[ Editor’s Note: This is good news in some respects, with the quick peaking and a greatly reduced death rate. My worry would be looking into the future, for instance, what could happen if Omicron’s lethality increases greatly, on top of its proven lightning infection rate?
By the time the scientists had come up with a new vaccination, the world population would have been reduced way beyond what we have seen so far.
New York City seemed to be happy with this South African news, as it is going ahead with the Times Square traditional New Year’s festivities, even though it has one of the toughest business vaccine mandates in the country.
The greybeards are telling us that the next six weeks or so of Omicron will tell us what we could be looking at for the rest of the new year. One big thing we learned in this infection round is that testing was of limited use in terms of control, as it was spreading so quickly.
However, we have the trailing indicator that health systems around the planet are burned out, especially having to deal with knucklehead unvaxed people, some of whom have been beating up on hospital staff, a lower-class traitor attempting to show you are in charge of the situation.
I will close with a comment on our parallel political virus front, where the living target has been our democracy. Finally the term, Trump Terrorists is emerging, not a joke or hype, but simply how the Trumper effort has so smoothly woven violence into its platform.
The term was put out to get a feel for whether or not the general public can grasp it. Part of its emergence is the dearth of arrests on the wave of death threats against election people and Congress.
Local law enforcement seems to be viewing that situation as a federal responsibility, or maybe it is evidence of Trumpers already having infiltrated law enforcement to the degree needed to stop their terror commandos from being rounded up. Thus ends my cheery missive for today… Jim W. Dean ]
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First published December 30, 2021
NY Times: The South African government said Thursday that data from its health department suggested that the country had passed its Omicron peak without a major spike in deaths, offering cautious hope to other countries grappling with the variant.
“The speed with which the Omicron-driven fourth wave rose, peaked and then declined has been staggering,” said Fareed Abdullah of the South African Medical Research Council.
… “A Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two. This Omicron wave is over in the city of Tshwane. It was a flash flood more than a wave.” The rise in deaths over the period was small.
…“We’ll be in for a tough January, as cases will keep going up and peak, and then fall fast,” said Ali Mokdad, a University of Washington epidemiologist who is a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist. While cases will still overwhelm hospitals, he said, he expects that the proportion of hospitalized cases will be lower than in earlier waves.
…In South Africa, overall case counts have been falling for two weeks, plummeting 30 percent in the last week to an average of less than 11,500 a day.
You can read the full New Tork Times article here.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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Jim (Merry Christmas and happy new year).. please explain this to Gordon and Carol.
Hi Jim
Sorry, I apologize to being jerk with a “wikipedia investigation”
but dont believe the omnicron “dont worry about it too much” news-spin going around,
My brother was sick all week and today tested positive for covid. (he is vaccinated too)
He got it from his stupid church service Christmas morning and could easiiy of infected whole family at our Christmas party that afternoon.
My brothers developed an attitude I argue with them about that maybe everyone should just get it and “get it over with” and “everyone is going to get it anyways” and so looks like thats what they got.
I dont see where once you get it no worries getting it again, like a flu strain.
Its not the flu and its not “natural” either….One of their mental-problems besides not figuring out its a US military bioweapon Trump dumped into Iran and is mutating rapidly (try to convince them of that eh) is believing news stories that omnicron is not such a big deal because as evidence “it didnt cause spike in deaths in South Africa” for example. Happy New Year!
So lets hope so;
BUT – Its from theNYT so that is red flag right there, always something nefarious coming out of them.
And a correction – its not really the actual South African government that says this rosy picture,
but the “South African Medical Research Council” which is “under control” of an entity that makes products and stuff to stop diseases like malaria (sort of) and has offices in the UK and Wash DC….”Innovative Vector Control Consortium” These guys funded by Bill and Mindy.
President of SAMRC is Glenda Gray, who opposed lockdowns in SA after the first ones two years ago, calls it “thumb sucking” She is famous HIV researcher, has had lots of controversy and the SA government seems to dislike her quite a bit – sorry! I read the wikipedia page on her. not that you can trust wikipedia so much either.
I would guess the SAMRC is saying just what the elites and such want it to say and they say it.
They dont want worldwide panic that world is going to end soon for humanity if omnicron mutates into something more deadly and more contagious than what Trump dumped into Iran which mutated into Delta now Omnicron.
Whats next we dont know.
Get over the news platform bias. There is no bias when they are just reporting press releases from South Africa. Plus, all of these Covid reports are a continual work in progress with new data flowing in all the time and being analyzed, and ABC scientific process that has been followed for generations, especially in health care. And it comes as no surprise there are situations where ‘experts’ disagree, something that also is not uncommon. So dumping the spin claims on the media is a stretch. We post third party material all the time and sometimes get the ‘spin’ silliness claims from bored people mainly who are online to get their ‘gotcha’ buzzes every day. These are the people, usually anonymous, who are critics of all the world’s public health departments, who like playiny Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Happy New Years Eve where we survived another year of Trumpism.
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