Welcome to the New Boss

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This is getting RIDICULOUS!

OWN VOICE. ~ InPerspective by Gregg Dieguez —

What was that song by The Who? “Welcome to the new Boss, same as the old Boss”?[1] COVID cases have septupled in the U.S. in the past month (that’s seven-fold), and it’s not a statistical trick. This is based on the 7-day rolling average, which actually understates the true number of infections because the U.S. has (still, almost 2 years later) inadequate testing to detect them all.  What does this mean for You, and all of Us?

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Current Status:
compare S. Korea and our situation – canary in coal mine? SK much more vaccinated, but…
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/covid-19-vaccination-tracker/
I know I had “fun” searching desperately online and driving to local pharmacies all around in hopes of finding an at-home COVID test kit (or several). We wanted to gather in a couple of small groups, and ended up eating in a garage with the door open and in another small well-tested gathering. It remains a tragedy, and I don’t mean to exaggerate, but with over a million dead from COVID and diseases that couldn’t be treated because of COVID, we still don’t have enough tests to keep ourselves safe. And the President’s Press Secretary thinks sending a COVID test kit to every family in America is a crazy impossibility – meanwhile they send 7 kits, free, upon request to anyone who asks in the UK. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to not do Public Health – both our government (which wouldn’t admit the severity of the Pandemic, wouldn’t use the test kits from the WHO (German, actually), and 22 months later still doesn’t have enough test kits to allow people to keep themselves safe) – and our Public, which continues to doubt the severity of the virus, and won’t get vaccinated and stay masked. We have forgotten some key parts of our own Constitution:
…provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…
We aren’t defending ourselves and we can’t enjoy our Liberty together when we can catch a deadly virus.  Some have stated that Omicron is much less deadly. And I sure hope it is, but that won’t help, and here’s why:

” Suppose we have two viruses, one that is twice as transmissible as the other. (For the record, Omicron is currently three to five times as transmissible as Delta in the U.K.—though that number is likely to fall over time.) And suppose it takes five days between a person’s getting infected and their infecting others. After 30 days, the more transmissible virus is now causing 26, or 64, times as many new cases as the less transmissible one. … If we are banking on the idea that Omicron is more mild to get us through winter, then we had better hope that it’s really, really mild. “[2]

So, while we await real data on Omicron infectiousness and fatality, a little sensitivity analysis tells us that if Omicron is about 100 times LESS lethal than Delta, we’ll still have the same death rate as Delta – at least until it runs its course. It’s likely most of those deaths will be among the unvaccinated, but some will be people who are older and immunocompromised and whose vaccination won’t trigger a robust enough immune system response from their memory B and T cells. Whatever the death rate turns out to be, remember that it was NEEDLESS. We could have avoided those deaths and the lingering damage to our economy, our health care workers and system, and our longer term (Long COVID) health outcomes. Other countries largely defeated this virus by simple public health measures (testing, tracing, quarantine, masking) BEFORE there were even vaccines.

[insert updated table on avoidable deaths]

We could have avoided 45 to 90% of our deaths, if we had the same sense of Interdependent Self and Collective Responsibility that those other countries did. But we don’t, and the former world leader in Pandemic Response stands shamed before the world because while we have the Technology, we lack the Judgement and Willpower to use it in our own defense.

sotrovimab (made by GSK/Vir Bio) is the only EUA’ed mAb that is known to work against Omicron, and in very limited supply.

masks are now better, and needed.

Good News:

the right masks

vaccine boosters

only 5 day quarantine

lower hospitalization, and likely death rates

Who Are We, and Who are we going to be?

No Lockdowns: The Terrifying Polio Pandemic of 1949-52

Whatever our choices, and our fate…
At any rate, we’ll be in good company…

FOOTNOTES:


[1] “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – The Who

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/who/wontgetfooledagain.html


[2] We Know Enough About Omicron to Know That We’re in Trouble

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/covid-cases-omicron-highly-contagious/621038/

FDA analysis of test kits affected by Omicron?:

Alexander Tin, “Why antigen tests may still work well for Omicron, despite “reduced sensitivity” in lab studies.” CBS News, 30 Dec 2021.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-rapid-home-antigen-tests-detect-omicron-variant/?intcid=CNI-00-10aaa3a

NIH scientists caution that their lab finding is not evidence of a significant drop in the real-world performance of popular at-home tests, even in the “worst case scenario.” The FDA is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) RADx program to study the performance of antigen tests with patient samples that have the omicron variant. . .  Early data suggests that antigen tests do detect the omicron variant but may have reduced sensitivity (meaning, more false negative test results).

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/sars-cov-2-viral-mutations-impact-covid-19-tests#omicron-reduced

Headed to 1 million cases a day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/30/omicron-variant-challenges-covid/

 

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More From Gregg Dieguez ~ InPerspective

Mr. Dieguez is a native San Franciscan, longtime San Mateo County resident, and semi-retired entrepreneur who causes occasional controversy on the Coastside. He is a member of the MCC, but his opinions here are his own, and not those of the Council. In 2003 he co-founded MIT’s Clean Tech Program here in NorCal, which became MIT’s largest alumni speaker program. He lives in Montara. He loves a productive dialog in search of shared understanding.

Gregg
Author: Gregg