The Omicron Question.

A pandemic of the unboosted.

1. Tomas Pueyo: “If you haven’t had Covid before, you’re going to get it. You can only escape it while you lock yourself out. The moment you come back into society, you will get exposed to it. Paradoxically, this can be good. This is the final battle for Covid. It’s throwing everything it has at us and will overwhelm the world. But in doing so, it might have weakened itself. And it’s attacking at a moment when the world is well-armed with vaccines and prior infections. In this final battle, many people will die. But they might be few in comparison to what it could have been. This all hangs on one data point, the Omicron Question. Only when we get that will we be able to tell if Omicron is good or bad. I’m hopeful based on anecdotal evidence and community prediction, but we just don’t know.” Read the rest. (via unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)

2. The Omicron Covid variant has been found to multiply about 70 times quicker than the original and Delta versions of coronavirus in tissue samples taken from the bronchus, the main tubes from the windpipe to the lungs, in laboratory experiments that could help explain its rapid transmission. The study, by a team from the University of Hong Kong, also found that the new variant grew 10 times slower in lung tissue, which the authors said could be an indicator of lower disease severity. (via theguardian.com)