People freaking out over Omicron
The new year is off to a March 2020 start.
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| Upon learning of the Omicron variant, this person locked himself in a cleanroom he built for himself in his house. Security camera footage captured him spending most of the past month holding his hands over his ears and screaming, apparently oblivious that the virus is not transmitted through ears. He caught COVID after a Door Dash driver dropped off some lunch. He ended up being asymptomatic. // photo by Usman Yousaf |
Despite the plethora of information that shows Omicron is more infections but far less deadly, people are absolutely freaking out over it, at the beginning of 2022 before the first week of January was even over.
There have been some nasty bugs (other than COVID) that have been spreading like wildfire over the latter half of December. I've been coughing since the week before Christmas. All that hemming and hawing about low rates of diseases like the flu last year just came back with a vengeance.
This, along with the Omicron variant spreading like crazy, have people hunkering down again. It feels like March 2020.
The first clue since the break was that my son's preschool required negative COVID tests to return to school, in an email sent the Friday before Monday's reopening. Sigh. There has been panic over certain corporate media outlets saying that hospitalizations for children have been skyrocketing. They mention a five-fold increase in New York and a 48% increase across the nation. What's not in the article is that pre-Omicron, typically less than 5 children per 100,000 were hospitalized for COVID. That is, a 0.00005% chance. Increase it 48%, let's be generous and round up to 50%, and we get a new, scary number of 0.000075%. The number just for preschoolers is considerably less.
It didn't help matters that Sonia Sotomayor, in an oral argument in the Supreme Court, was shrieking about 100,000 children in "serious condition". No, there aren't. At the time of shrieking, the rolling one-week average of hospitalizations, not even narrowing it to "serious condition", was less than 800 (a number for legal minors). A number of them were likely taken to the hospital despite having minor symptoms, needlessly inflating the hospitalization numbers.
Nevertheless, by the second day of returning to school, a student coughing was sent home and was discovered to have COVID. The next day, preschool was a ghost town. Barely any kids were dropped off, as if this virus were turning kids into flesh-eating zombies. The school reported the positive COVID result and shut down for the rest of the week, leaving the rational parents scrambling to find other accommodations.
Then the very next week, another student tested positive and they shut down the school again, this time not letting people in the door in the morning since they received the positive test news in the morning. That Friday, the owner of the school anxiously called me, asking if my son was okay. At first, I thought she was checking in to see how he was doing due to his isolation from school. It wasn't until a little bit later I realized she was checking to see if he had any symptoms. Nope. He was fine, I told her. She seemed relieved, as if he had survived a game of Russian Roulette. I never had any doubts he would be. She was more worried about it than I was, presumably because she watches more CNN than I do, drastically overinflating her sense of danger. Over two weeks, my son was in school for a total of about four days, needlessly consuming multiple testing kits in the process. It didn't help that the demand for testing kits have gone through the roof, with Amazon back-ordered on many tests. I'm no economics professor, but I'm pretty sure performing unnecessary tests on three-year-olds doesn't help the shortage.
I wish my son's preschool was an isolated situation, but schools all across the country have been shutting down, many of them for "precautionary" reasons including the local Hayward public school district, setting the record for the current academic year, despite the fact that children are still not particularly susceptible to this virus. Teachers are also not particularly in danger in the classroom, possibly due to children likely having a low incidence of passing COVID on to others.
Similarly, colleges across the country have shut down again, despite vaccination rates in the upper 90th percentile. Many cite spreading COVID cases, but few seem willing to release the severity of the cases, aside from Purdue, which reports that approximately none of the cases are severe, which is exactly what one who is not a college administrator, apparently, would expect.
My wife, who commutes over the San Mateo Bridge, noticed that the traffic had subsided significantly. The number of cars in the parking lot of my office had declined again. The office adjacent to ours appears to have gone back to working from home full time. Across the street at the COVID testing center, however, lines had exploded again, after months of activity similar to a store selling sand in the middle of the Sahara.
Annoyingly, my office, which is 100% vaccinated, has gone back to mandating masks when we're not seated at our desks, as if the virus wakes up when we stand up. The six-foot halo was a completely made-up number with no relation to COVID aerosolization that has just been repeated so often with stickers on the ground that it has just become "truth". Everyone also wears cloth or surgical masks except, ironically, for the youngest person in the office who wears an N-95 mask. Everyone has also seemed to miss all the data that shows masks, except for N-95 masks, have extremely limited efficacy, even in indoor settings. But why read data when you can have security theater?
Speaking of theater, we know symptoms from Omicron are far less severe, as well as its fatality rate. We also know vaccines only show a very slight reduction in viral transmissions, at best, and can "efficiently transmit infection in household settings." Even the CDC admits this, now. Nevertheless, some cities like Boston implemented a vaccine mandate, as Omicron became the lead story. So these geniuses' idea of combating a virus that is highly transmissible of relatively lower harm is to introduce a requirement to vaccinate, which does not prevent transmission and protects against symptom severity? Brilliant. These people, if they find themselves pregnant with twins and plan to throw fewer cocaine-fueled house parties, would look into changing their living situation and instead of buying a larger house with more bedrooms, probably buy a one-bedroom penthouse in the city with a giant Scarface mural in the living room.
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| A filled up Chase Center enjoying the Tool concert, with many mask-less. We all died within a week. No, wait, we're still here. // photo my own |
Responding to this panic, numerous articles have cropped up, telling people to not panic in the face of Omicron and how to deal with anxiety, with some authors unable to continue fear-monger even when writing such articles. The head of the CDC, the WHO, and UCSF experts have all felt the need to tell everyone not to panic over Omicron. Despite this, the CDC gave new guidance to upgrade masks, sending mixed signals. Even Joe Biden felt the need to get in on the fray to tell people not to panic, even though he was the first one to panic by instituting border restrictions (with a weekend delay because viruses don't virus on weekends, c'mon, man) and threaten people with lockdowns.
Screw you all and your numbers. We have decided on panic.
