Everyone has coronavirus fatigue. We have to “redouble our efforts”? People are halving their efforts or not making any effort. I see fewer people masking and am told that in other areas of Florida outside SoFl one never sees a mask. There are no plans so far as I am aware to close the courts again. “Breakthrough infections are common”: There goes the vaccine magic bullet. It feels hopeless to most people it seems. We just have to go on about our lives.
I want to surrender sometimes. I try to surrender. I engage in escapism more but it is decreasingly effective; the entertainment industry offers little relief, it is more the vanguard of the virus’ advance.
It has taken 800,000 American lives, sickened 50,000,000; retarded the economy again and again. Wave after wave, as regular as the sea, and nothing we can do to becalm it.
Even as scientists race to understand more about the Omicron variant and the threat it poses, one fact is abundantly clear: It spreads quickly everywhere it lands.
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…early data from the United States suggest that Americans will not be spared. “No part of the country will be safe from Omicron,” said Shweta Bansal, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University.
…the share of cases caused by Omicron has increased to 2.9 percent from 0.4 percent in just a week, according to projections by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
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…the United States must redouble its fight against the virus, experts said. “I think we need to be prepared for the possibility that this could be at least as bad as any previous wave that we’ve seen,” said Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We need to be thinking about what the plan is if things get bad.”
Omicron is not only highly transmissible but also skilled at evading the immune system’s defenses.
Breakthrough infections are common. This week, Denmark reported that three-quarters of its Omicron cases occurred in people who had received two vaccine doses. And a recent outbreak at Cornell University, where 97 percent of the population has reportedly been vaccinated, may have been driven by Omicron.
“There is no question that we’re seeing some level of immune escape and re-infection,” Dr. Lessler said. “Which means that the pool of people available to be infected with this virus is larger than it was before.”
Current levels of vaccination are unlikely to stop the variant, experts said. In Denmark, where Omicron is spreading rapidly, 77 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, having received a two-dose vaccine or one-dose regimen, depending on the vaccine. That suggests that the United States, where 61 percent of people have completed their primary vaccine series, should brace itself for a similar wave of cases.
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The question is how much the rapid spread of Omicron will contribute to hospitalizations and deaths.
