Welcome to the New Boss

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?

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:

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]

the CDC says it's not omicron unless it comes from the Omicrônne region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling covid

— mike cella (@mikeVcella) December 28, 2021

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.

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/

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