The COVID-19 pandemic

[plam]

The graph is from OWID, so I trust the data, I'm sure there are things which are not directly comparable, but there's clearly countries which have handled this.

https://twitter.com/lisa_iannattone/stat...6660600833

(As an aside, the twitter embedding isn't working anymore?)

The other part of my question was about being open: which countries are open and have controlled omicron. Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, China, and to my chagrin, New Zealand, are definitely not open (even though I have a valid visa to NZ). Japan closed to all but Japanese citizens in the face of Omicron.

I'm not convinced that anything less than a NZ-style border closure (which surely could not work here) would have kept Omicron out. And even that may not end up working longer term in NZ. It's pretty hard to implement a successful Zero COVID strategy.

I think it's clear that you have to close the border if you are trying to contain Omicron with today's tools. NZ experts are saying that it's just a matter of time before it gets out. In fact an MIQ worker tested positive in surveillance testing for Omicron today, having caught it from some cases inside the facility. But they (and especially people working in MIQ) are heavily contact-traced. I hope NZ dodges this bullet again, to give it enough time until the hopefully successful Omicron vaccine, but at least until 5-11 (opens tomorrow) and booster rollout.

Next. If the healthy need to be protected against a small, miniscule minority of unvaccinated people...then something went wrong somewhere along the line.

I wouldn't have worried as much about delta, but I do worry about omicron, because my two doses of vaccine (until January 24) and even three doses of vaccine don't do a great job against infection, even if they protect against hospitalization. And COVID makes some people unhealthy in the long term with long COVID. It's a lottery that I'd rather not enter.

Next. The R-naught of SARS-CoV-2 in Waterloo Region is actually 0.9, so please don't make BS numbers up to fear monger. It hit a high of 1.9 in late December - which is still much lower than any previous spikes - but has continued to fall into an abyss. The University of Waterloo data on wastewater surveillance - which provides very solid data on infections well before PCR or antigen testing does - is already suggesting we've plateaued with this wave so the R-naught should continue to drop even lower and thus so should hospitalizations.

You mean Rt; R0 is the fundamental number in the absence of any measures.

But anyway, the wastewater result says maybe plateaued in Kitchener and Cambridge and still rising in Waterloo, so that's not quite true. I just think that the fact is that there is a lot of COVID circulating in this community.