The new Variant

We didn’t want to think about it, but we all knew that there was a possibility of a “Worst case scenario” variant to come and wreck all expectations of return to a more normal life .

Now it’s still early days, more data will be needed to be sure if it’s really as bad as the first indication could suggest.

Media tend to sometimes over-dramatize early estimates and extrapolate on that to build an apocalyptic scenario, the truth is, we don’t know how the “Omicron” variant is going to play out .

Sign that people are quite scared to a return to more stringent covid measure, the stock market reacted quite swiftly to the news, not great, but expected, after all the effort that we already made to get out of the more restrictive measure, coming back to a more socially distanced world, is not appealing to anyone .

The main concern is probably that it’s already spread out of Africa, not even a week after being announced, and it’s overthrowing the Delta variant at warp speed in South Africa, the next week will tell what to expect.

On the bright side, it’s always a possibility that this variant being less deadly, it’s at least in the realm of possibility, but with the luck we have lately, we better prepare for quite a bad ride.

With the relatively low number of case, it’s hard to know exactly the impact of “Omicron”, in South Africa, a Johannesburg Doctor talked about seeing very mild case in vaccinated people, and a Soweto Doctor, a region with a low Vaccine rate, seeing younger, being sicker than with Delta .

So with those really early observations, we may hope the vaccine still has an impact on severity, that would be awesome news .

What we don’t know yet :

  • Vaccine evasion ?
  • More contagious ?
  • New symptom ? (Symptom set seem to be different) 
  • The need for a tweaked booster ?
  • Unvaccinated younger people more at risk than with Delta ?

We already have cases in many places, Canada got 2, the Dutch already have a full-fledged cluster, we can probably say that we may not be able to slow this down a lot, especially if it’s as contagious as some extrapolate right now .

Let’s knock on wood, and hope for the best of the worst case scenario, a variant that will give us mild cases in vaccinated people, and put vaccination of poor countries in the fast track, because if this one may not be (Still can be bad), the next one could be worse .