Attaboy, Owen. Keep that fear cheerleading up. You're doing great. Bet you get a bonus.
The celebrations are not only way too early, they are bizarre.
South Africa had 181 deaths today. That’s about 15X their typical pre Omicron totals. And it’s summer there. Pre Omicron they were logging fewer dead counts with much cooler weather. SA doesn’t get so hot they are driven into AC. Pretty hard to conclude anything other than Omicron is NOT more mild.
US death counts are vicious. These 1000+ dead days are heading into month 5. Do you realize what the Excess Death curve is going to look like with 5 solid months of this? And no real sign of it stopping.
Every Wall Street prediction of peak is based on nothing other than some other country with different season/weather, or the shape of last winter, which was a different virus.
No one knows anything other than a huge number of people are getting killed by the virus every day. That is ALL anyone knows. Anything else is pretense. Whistling in the graveyard.
Attaboy, Owen. Keep that fear cheerleading up. You're doing great. Bet you get a bonus.
A better comparison would be SA’s Delta wave with their Omicron wave, rather than comparison “between waves”. But with SA, for many reasons, comparison is difficult anyway.
France is in some ways a better comparison. But, they are not much ahead of us. In any event, their Omicron fatalities are not particularly encouraging. However, I’m more concerned about ours, in 2 more weeks and thereafter (very slow falloff?) The area under our curve is what counts, and despite what a lot of very cold (or misled) people on FR say, it is still a lot of carnage.
On the economic front, Omicron seems to be generating a lot of cases sufficient to send people to ER’s, then home feeling “awful” for a week. That alone is a big hit to our economy, and therefor everyone’s wellbeing. Of course our Gov’t exacerbates the situation.