question it should be added to the list of mandatory innoculations. If that turns out to be the case I’d be thrilled. But that’s not happening now. And I kind of doubt it will any time soon.
As for the kids, they are more likely to get sicker from the flu than COVID. But we never mandated the flu shot for students until last school year, as a defensive measure against COVID.
I think it’s going to be really a rough winter. But some good news: The guy on Twitter who follows Boston area wastewater levels of COVID reports a downward trend over the past couple days So, hopefully a month from now the burden on hospitals will mercifully start easing up.
The Covid vaccine is an “actual vaccine”. There is no delineation between “actual vaccines” and non- such as you refer to. No vaccine is 100% effective – that’s why getting as close to universal vaccination as possible is so important.
Pediatricians are reporting alarming increases in rates of kids with Covid, including serious cases. I don’t know any doctor who doesn’t want their children vaccinated. And, again, all our resources are stretched thin right now. You don’t want your loved ones to end up in the hospital right now – I’ve just gone through that with a parent, and it’s not good.
One other point I forgot to mention – coming down with Covid doesn’t seem to provide lasting immunity. It’s not unique in that – immunity to influenza isn’t lasting, either.
Here’s a startling and very encouraging chart. As Andy Levin mentioned above, and the Boston Herald reports,the daily Covid waste water testing for the Boston area is showing as steep a drop in the last few days as the meteoric rise that occured since the holidays.
Yeah, Jerry, but the hospitals are still going to be under a lot of pressure for a while because severe illness lags cases by a few weeks. But it is a light at the end of the tunnel, thank God.
What, am I the only one here that nervously watches the MWRA poop charts daily?
Adam, you are not alone!
Yes, nothing better to brighten your day more than a falling poopometer
Andy, the reason that polio and other diseases have been all but eliminated in the United States is widespread and/or
mandatory vaccination for children entering public schools. But polio is still a threat in other parts of the world where people are not vaccinated, and outbreaks of measles, mumps, and other potentially deadly diseases do occur in the United States, particularly in communities where children are not vaccinated and/or get infected by someone who has traveled overseas. Indeed, Pertussis (whooping cough) and Chicken Pox can be prevented with vaccines, but remain fairly common in the United States. While vaccines aren’t perfect, the more people who get vaccinated, the sooner these diseases can be all but eliminated. But the United States is nowhere near that level yet with COVID.
The Stallion!
Understood… but these vaccines, according to the CDC, can no longer prevent transmission/infection. Rochelle Walensky admitted that some time ago, I think during the Delta wave.
Now the virus is even more contagious. That’s why so many people are sick, here in Newton, where vax rates are really high. I would need another hand to count all the people here I know who have this virus, 99 percent vaccinated. Thankfully they’re all fine, though a few with mild lingering symptoms.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the legal precedent for vaccine mandates, Jacobson, relies on the innoculation preventing spread of the disease, in that case smallpox. Yes? But what the mRNA shots do is basically help the body prepare for the virus and limit or maybe block its symptoms altogether. In other words, if I choose to get COVID without vaccination first I am risking a more severe outcome for myself, increasingly so the older and less healthy I am. But either way, shots or no shots, I can be infected and then infect others…. at least the way things stand now with these vaccines and this virus variant.
If all we can do is protect ourselves with the shot, but not protect others, how can you mandate (especially for young people)?
@AndyLevin
You’re unfortunately spreading inaccurate, misinformation.
Prior to Omicron, the vaccinated/unboosted were 4-5x less likely to be infected than unvaxxed, and boosted were 5-6x less likely to be infected than vaxxed/unboosted. This does not mean that vaccination is 100% effective at preventing transmission, which is what Walensky acknowledged. But the data is clear that it reduces likelihood of transmission, and the data has consitently demonstrated that. What is not clear is what would happen if we were near 95% vaccination as a country. But there is reason to believe, like other vaccines, numbers would be far lower, as SARS-COV-2 would not have the easy hosts that it currently has in unvaccinated people to infect and transmit. Unvaccinated people are still the predominant tranimission vector, at rates as described above- 4-5x more than vaccinated and 20x those vaccinated/boosted. Again, pre-Omicron.
Alec Wilson, we are no longer pre-Omicron.
Alex, yes, pre-Omicron.
You’re making my point.
