So we're all at panic stations for something that's 30% less severe than what we're all at least double jabbed against.
this reaction at the minute stinks
View attachment 23122
First off, there's some straightforward untruths there. I trust Nick will pick them up with his customary vigilance about Covid myths.
Viruses can mutate to be more deadly as well as less deadly. Don't trust Twitter for science is a pretty good rule imho.
At the moment we're not quite sure which way it will go but even if Omicron only resulted in a quarter of the hospitalisations that Delta caused, the rate of infection/re-infection appears to be far quicker (doubling around every two days, we're told).
Again, a little bit of maths helps here. A small proportion of a very large number is still a pretty big number. When you get into geometric progressions, the numbers get big pretty quickly.
If one person died today of Omicron, and then that doubled every three days, so on Friday two people died, next Monday four people and so on, then by New Year's Day we'd be at 64 deaths a day and 127 dead.
By the end of January though, the death rate per day would be 65,536, and over 130,000 would have died.
I'm not saying for a moment that's what's going to happen, but that's what's causing concern about the new variant.
You could take the line that there's nothing to worry about, and that it's all been overblown to sell papers and make people rich and distract from the idiocy of the government etc.. And you could be right.
And if you are right then I guess people will feel like they've been pressured into vaccinations and inconvenienced by face masks for no good reason. And some corrupt bastards will have made some more money at our expense.
Or you could be wrong, in which case thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of people end up dead or seriously ill and perhaps the NHS completely breaks under the strain.
Personally, I can only see one rational option here, given the risks of doing nothing.
I certainly don't see the proposed changes as an overreaction, but obviously some differ. We're certainly not at 'panic stations' though, unless I've missed the air raid sirens whilst I was on the bog.