What We Know, and Don’t Know, About Omicron

“Omicron” would be a good name for a Marvel Comics villain, and “The Omicron Variant” might be the title of a future Frederick Forsyth spy novel. But it’s a virus, and we have to deal with it.

I’ve been reading what researchers and not-researchers are saying about Omicron. The only thing everyone agrees is certain about Omicron is that it really is much more transmissible than earlier versions of the covid virus. Beyond that, we’re still in speculation mode. Preliminary data from around the world suggest that Omicron is less deadly than earlier versions, but the data collection people warn us that there are other factors impacting the data. What is true of one population group might not be true of another one.

This may be why CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky refused to be pressured into calling Omicron “mild” in a Fox News interview. “Mild” suggests it’s no worse than a head cold. But deaths from Omicron are being recorded around the world. There may be a lower rate of deaths than from earlier variants — so far — but the thing can still kill you. This is no time for complacency.

We keep hearing that vaccinated and boosted people are getting infected. But this is not a reason to panic. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic writes,

The easy question is whether a typical vaccinated (or recently infected) adult faces the same individual risk of severe disease from Omicron that she faced from the original coronavirus in March 2020. The answer is, almost certainly, no. The U.S. has banked a lot of immunity through infection and vaccinations, and the Omicron variant doesn’t seem to evade all of that built-up protection. In the past month, we’ve learned that Omicron excels at breaking through the first layer of immunity, which is our neutralizing antibodies. But our next layer of protection, our T-cell response, seems to hold up much better against the variant. If you think of the vaccines as a castle-defense system, Omicron is like an invading army that can scale walls (i.e., bypass neutralizing-antibody protection) but not fight the knights within them (i.e., overcome T-cell protection). Boosted Americans are particularly well equipped against the Omicron variant, because the third shot increases the number and quality of our neutralizing antibodies, which effectively builds up our immunity wall.

I like the castle analogy. Our T-cells are the guys up on the turrets dropping big rocks.

Thompson goes on to say that preliminary data point to a lower rate of severe infection among the unvaccinated as well, maybe. Data collected by the Imperial College of London showed Omicron is as dangerous as Delta, but this was based on a small sample.

Thompson writes that the best way to think about severity is to imagine four concentric circles. In the inner circle are younger, healthy people who have been vaccinated and boosted. They are probably safe from severe illness from Omicron, even if they catch it.

The next group out contains people under age 65 who are vaccinated and boosted, but who have some health issues that make them immunocompromised. They need to be more careful.

Those of us over 65 who have been vaccinated and even boosted are in the third ring out from the center. The older you are, the more vulnerable you are. Don’t take chances.

The unvaccinated are in the outer ring, and in that group some are more at risk than others. There’s a big concern that even if this group has a lower rate of severe illness, they are bound to have a higher rate of infection. It’s likely hospitals will be slammed again this winter.

At this point, we’re all hoping that Omicron is not as deadly as earlier variants, and many headline writers have jumped the gun and declared it to be so. But at the moment it would be wise to procede as if it’s just as bad as the other variants.  Fingers crossed, wear your masks and get your boosters.

What follows is speculation: MSNBC reports that some virologists think the Omicron variant could burn through populations rapidly, causing considerable sickness and death. But then just about everybody will have had covid or the vaccines, meaning everybody’s got some immunity, and finally the pandemic could end.

“As all the public health folks have been saying, it’s going to rip right through the population,” says Dr. David Ho, a world-renowned virologist and Columbia University professor. “Sometimes a rapid-fire could burn through very quickly but then put itself out.”

Nobody expects covid to go away completely, but perhaps it will stop upending lives. Yascha Mounk writes at the Atlantic that whatever happens with Omicron, sooner or later covid will cease to be a social phenomenon. We’ll learn to cope and adapt. Eventually there will be enough immunity in populations that covid will stop being a big deal. However, new variations could still throw that hopeful notion out the window.

And while variants may come and go, we will always have stupid.

A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.

This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.

It’s a wonder our species has made it this far, frankly.

4 thoughts on “What We Know, and Don’t Know, About Omicron

  1. maha,

    Pre-Fux "news," thanks to generations and generations of truly stupid people doing really stupid things – and thus deleting their "stupid" gene out of the human gene pool* – we are much smarter now as a species than we were at… At, say, the time of The Roman Empire.

    Fox, OANN, and NewsSchmucks now cull the remaining morons pretty effectively.

    If you look at those TV "news" outlets in the right light, you'll see that they're skimming off the really stupid people, leaving our society better off in the long run.

    Unfortunately, along with these more deserving idiots, we have had far too much collateral damage – the illnesses and deaths of nice, good, wonderful people, caught in the pandemic's vortex. 

    Wonderful, loving people like my Mom.

    BTW:  I want to add tRUMP to the list of horrible people whose graves I want to "fertilize" with the internal remains of a pre-cemetery visit lunch of chili-cheese hotdogs and fries, a side of jalapeno-poppers, and all washed down with an ice-cold case of good ol' PBR!
    “Target sited. Pants down! LET ‘ER RIP!!!!!”

    *Darwin Award winners, pre-Darwin Award.

    2
  2. The reason we are still deep in Covid a year after the vax was developed generally has to do with the significant minority who refuses to apply critical thinking to the crisis. It's not just trumpsters – the Covid deniers are global, violent, somewhat organized, and backed by their misinformation sources.

    The opposition is strong in places like Italy and Russia. Putin and Trump downplayed the threat of Covid early and that idea took root – it's a liberal conspiracy to discredit the authoritarian leaders. When they had the vax, the citizens refused to fall for a liberal trick. Italy is beyond comprehension after Covid crushed their medical system. 

    I had the misfortune of talking to a conspiracy nut last week – she has a podcast and I'm promoting my book. Complete disconnect from reality – Biden is senile and Trump is coming back. Scary. But she's convinced that "they" are controlling everything and everyone. I can't see any rational reason why she would vote if she is as convinced as she says that nothing we can do will make a difference. 

    Someone who is into the science of manipulating large numbers of people should study this – I'm not sure it would take much propaganda to convince these people that resistance (other than violence) is futile. I haven't seen percentages reported but quite a few of the J6 crowd hadn't bothered to vote in November, but they were willing to riot in January. A bunch of these folks (who knows how many) are enrolled in the New Civil War. If they see not voting brings the day of revolution closer, they will boycott voting AND riot over the election results.

    This is opinion based on isolated incidents and without hard numbers.

  3. I find it hard to understand people attending a conspiracy conference.  Even when your institution pays for the basic expenses of attending a professional conference, one usually has to dig in your own pocket quite a bit to fund such an activity.  Then there are the lost workdays.  One usually returns to a bigger backlog than one left because no elves cover for you when you are gone.  Sure, you get some benefit in keeping up on your profession, but it comes at quite a cost.  

    Here you have a conference that you must fund by yourself which only increases your state of confusion.  It seems more a training session for budding paranoids in search of people who are out to get them.  What they don't understand is that the ones promoting the conference are the ones out to get them.  The few come out ahead exploiting the masses of the gullible.  Yes, the fool and their money are soon parted.  They leave poorer in many ways and too confused to figure out why they should have a more than a case of COVID, like a giant case of buyer's remorse.

     

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