Poll of the Day > Omicron is now most common coronavirus variant in U.S.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-ap-news-alert-4fbe85498c52edeef247e31d7c004958

NEW YORK (AP) Omicron is now most common coronavirus variant in U.S., accounting for nearly three-quarters of COVID-19 cases, CDC says.

Shortest news post ever.

Judgmenl posted...

Omicron is now most common coronavirus variant in U.S.

It's almost as if a vaccination-resistant strain is going to have a natural evolutionary advantage spreading over variants that are mostly resisted by said vaccination.

It's shocking how far and fast it spread while already in restricted travel due to delta

it's like people WANT it to last forever

Lokarin posted...

It's shocking how far and fast it spread while already in restricted travel due to delta

it's like people WANT it to last forever

It's kind of like what Syndrome said in the Incredibles. If everyone has covid, then nobody has covid.

Lokarin posted...

It's shocking how far and fast it spread while already in restricted travel due to delta

it's like people WANT it to last forever

It doesn't help that people have really latched on to the "it seems to be a milder illness" thing and are therefore resistant to doing anything more to limit its spread, especially going into the holidays. Never mind that data's still pretty limited on that and even the most optimistic results are only suggesting a ~29% reduction in hospitalization rates, which can easily be drowned out by increased infection rates. The folks that have been banging the "viruses tend to mutate to be less deadly!" drum since the whole thing began have been quite happy to jump to conclusions based on those preliminary impressions, because confirmation bias.

adjl posted...

It doesn't help that people have really latched on to the "it seems to be a milder illness" thing and are therefore resistant to doing anything more to limit its spread, especially going into the holidays. Never mind that data's still pretty limited on that and even the most optimistic results are only suggesting a ~29% reduction in hospitalization rates, which can easily be drowned out by increased infection rates. The folks that have been banging the "viruses tend to mutate to be less deadly!" drum since the whole thing began have been quite happy to jump to conclusions based on those preliminary impressions, because confirmation bias.

its also the fact that we literally can't stop it now.

Lokarin posted...

It's shocking how far and fast it spread while already in restricted travel due to delta

it's like people WANT it to last forever

MUH FrEeDoM!

Do people really still think we have an agreement with some entity that'll make a virus just disappear if we lockdown for an arbitrary amount of time?

Fam_Fam posted...

its also the fact that we literally can't stop it now.

A lot more could have been done to slow it down, and still could, but that's not going to happen so long as the prevailing attitude is "why bother?"

Veedrock- posted...

Do people really still think we have an agreement with some entity that'll make a virus just disappear if we lockdown for an arbitrary amount of time?

I don't think anyone's presented it as a matter of the virus disappearing after an arbitrary lockdown period (aside from the extreme fantasy scenario of the entire world locking down completely for 3-4 weeks so existing cases can't spread and the virus dies out, but that's neither arbitrary nor a remotely feasible idea). It's a matter of slowing things down until other solutions are developed and implemented that can reduce the risks associated with returning to normal. These include mask mandates, plexiglass barriers, and vaccinations. Unfortunately, when a significant number of people are outright refusing to participate in those solutions and/or other precautions are lifted before case numbers reach a level where those precautions can manage them, it becomes necessary to lock things down to get case numbers back under control. Otherwise, case numbers remain out of control and you get problems like ICU's being unable to accept new patients.

Well unfortunately, we still have people who aren't taking this virus seriously and as a result people are walking around without masks thinking it's OK and it's not.

As we have seen this week, some sporting events have been cancelled and they're debating if they should go to back to playing games without fans in the stands so we all need take this thing seriously.

Friendly reminder that omicron was brought over to the US by a fully vaccinated individual(s). Maybe instead of forcing vaccinations on millions of individuals when obviously they didnt stop this latest variants, we stop the few people from traveling to foreign countries.

MartianManchild posted...

Friendly reminder that omicron was brought over to the US by a fully vaccinated individual(s). Maybe instead of forcing vaccinations on millions of individuals when obviously they didnt stop this latest variants, we stop the few people from traveling to foreign countries.

Even at its strictest, locking down travel isn't a guarantee of safety. The world needs a certain degree of international travel to function, so there's always going to be some risk involved. The regions that have successfully kept Covid under control have generally done so by being very strict about how people come in and requiring incoming travellers to isolate for two weeks, but that's more than most Americans are willing to accept regardless of their views on vaccines, so I can't see that working.

Moreover, while vaccination wouldn't have been perfect protection against Omicron arriving on US soil, a higher vaccination rate would nonetheless reduce its spread and severity (as well as doing the same for the variants already running rampant). I don't know why you people insist on treating vaccination as an all-or-nothing solution, but that's not how it works at all.

adjl posted...

