A dastardly combination
While the signals may seem contradictory, they can be rationalized, though fitting them into a coherent national response to a pandemic that has relentlessly outpaced political leaders and deepened national divisions is another thing.
The main key to understanding parallel Covid realities is that the Omicron variant is much more contagious than the Delta version it catches up to, but generally causes less serious illness, according to growing evidence.
This dastardly combination of increased transmissibility but apparently more moderate disease postpones the shaky balance between mitigation and maintaining a semblance of normal life forged in previous waves of infection. It also means political and business leaders are grappling with whether a virus that manifests itself in mild illness and even no symptoms for many people should continue to threaten critical infrastructure and basic services that support American life.
Some elected officials are erring on the cautious side — including those closing schools, at least for a while. It makes sense, because it’s hard to fathom how to sustain personal learning when teachers test positive and have to go into isolation. But other leaders, such as Adams, are giving the impression that the country is waging the latest war on the pathogen while a new one has just begun. His bullishness is the luxury of a mayor with a new mandate.
But the idea that Omicron is a tame enemy shifts the risk equation too far towards underestimating the virus and could lead to dangerous shortcuts.
“This story that it’s just a mild virus doesn’t add up,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, told DailyExpertNews’s Jake Tapper Monday.
As more Americans grow weary of the fight, conservative critics of public health officials may want to resist the temptation to gloat. Even now, most Americans hospitalized and dying in the Omicron wave (and the still raging Delta wave in some districts) are the ones who refused free, effective vaccines amid a deluge of misinformation about the inoculations fueled by many GOP politicians and conservative media hosts.
The best way to stay protected from serious illness, hospitalization or death is to get vaccinated and boosted, whether the Omicron variant is less potent or not. Many of the 820,000 US deaths from the disease could be alive if some Republicans, including ex-President Donald Trump, had not made public health a victim of their political ambitions and ignored the science and pushed for premature economic openings in 2020.
Hospitals are popping again
And living with the virus is easier said than done.
One of Omicron’s cruelest quirks is that while it may seem easier for most people to shake off, its increased transmissibility means that even a smaller percentage of patients who become seriously ill in this wave than others have entered the health care systems. could succumb and stretch the hero even further. doctors and nurses wrung out by the pandemic. For example, national hospital admissions reached 100,000 for the first time in four months on Monday and most experts expect them to go even higher. System overload can also severely reduce the quality of care for people with other conditions, especially chronic conditions such as heart attacks or strokes.
But the nature of this pandemic is that it raises questions that are usually impossible to answer satisfactorily — especially those that permeate the riven political empire. sen. Marco Rubio, for example, welcomed the sight of packed football stadiums over the weekend and warned in a tweet against “irrational hysteria” fueled by Omicron. But the Florida Republican received a reprimand from the president’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who commented on DailyExpertNews’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that an average of 1,200 daily deaths from Covid-19 were “not a trivial situation.”
But even Fauci has argued in recent days that the country is in the process of recalibrating its risk tolerance, saying last week that no activity in a pandemic was completely safe.
That’s just another reason for the nagging feeling in the country that everyone is looking not just for a way out of the pandemic and its hardships – which seems unrealistic – but for an adapted way of life that is sustainable. But despite the hopes of a quick peak from Omicron, no one can say for sure how long it will reign, or whether it will be followed by another thorny and chaos-inducing variant.