It's a goddamn shit show. Haven't met any colleagues for 1,5 years and now it seems 2 weeks safari in Africa this summer is down the drain too:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59427770
This new SA variant may be a whole new level of contagious. I don't think the shit show is going to end anytime soon.
At present Omicron seems to be no more dangerous than the Delta variant, definitely more contagious, but all cases here in South Africa are 'mild' cases.
For now life is continuing as normal here in Cape Town.
The next few weeks will tell a lot. I'm hoping it ends up being less deadly than Delta; with so many mutations in Omicron it's possible. I read somewhere that sometimes viruses mutate to be less harmful as they adapt to be more contagious.
The old hypothesis going back at least to William McNeil's Plagues and People (1976) is that a lot of modern mild diseases were once deadly pathogens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_and_Peoples
From the perspective of a virus, there is no evolutionary advantage to killing the host if your goal as a virus is to reproduce and mutate (from an evolutionary perspective, that is the goal of every species). So one strategy is to become less deadly and more contagious.
There are obviously exceptions. One reason for exceptions can be that a virus has a vast non-human reservoir in that reservoir it is non-lethal, but becomes lethal when it spills into humans. Since the human host accounts for a small portion of the virus, there is not a huge evolutionary advantage to becoming non-lethal and there is a pressure to stay lethal, because those viruses that jump to humans do not evolve to lower lethality.
McNeil noted that certain deadly diseases seemed to disappear at the same time that other less-deadly diseases appear and hypothesized that some of the ancient diseases that seem to no longer plague us, actually still do, but in forms that give us a mild fever, a cold, or something like that, rather than killing us outright.
Anyway, I don't know how well that has all held up.
Early news from Drs in JHB:
Quote
- There are early signs the Omicron variant does not cause more severe illness than the Delta variant.
- However, experts have cautioned that the variant has only recently been discovered - and data will tell whether this is the case.
- NICD officials and GPs in Gauteng have noticed that vaccinated patients tend to fare better than the unvaccinated.
https://www.news24.com/health24/medical/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/more-reports-that-omicron-appears-to-cause-mild-covid-but-too-early-to-say-for-sure-experts-warn-20211130-2
QuoteThe new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, was present in the Netherlands earlier than previously thought, officials say. It was identified in two test samples taken in the country between 19 and 23 November, which is before the variant was first reported by South Africa.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59473131
Greece Imposes $114 Monthly Fine on Unvaccinated People Over 60 - BNN Bloomberg
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/greece-imposes-114-monthly-fine-on-unvaccinated-people-over-60-1.1688903
Via Google translation from Israel: (https://www.mako.co.il/news-lifestyle/2021_q4/Article-0e660b77fe17d71027.htm)
Vaccine + boostered about 90% effective (95% for Delta)
Omicron = 1.3 x as infections as Delta
Unvaccinated are 2.4 times more likely to have serious illness compared to Delta
If this holds true we're going to have a whole lot more sick people soon.