I don't know why you people insist on treating vaccination as an all-or-nothing solution, but that's not how it works at all.

you even listening to yourself? you vaxxers are the ones treating vax as the all-or-nothing solution that will solve the pandemic. that 100% vax rate will eliminate the virus. that denying nonvax their freedoms and rights to public areas will solve the pandemic. well the nonvax hasn't been able to leave their houses, while the vax are going around spreading the virus. so is the pandemic over?

yet at the same time, not only not take blame and shame when new variant is brought back from overseas via a vax carrier. instead put the entire blame on the nonvax who has done nothing wrong in this case.

adjl posted...

It doesn't help that people have really latched on to the "it seems to be a milder illness" thing and are therefore resistant to doing anything more to limit its spread, especially going into the holidays.

What are you talking about? We got a new lockdown here...

Amuseum posted...

you even listening to yourself? you vaxxers are the ones treating vax as the all-or-nothing solution that will solve the pandemic. that 100% vax rate will eliminate the virus. that denying nonvax their freedoms and rights to public areas will solve the pandemic. well the nonvax hasn't been able to leave their houses, while the vax are going around spreading the virus. so is the pandemic over?

yet at the same time, not only not take blame and shame when new variant is brought back from overseas via a vax carrier. instead put the entire blame on the nonvax who has done nothing wrong in this case.

You are aware that vaccinated or not, everybody is expected to mask up, right? The vaccination deals with the strains we knew about at the time, and the mask helps reduce further strains as we develop the vaccine to cover new strains until it dies out and can't mutate.

Unlike masks, travel is necessary to keep the global economy running, we all need food and water and electricity, there is no right to not have cotton near your face.

Amuseum posted...

you vaxxers are the ones treating vax as the all-or-nothing solution that will solve the pandemic. that 100% vax rate will eliminate the virus.

Herd immunity will eliminate the virus, or at least squash it to the point of no longer being epidemic (this is the definition of herd immunity). Whether or not the available vaccines are capable of reaching the herd immunity threshold without additional measures remains to be seen, particularly with vaccine-resistant variants thrown into the mix, but it remains true that higher vaccination rates than what the US can currently claim will be needed to get the virus under control. Depending on how well boosters are able to improve the situation, new vaccines may need to be rolled out to deal with omicron, but we'll see how the data pans out as more people get boosters.

Nobody (that knows what they're talking about) is saying that 100% vaccination will make the whole thing disappear. That would likely have been the case before delta, but delta reduced the vaccines' efficacy by enough of a margin that further efforts to reduce the herd immunity threshold would likely still be needed. What people are saying is that vaccines are a critical part of the fight against Covid and that higher vaccination rates are going to be needed to wrangle it (and, in turn, that anti-vaxxers efforts to keep rates low are interfering with that). Omicron hasn't changed that, it's just making other measures (likely including boosters, for those that finished their first pair of shots a while ago and have been waiting for the rest of the country to get with the program) more necessary.

Amuseum posted...

well the nonvax hasn't been able to leave their houses, while the vax are going around spreading the virus.

I'm not sure what land of fantasy victimhood you live in, but that's not actually the case in the vast majority of the US. The US' vaccine mandates have, by and large, been pretty toothless and inconsistently enforced in the areas where they've actually been put in place, and even that's a pretty small minority of regions. The unvaccinated still make up a disproportionate number of the country's cases, which becomes even more exaggerated when you look at hospitalizations, and more still for deaths. Nobody's actually banned from leaving their house; the worst "violation of their rights" they'll suffer is being turned away from a restaurant or two.

Amuseum posted...

yet at the same time, not only not take blame and shame when new variant is brought back from overseas via a vax carrier. instead put the entire blame on the nonvax who has done nothing wrong in this case.

Tell you what: You find me (credible) data that indicates that the unvaccinated make up less than 40% of the US' Covid cases, and maybe I'll humour your efforts to claim that the vaccinated are to blame for its spread. Bonus points if you can also find that data specifically for omicron, but the point loses a lot of its weight when you consider that omicron is known to be vaccine-resistant (which we can mostly blame on the unvaccinated population for keeping case numbers high and providing the opportunity for variants to arise) and is therefore expected to spread among vaccinated populations.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

What are you talking about? We got a new lockdown here...

The Netherlands are generally being more sensible about these things than the US. Large swaths of the US are doing nothing different, with some even welcoming omicron under the belief that it will out-compete deadlier variants.

Fam_Fam posted...

its also the fact that we literally can't stop it now.

