The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

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.
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Fair point, I'm not certain what measures are in use, but it is pretty clear that it is possible to deal with it.

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.

I similarly don't want to be involved with this, and it should not be up to others whether I am forced into it.

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.

Yes, this is on point, I may not have been specific, but the basic reproduction number of Omicron is very high much higher than any other variant, and COVID has always been much higher than the flu.

It isn't fear mongering and it isn't BS, but quoting the Waterloo number when even the provincial numbers are much higher IS cherry picking data.

It is also absolutely the case that we do not know what the Rt value is today. I watched the testing centre, it was empty, literally empty for hours at a time. We are not measuring Rt in a meaningful way right now, lets not pretend otherwise.

As for wastewater, that too, isn't a clear signal, again, we have never measured levels even remotely this high so we don't understand the limits of measurement. Further, if you're looking at the graphs, they switched them to a log scale a few days ago, makes it harder to see a plateau.