Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

The Country Joe and the Fish line occurred to me. No panic.

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

Surprised that so many mispronounce the word omicron. TV news, the President and others. ohm a chron , not ah me chron

David Martin Loc: Cary, NC

Reference, please.

EdJ0307 Loc: out west someplace

I'm surprised so many use "your" when they mean "you're". If were, I mean we're, going down this road, their, I mean there, are many other examples.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Your thoughts are how conspiracy theories arise. If you start from the position that they’re not telling us everything, you’ll never be satisfied with any answer.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

👍👍👍

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Oooo, those "others" are so scary.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Oooo, the conspiracies bubble to the surface, bubble, bubble, toil and trouble …

traderjohn Loc: New York City

When you consider the cost of taking care of the "others" you should be scared.

diny

not

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

The Others was s good movie!

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Yeh, they’re really expensive. It’s a shame how much we have to pay them to pick our crops and attend our universities to become our doctors and scientists. What a damn shame. If we didn’t have to spend all our money on them we’d be the richest nation on Earth. Oh wait …

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Symptoms: headache, body ache, tiredness, scratchy throat, dry cough.

The California patient is said to be doing well and quarantined at home (from local reports here in the SF Bay Area).

S. African doctors who have been treating it for a few weeks now have said it's often a mild illness that passes fairly quickly in the vaccinated, and that the bulk of the cases they've seen so far have been in men around 40 years of age or younger. Most of the hospitalizations have been unvaccinated. (S. Africa is much better vaccinated than many other African countries, but still is not as thoroughly vaccinated as Europe or even the US.)

The biggest concern is that it's extremely transmissible. Initial growth of cases in S. Africa has been exponential... doubling daily.

S. Africa is not necessarily the point of origin. It just has the best genomic sequencing facilities in Africa, so was the first to identify the variant. The first known case was around November 9, if I recall correctly.

Yesterday two deaths were attributed to Omicron in one of the other countries in southern Africa.

Omicron cases have been identified in many European countries. Two flights into the Netherlands were held after arrival so that all the passengers and crew could be tested. I didn't hear the total number of people, but 60-some people tested positive for Covid and about a third were confirmed to be the Omicron variety.

Reportedly the UK typically sees 700 arrivals from S. Africa per day, so Omicron is almost certainly present there, too (cases have now been confirmed, since I started writing this).

If you'd like to be better informed about Covid, check out "Dr. John Campbell" videos on YouTube. He posts daily and does a very good job explaining a lot of things.... such as why Omicron actually might be a good thing, although it's too early to tell. Some of his videos are detailed explanations and others are just short updates. He's been a strong advocate for proper vaccination technique ("aspiration"), explaining that the most likely reason some people have heart-related problems is due to improper injection. He also gave some good advice regarding vitamin supplements to boost one's immune system and sometimes interviews Covid patients about their experiences, including one today who along with his wife has just been diagnosed with Omicron. Both of them only saw a couple days of flu-like symptoms "more like a hang-over". Both were vaccinated, and either he or his wife had the Delta variant not long ago, so would have had both vax and natural immunities.

As of this morning (Thursday, Dec. 2), Omicron is confirmed in 24 countries. In S. Africa it is now 74% of the positive cases, so it's definitely out-competing and replacing the Delta variant.

Another Dr. John Campbell video explains why it might NOT be a good idea to create an Omicron-specific vaccine/booster. Doing so may cause the virus to further mutate into yet another variant, with unknown transmissability and virulence. This is part of the problem with the vaccines, too... especially the mRNA type.. that they're tailored to be very targeted, essentially creating a single, very narrow type of immunity. Eventually a virus can mutate to circumvent that. It's different with people who have natural immunity from having had and recovered from an actual Covid infection. They've developed a much broader range of immunity, which also may be more enduring (it's just too early to say, but several large studies strongly suggest it).

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

Perhaps this may be something to think about:

"You can't see them or feel them, but millions of airborne viruses are wafting around you each day, and billions more microbial travelers are descending everywhere on Earth, after riding air currents around the world.

For the first time, scientists have analyzed the vast quantities of viruses that are swept up and swirling about in the atmosphere, sometimes traveling tens of thousands of miles from their point of origin before seeing the planet's surface again. To do that, researchers looked at a boundary layer in the atmosphere — the free troposphere, which lies below the stratosphere but is still high enough to be beyond the reach of weather systems."

Microbes, bacteria, and viruses have been around longer than man's first footprint on the earth. In all likelihood, they will be here long after man is gone.

clickety

Nothing new! That’s always been a reality.