You couldn't stop it in December 2019, why do you think we'd be able to stop it now?

MartianManchild posted...

Friendly reminder that omicron was brought over to the US by a fully vaccinated individual(s). Maybe instead of forcing vaccinations on millions of individuals when obviously they didnt stop this latest variants, we stop the few people from traveling to foreign countries.

Sounds like a potential sequel to 1984.

adjl posted...

The Netherlands are generally being more sensible about these things than the US. Large swaths of the US are doing nothing different, with some even welcoming omicron under the belief that it will out-compete deadlier variants.

Yes, between the "Wappies" (Dutch word that gained a new modern meaning during the pandemic) and the rich countries just neglecting their promises to the third world concerning vaccines, the current international situation is certainly a lot worse than it could and should have been.

Someone I hung out with tested positive, rip timing

Judgmenl posted...

You couldn't stop it in December 2019, why do you think we'd be able to stop it now?

Sounds like a potential sequel to 1984.

a.) who is the "you", and who is the "we" you are differentiating between?
b.) who said i thought we could stop it in December 2019?

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Yes, between the "Wappies" (Dutch word that gained a new modern meaning during the pandemic) and the rich countries just neglecting their promises to the third world concerning vaccines, the current international situation is certainly a lot worse than it could and should have been.

Eeyup. Things had been relatively good around here, but then one of our university sports teams came back from another university where a sizable outbreak was happening and failed to isolate, some members of which attended a large convocation ceremony that was held in violation of public health guidelines and turned into a super-spreader event. We've had more cases in the past week than we have in the entire rest of the pandemic combined, and the province as a whole has gone from being internationally recognized as one of the best responses overall to having the highest per capita case rate in the country.

DrPrimemaster posted...

Someone I hung out with tested positive, rip timing

One of my coworkers tested positive a week after I'd gone out for drinks with her and some other people from my team. The bar in question was identified as an exposure site, so I'd already been tested and found negative before her result came in (she figures it came from her daughter), but it's still kind of alarming how close I came.

Fam_Fam posted...

a.) who is the "you", and who is the "we" you are differentiating between?
b.) who said i thought we could stop it in December 2019?

The cool thing about the internet is that I don't need to answer your questions.

Judgmenl posted...

You couldn't stop it in December 2019, why do you think we'd be able to stop it now?

Didn't*, not couldn't. Every country had the potential to operate an absolute lockdown and kill off the virus, but everybody weighed their options and decided that would be too extreme when the severity was uncertain. Even now we could, but choose not to due to the large casualties to deal with mexican beer

Judgmenl posted...

The cool thing about the internet is that I don't need to answer your questions.

the other cool thing is being able to contribute nothing meaningful to a conversation. have a nice day.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Didn't*, not couldn't. Every country had the potential to operate an absolute lockdown and kill off the virus, but everybody weighed their options and decided that would be too extreme when the severity was uncertain. Even now we could, but choose not to due to the large casualties to deal with mexican beer

Yes, everybody just doing their own thing might have worsened things a bit.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Every country had the potential to operate an absolute lockdown and kill off the virus

Eh, no they didn't. The notion of the entire world shutting down for 3-4 weeks to let the virus die out is a nice fantasy that sounds really simple and effective on paper, but there's really no way to actually translate that into the real world. If nothing else, the extent to which so many people have resisted and outright defied such simple restrictions as "wear a mask" tells us we'd never actually get everyone cooperating in a real lockdown, so that would either create a need for enforcement (expensive, ethically questionable, and results in exposures that would probably end up nullifying the whole exercise anyway) or just break the whole thing because of a few non-compliant douchebags wandering around freely.

Even if we assume that everyone would cooperate, the logistics of pulling it off would be absolutely insane. Right off the bat, you've got the challenge of getting a month's worth of beans and rice to everyone's door. Utilities would need to continue operating (at least power and water, and Internet/cell service would also need to be maintained at least well enough to communicate new directions to everyone), so those workers would still have to be out and about. Some utilities would be able to function by having their crews live on site for that period, effectively isolating them, but then there's the risk of an outbreak within one of those crews crippling the local infrastructure. Farms and ranches would need to continue to operate, since you can't just stop tending crops/livestock for a month and expect everything to be fine when you come back. Household repairs could possibly be ignored if we're okay letting a few unlucky people die to E. coli after their sewers stop working, but that's a hard sell.

The biggest mistake pretty much everyone has made is relaxing whatever restrictions they have had in place before case numbers actually got low enough for that to be a good idea. A lot of that comes from political pressure, which has been a major problem through this whole ordeal.