The Looming Conundrum Is Still Looming

A little over a year ago, President-elect Biden said this:

[A] "very dark winter" is approaching as the U.S. coronavirus case count nears 10 million.

"There is a need for bold action to fight this pandemic," Biden said in Delaware. "We're still facing a very dark winter."

Biden, whose campaign against President Donald Trump made the coronavirus a main focus, pledged to "spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we're sworn in on Jan. 20."

Yesterday, a little over a year later, President Biden said this:

President Biden on Thursday warned of a winter of "severe illness and death" for unvaccinated Americans as coronavirus cases spike across the country.

Biden, in a meeting with medical advisers and Vice President Harris to discuss the pandemic, said the country was in a better position to deal with the omicron variant of COVID-19 because of steps taken to limit travel and increase access to boosters.

"But it's here now and it’s spreading, and it’s gonna increase," Biden said of the omicron variant, which experts think is more contagious than previous strains.

"For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death... for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm," Biden continued.

Dr Fauci laid down the same marker. Farther down in the story:

Anthony Fauci, Biden's top medical adviser on the pandemic, said earlier Thursday that the omicron variant will likely be dominant in the U.S. in "a few weeks" and warned of the possibility of hospitals being overwhelmed this winter.

So let me see. As best I can tell from the very sketchy and incomplete data that's been published, the Omicron variant, though first announced by South Africa on November 27, has been loose in the US, the UK, and elsewhere since about November 15. It is said to be exponentially more transmissible than the 2020 model, and it incubates in only 2 to 4 days. So why need we wait further weeks to have our hospitals overwhelmed? While regional US COVID statistics vary widely and are still driven by the Delta variant, here's the all time graph for Florida, which I think is significant because without vaccine, mask, or social distance mandates, its totals have remained low since the summer:

Given the very high transmissibility and short incubation period of Omicron, plus the relaxed attitude toward vaccines there, shouldn't we already have begun to see an alarming uptick? But if you go back to last fall and winter, cases there began to rise in late summer and peaked right around the new year. So much for last year's "dark winter".

The problem is that nothing's changed in the year since he pledged to turn things around.

"My first 100 days won't end the Covid-19 virus. I can't promise that," Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware. "But we did not get in this mess quickly, we're not going to get out of it quickly, it's going to take some time. But I'm absolutely convinced that in 100 days we can change the course of the disease and change life in America for the better."

Last week, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, the President-elect said he will ask Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days after he takes office.

The conundrum is that, with the renewed doomsday rhetoric, either he's acknowledged that his COVID strategy has been ineffective, or he's sending the message that the doomsday rhetoric is an attempt to stoke continued panic over a steadily decreasing threat. Meanwhile, even the uber establishment Atlantic ran a story Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid.