Yeah, As I Said

According to the UK Daily Mail, US Omicron cases have doubled overnight:

The number of confirmed Omicron cases in the U.S. has nearly doubled in a period of 24 hours, and six Northeastern states saw a record number of daily COVID cases this week as the variant is now confirmed in 44 states, with New York hit the hardest.

As of Saturday morning, there were 830 cases of the Omicron COVID-19 variant confirmed by DNA sequencing across the country, a 97 percent increase from Friday morning's tally.

In reality, the true number of Omicron cases is much higher, as only 1 to 2 percent of all cases are sequenced for variant markers, but the testing data shows a disturbing national trend.

The problem is that as is increasingly reported from Europe, the Omicron variant is far milder. The Daily Mail story continues at length to conflate Delta with Omicron, but its graphs simply illustrate another point I've been making:

There's little difference between the late 2020 peak and the late 2021 peak nationally, despite the fact that by the Daily Mail's count, 72% of US residents have had at least one dose of vaccine since the 2020 peak. According to this site, 203,479,206 people or 62% of the population have been fully vaccinated. Of those, the percentages in vulnerable populations are far higher. But this has had no remotely proportional impact on cases or deaths overall in the US, currently based on the Delta variant.

The public health establishment has simply had no good explanation for this state of affairs. Its strategy throughout has been to scold the plebs for insufficient adherence to whatever the current prescription is: too many block parties; not enough masking; not enough social distance; not enough jabs; not enough boosters. In response to the new wave, it's going to be rinse, repeat.

In fact, I found a really good example of the current credentialed line in a recent New York Magazine story South Africa's Omicron wave is already peaking. Why?

First, there’s the simple limit to testing capacity. As things increase, our testing capacity doesn’t increase as fast, and so we’re missing more and more cases. That can give you a distorted picture — it could look like a plateau in Gauteng, but you could imagine it’s really a much higher crest.

I also bet we can expect a lot more underreporting of Omicron, compared to previous wave, because it’s more mild, either through existing immunity or through actual reduction of intrinsic severity. And if, on average, you’ve reduced the severity of cases, there’d be a lot of people that don’t bother to come to the hospital or to get tested. And so as a rough guess, you might go from like one in 10 cases reported in South Africa to one in 20 or even one in 30 cases — that wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me. And that makes it so that at the same caseload of Delta versus Omicron you could actually have three times as many infections with Omicron.

We could also have a change in generation interval. If we have Omicron kind of doubling at this very fast two or three day rate, you don’t actually have to have Rt be three. You could have actually just made the whole thing faster without having the number of secondary infections being much higher. And we don’t have no way [sic] of knowing that at this moment.

It's a lot of entre nous patter sprinkled with jargon leavened by "I also bet", "rough guess", "kind of", and "just made the whole thing faster", concluding with "we don't have no way of knowing that at the moment". I'm not going to check if this guy is an MD, PhD, both, or neither. He isn't a credible spokesman.

This is the looming problem with the received narrative. It's putting out Ponzi scheme numbers on how fast things are gonna get worse, such that if they don't get a whole lot worse in a matter of weeks, they'll start to lose any remaining credibility. Remember that they're claiming cases will double at a rate ranging from every 1.5 to 3 days, such that by sometime next month, everyone in the world will be sick, and there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. But if things do get a whole lot worse, they look just as bad, because after more than two years, they've proven themselves utterly feckless to deal with the problem and lose any remaining credibility anyhow.

If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing, let's break out the booze, and have a ball. If that's all.