Covid Support Thread
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So this is weird to me… With Delta, it was raging through India for MONTHS earlier this year. It killed family members of people I work with. My co-workers in India were saying the vaccine didn’t seem to work against it, which was alarming. But the media barely covered it, it was just like, oh, here’s some Indians cremating their dead. Meanwhile we acted like the pandemic was over and were dropping mask mandates – remember no one was wearing them for a while in June/July? And then in the summer it was like, oh fuck, Delta.
So my question is, why are we on this high alert for omicron now? Why does the media care now but they didn’t then? Like it must have been known with Delta that vaccines were less effective against catching it, but they weren’t saying that until it was already here and we had that Provincetown outbreak in July. We were being encouraged to go back to normal. Now it’s like, we don’t know anything yet about omicron but you should be concerned.
What’s going on with the messaging? I’m not implying any conspiracy or anything, just trying to figure it out.
I don’t think there’s anything organized around the messaging at all. I think the CDC and WHO and anyone else with credibility and a platform made a mistake with Delta and the messaging around it (like when the CDC said in May, as Delta was raging in India, that vaccinated individuals could drop masks). And now maybe those same people are over-compensating for that mistake and trying to err on the side of caution. Delta proved to be a huge set-back on our path to ending the pandemic and I would think health organizations and politicians and various leaders are loath to see the same thing happen again, especially considering how under vaccinated most of the world still is.
We really don’t know enough about Omicron right now to draw many conclusions. It appears that it could be more contagious than delta, but that’s not proven. We don’t know if it leads to more serious disease or how effective vaccines are against it. I suspect we’ll learn much more in coming days. Personally, I’m not worried at this point (for myself and my loved ones). I’m concerned for people in regions with little access to vaccines, and for kids who aren’t vaccinated yet and are going to school with little to no mitigations (which describes a majority of the world, including a big percentage of the US). As long as we have such huge pockets of under vaccinated folks, even/especially young children, we’re all at risk of more dangerous, vaccine-resistant variants developing. Whether that’s omicron remains to be seen though and I suspect, based on the tiny bit of data we have so far and on sheer hope and blind optimism, that our vaccines are effective in this case.
He’s not saying anything new. He’s saying that the structure of the virus strongly suggesta that there will be a loss of efficacy, which is what everyone else has been saying. Moderna hasn’t done any testing or anything like that yet. He doesn’t have any new information -it’s just the kind of informed speculation that we had before.
Regeneron also reports less effectiveness for their COVID treatment against Omicron.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/regeneron-loses-potency-against-omicron-super-mutant-early-tests-show?ref=home
@Kate – I think there are two big differences between the reaction to Delta and Omicron…1. General xenophobia led people to think that Delta was no different; they are brown and stupid and we are smarter because we are in the US. It is their infrastructure that is the problem. And when Delta hit the US hospitals were setting up people with oxygen and putting them in the parking garages to wait to see a doctor because the ERs were overwhelmed and hospitals were notifying their state boards that their oxygen supplies were running out. So… not so superior.
2. People didn’t know what a variant was. A bunch of people dying on the other side of the world… makes no impression when you’ve already made up your mind that COVID is non-lethal. And then Delta came and people are dying. Quick, days long turns from healthy to dead. Long, drawn out deaths over weeks where the person just gets sicker and sicker.
We’ll see how this one turns out… but it’s clear that we’re not getting a handle on this thing and we have to get people vaccinated or isolated. Put everyone who refuses the vaccine on an island somewhere. Like Staten Island but with no bridges or ferries.
The thing is with Delta is that we knew full well by May how dangerous it was from the UK but policy makers still acted as if COVID was over until August.
@Fyodor – those who were already being cautious remained cautious. Walking around outside without a mask isn’t terribly risky unless you’re in a crowd.
People who believed that COVID was a hoax, or was nothing more than a flu… got their asses handed to them (and continue to do so). We’ve just finished a holiday weekend and as I’ve mentioned before, many people who choose to not vaccinate and not mask and not be cautious will be having a very un-merry christmas.
Thank you to everyone who replied with kind words to my post (back on Nov 21 or 22). I was completely bedridden with nausea so haven’t been online and am just reading responses now. I’m starting to feel better now!
I had a good talk with my husband after I made that post, which went a long way towards making me feel better. Then I met with my midwife and that helped a lot too.
@hfantods – I’m in Ontario, about an hour outside Toronto.
@MaterialsGirl, there are other birthing centres but they’re out of town. I feel most comfortable at this hospital – it’s close and it’s where I gave birth last time, and while the labour/birth were awful, the facilities and staff were wonderful! I have a lot of confidence in them. I hope the policy changes by June but if not, I’ll suck it up.
@Cleopatra_30, email the gym! I want to live vicariously through you. I wanted to contact the gym when I heard what my cousin-in-law was doing but it sounds like the rule-breaking is coming from the top.I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.
@ListForLeslie I’m talking about policymakers. Even after Delta was known to be crazily contagiousane vaccine evading the CDC dropped its indoor mask mandate for the vaccinated. They continued to repeat the lie that breakthroughs were “rare” well into June and July.