@Andy
There is no data with Omnicron, so you are making statements without data on the effectiveness of Omnicron transmission with vaccination.
Further, it’s unreasonable to assume vaccination has NO effect on transmission/infection, after having a meaningful effect on prior variants. Biologically Omnicron isn’t sufficiently structurally distinct to make that assumption. It would also mean that 75% of current cases are in the vaccinated population, which is unlikely based on Mass breakthrough data released last week.
We can agree that it’s vaccines are less effective at preventing Omnicron infection/transmission, but you said “not” effective which is not consistent with the science or clinical data to date.
Andy is of course precisely right.
The most important thing we can do now is not ruin our children’s educational and extra curricular experiences by clinging to false and ineffective strategies for prevention. By some accounts 1/3 to 1/2 of the students at Newton South either have presently or have had covid since the holidays. At the middle schools its 1/4 to 1/3. These vaccines are not preventing the spread of covid and neither are masks.
Our community is doing “all the right things” and we cannot stop this.
The time has come to admit that we need new strategy that takes into account the costs of masking 5 year olds, of forgoing school dances, of cancelling ski club, of prohibiting spectators at hockey games.
Other places in this country, entire states and regions, are not doing what we are doing and they do not have more covid than we do.
Craig where did your numbers come from?
Jerry, once my family and everybody we knew in Newton tested positive we started asking around. My numbers are highly unscientific but I doubt you’ll get much pushback if you corroborate them with families with kids.
Everyone is fine.
Who isn’t fine are working parents with young kids in daycare. My child’s daycare has been or will be closed 60% of the days this month through MLK day. The guidance from the state is that if a child tests positive their room closes for 5 days. This is insanity.
And now the Gov is saying a PCR should not be required to return to daycare . . . because there is great demand for the PCR test. I don’t know how you tell daycares to close and require a PCR test; and then say PCR tests shouldn’t be a return to school/work requirement. He hasn’t give clear guidelines.
This is absolutely correct. The mitigation measures in place for daycares and preschools assume it’s still March 2020 without reflecting the reality that it is 2022 and Omicron. A single positive case leads to days of shut downs, which of course when you have a young child (or children), are days when work is practically impossible.
It really seems to me that throughout this pandemic, kids and their families have not featured prominently in the thinking of policy makers and suffered as a result.
Oh – and when you see the next news item about how the birth rate has dropped to unsustainably low levels – please think about this post and the many others about what kids and their parents have been put through. And then you might understand one of the reasons why people are having fewer kids.
The tone on this post is much less panicked than those on Newton affinity Facebook groups…and much nicer to digest. We lost a lot of folks i the first wave sadly, yet despite the huge spike in infections, deaths of dramatically decreased. We’ll get thru this. The poop says so. Hospital stats always lag behind symptoms. Those will get better soon as well.
While not quite pre-pandemic levels, the streets of Newton very quite the week of and leading up to New Years. Social media was filled with pics of travel and gatherings. One has to wonder though… would the current surge have happened without the uptick in holiday travels and gatherings? The 20/20 of hindsight. Happy New Year, all!
I’d caution against thinking the Omicron variant as something we can or should live with. The state gives us precious little information about how many vaccinated people end up up with serious consequences of infections. (https://www.mass.gov/doc/weekly-report-covid-19-cases-in-vaccinated-individuals-january-11-2022/download is about the sum total of it.)
In the last week covered there, 112 vaccinated persons died as compared with ~200 unvaccinated. (Those are not normalized to the size of the underlying populations, but at least it gives some sense of scale. For more comparison, weekly mortality from flu in this state is probably below 30 (total including vaccinated).)
And, then, there’s no guarantee that the next variant that traverses the planet will be any less virulent or adequately protected against by current vaccines. After all, Omicron didn’t emerge predictably from a precursor that was circulating widely. It took virologists by surprise, and it’s emergence remains poorly explained.
Last, of course, we still have to consider the long-term consequences of Covid, the characterization of which is in it’s infancy. Today, we don’t bar people from colds from flying; but if we knew they and those they infected might experience debilitating neurologic sequelae years down the road, we might.
I am sorry that what I have to say is so much more pessimistic than nearly everyone else’s contribution. But I am optimistic about advances in vaccines and treatment options that will make a real difference in the not too distant future. For now, though, keeping transmission to an absolute minimum seems the smart way to go.