Omicron Covid cases are dropping nearly as fast as they had risen

[gristy]

So that's really good news. LA does trail NYC, as it has for previous surges.

7-day avg for NYC is at 13% of its peak: https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+cases+new+york+city
7-day avg for LA is at 50% of its peak: https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+cases+los+angeles+county

Will this be the last serious peak? Time will tell...

[dweller]

1. Pretty much

as Fauci predicted … 🤔


✌🏻

[L. Coyote]

2. Depends on where you are. We are at 800% higher than before the holidays, with deaths increasing.

Link to tweet

[Celerity]

3. Wonder how this thread will play out, as you have one group here who ridicules any remotely bad news

as being the product of doomers and clout chasers, and then another group who ridicule and insinuate that some posters who put up good news are aiding the RW and the antivaxxers (saw a person today flat out ask a long time poster, who has always been a good faith DUer as far as I have seen, if they are an antivaxxer, all over an extremely innocuous comment).

[SickOfTheOnePct]

4. Wish I could rec this post n/t

[teach1st]

5. Thank you

I was thinking the same thing.

[Shanti Shanti Shanti]

6. I follow my local county health dept reports, cases are down again last week, trending down fast

Good news but we been on this roller coaster ride before

[Dorian Gray]

7. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic

In NYC here. Went to a restaurant again last week for first time since November/Omicron Surge. I am making plans to bring my daughter to a Broadway show. Wasn't doing that a month ago.

But having said that, we know Covid keeps throwing curveballs at us. Omicron right after she was vaccinated really hurt deeply.

But the reality is that she is fully vaccinated and we are boosted, so I am feeling like we did the work to protect ourselves. And now that positivity rates have dropped from 23%-3-4%, I'm feeling much better about doing the things we were so looking forward to once she was vaccinated.

According to the NY Times, there were 1998 cases recorded in NYC yesterday. The last time we were that low was Dec. 1st. We are definitely moving in the right direction (for now) and I'm hopeful that we will get past this.

[L. Coyote]

8. Bigger picture.

https://www.ft.com/content/03aa46e2-ac3a-4c16-82be-431ea4c43e58

[crickets]

9. Interesting article.

Non paywall link: https://archive.ph/94Xop

[Pinback]

12. "The truth is that an 80-year-old that's vaccinated and boosted and gets Covid

most of the time has nothing more than a cold."

And...

According to data published on Friday by the French directorate of research, studies, evaluation and statistics, an unvaccinated 70-year-old who tests positive for Omicron is still about twice as likely to end up in an intensive care unit as an unvaccinated 40-year-old with Delta.

However, the risk is cut in half from 1.9 per cent to 0.9 per cent if they have received two vaccine doses. A booster dose takes their risk down three-fold again to just 0.3 per cent, one-third of the risk of the unvaccinated 40-year-old with Delta.

Amazing. Thanks for the link.

[L. Coyote]

10. Sudden rise of more transmissible form of Omicron catches scientists by surprise

https://www.science.org/content/article/sudden-rise-more-transmissible-form-omicron-catches-scientists-surprise

On 7 December 2021, as the Omicron variant of the pandemic coronavirus began to pummel the world, scientists officially identified a related strain. BA.2 differed by about 40 mutations from the original Omicron lineage, BA.1, but it was causing so few cases of ­COVID-19 that it seemed a sideshow to its rampaging counterpart.

“I was thinking: ‘BA.1 has the upper hand. We’ll never hear again from BA.2,’” recalls Mark Zeller, a genomic epidemiologist at the Scripps Research Institute. Eight weeks later, he says, “Clearly that’s not the case. … I’m pretty sure [BA.2] is going to be everywhere in the world, that it’s going to sweep and will be the dominant variant soon in most countries if not all.”

Zeller and other scientists are now trying to make sense of why BA.2 is exploding and what its emergence means for the Omicron surge and the pandemic overall. Already a U.K. report issued last week and a large household study from Denmark posted this week as a preprint make it clear BA.2 is inherently more transmissible than BA.1, leaving scientists to wonder which of its distinct mutations confer an advantage.

.....................

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[live love laugh]

11. As soon as it subsides pretty sure a new boogeyman

will replace it with the help of the RW media.