On the menu today: The Omicron wave is just about done, with new cases now down 80 percent from the early January peak. But judging from masking and vaccination-policy decisions from Washington, D.C., to New York City to Canada, you would think the Omicron variant was still raging out of control; the CDC’s data reveal that the Delta variant hasn’t been seen in weeks; and Fairfax County Public Schools have to start the clock on the countdown to allowing students to go maskless, as the county has passed the threshold for “moderate community transmission.”
Omicron Comes, Omicron Goes
The Omicron wave is just about done.
On the New York Times chart, the seven-day average of daily new cases nationwide peaked at 806,000 on January 14. Mondays tend to bring spikes, likely reflecting a backlog of delayed reports from the weekend. On January 3, the country reported more than 1 million new cases, and on January 10, the country reported more than 1.4 million new cases.
Yesterday, the country reported about 206,000 new cases, and the seven-day average of new cases dropped to just below 155,000.
That comes out to an 80 percent drop in a month and puts the country back to the new case levels of the week before Christmas. (Keep in mind, if someone feels sick, takes a home test, comes out positive, and never reports their case to their doctor or local health authorities, they don’t get added to the total, so these figures are undercounts.)
The Omicron wave coming to its end should be a factor in all of the current pandemic policy decisions — including D.C.’s decision to keep masks on kids in schools indefinitely, the Department of Homeland Security’s hunt for “Covid-19 disinformation,” and the city of New York firing more than 1,400 workers for refusing to get vaccinated. Since there’s no reason to think that the Omicron wave is passing differently in Canada, its gradual end ought to be a factor in Justin Trudeau’s insistence that all Canadian truckers must get vaccinated.
Here in Fairfax County, from February 6 to February 12, the percentage of PCR tests coming back positive has dropped to 6.1 percent — which is categorized as “moderate community transmission” on the CDC charts. Five days ago, Fairfax County Public Schools declared that, “FCPS will implement our roll back strategy when the Fairfax County community reaches moderate transmission and remains there for seven consecutive days. When that happens . . . masking will be optional.” Now, maybe it only declined beneath 8 percent in the middle of that time period. Either way, FCPS has to start the clock.
For all intents and purposes, the Omicron variant is the Covid-19 pandemic right now. The Delta variant stopped showing up in significant numbers the week ending January 8 and represented zero — that is 0.0 percent — of cases reported from January 30 to February 5.
Since February started, it is all Omicron, all the time, with the Omicron subvariant “BA.2” now representing 3.6 percent of cases and classic Omicron representing the other 96.4 percent. The BA.2 subvariant has been given the ominous nickname of “stealth Omicron,” but that mostly refers to the difficulty of genetically differentiating it from Delta. In terms of severity, it’s about the same as regular Omicron, but might be even more contagious than regular Omicron, at least according to Dr. Andrea Garcia, the American Medical Association’s director of science, medicine and public health.
Back on February 2, Garcia stated that, “In the U.S., BA.2 is about 8 percent of our cases right now. While BA.2 does not appear to cause more severe disease and our vaccines appear to be effective, BA.2 does show signs of spreading more easily, which really could translate into that slowing down of the trend we’re seeing with cases declining.”
But, for what it’s worth, roughly two weeks later, the cases keep declining. So far, the BA.2 subvariant doesn’t appear to be a game-changer.
With the Omicron wave in our rearview mirror, we can evaluate the accuracy of the admonitions beforehand. Back on December 30, Tatiana Prowell, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, offered a spectacularly dire warning about what Omicron would do to American life: “When we call 911 & no one comes, when we literally cannot enter the ER for crowds. . . . When we go to grocery stores & find shelves empty, to pharmacies & find them closed because every single employee is out sick themselves or tending to a loved one.” Her tweets were retweeted thousands of times, and “liked” tens of thousands of times.
When I read those tweets, I was irked that a medical professional was telling people that within a few weeks, American life would look like something out of an apocalyptic Stephen King novel.
But as wrong as Prowell was — and she was pretty darn wrong!–– the Omicron wave was a pain in the neck. Omicron was less of an apocalyptic cataclysm than a national sick-out, with tens of millions of Americans suffering mild but irritating symptoms simultaneously. Yes, some schools closed, but nothing like in the early days of the pandemic. The existing supply-chain crisis and labor shortages were exacerbated by workers calling in sick. Hospitals approached their capacity limits and shuffled patients around to other facilities that had room. But 911 continued to operate, the overwhelming majority of businesses remained open, and celebrities partied without masks at the Super Bowl as if the pandemic had never happened.
Omicron brought a lot more cases — roughly one third of all U.S. Covid-19 cases occurred between early December and the end of January. And the milder but more contagious virus did reach those who were still most vulnerable to it — the U.S. has suffered more than 136,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the beginning of December.
Right around here, someone will look at people taking off their masks and resuming their normal lives and cry, “But there could be another variant out there!” Indeed, there could, but right now, it’s not showing up in the CDC testing. More than 547 million Covid-19 vaccination shots have been administered, more than 214 million Americans have two shots, and more than 91 million Americans have gotten booster shots. Nearly 76 percent of all Americans have gotten at least one shot, which is 80.7 percent of everyone eligible, more than 87 percent of all U.S. adults, and more than 95 percent of U.S. seniors. Overlapping that are the more than 79 million Americans who have had Covid-19 — probably tens of millions more, between the asymptomatic and those who didn’t report their cases.
If somebody’s vaccinated, boosted, and had Covid-19 . . . there’s nothing else that person can do to protect themselves. (Okay, other than living a healthy lifestyle and maybe taking vitamins.) Our bodies have had it and our immune systems now know how to fight it off. Any new variants the come along might be significantly different, or they might not; we won’t know until genomic testing indicates something new and different has arrived.
ADDENDUM: Almost one year ago today: “President Joe Biden used his first address before a global audience Friday to declare that “America is back! The transatlantic alliance is back!’”
Yesterday, the U.S. abandoned its second overseas embassy in six months.