"Is It Covid-19 Or A Cold?"

"A doctor explains how to tell the difference." This story is on today's CNN live COVID news feed.

While Covid-19 cases are sharply rising across the US, the winter season is also a time for the common cold. Symptoms for the two can certainly look the same — sore throat, runny nose, cough and headache, among others.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed gives guidance to people trying to figure out if they have been infected and need to get tested or if they just have a cold.

. . . "Even though with Omicron, it's less likely that you're going to lose your sense of smell or sense of taste, those are really specific for Covid-19," he said.

Another common symptom with Omicron is a headache, El-Sayed added.

I'm subscribed to Alex Berenson's substack, and his reaction this morning was

Guys, I don’t know how to say this any more clearly: it is OVER.

The Omicold (pronounced Immacold) variant is about to bring this clown show to its inevitable conclusion.

. . . When your media water-carriers have to write articles explaining the difference between Covid and a cold… it’s over.

So why won’t Uncle Joe just say so? Because the current strategy isn’t working - not politically, and not for the country. It’s time to surrender to the ro like you did to the Taliban and to inflation.

Well, President Brandon is at least moving in that direction. Yesterday he told the governors on a call that “There is no federal solution” to COVID. For now, it appears that this statement is meaningless, since it doesn't look like the administration will drop its efforts to defend its various vaccine mandates as their cases come before the US Supreme Court.

It's just an effort to dodge the conundrum I've noted here, that nothing he's done over the past year has had any effect on the pandemic, yet when it does play itself out -- as it currently appears to be doing -- he'll get no political credit for that, either. Best just to step away from the whole thing, but on the other hand, withdrawing the vaccine mandates would make him look weak.

Meanwehile, with Omicron, The Science is collapsing as well:

There are legitimate concerns about the trajectory of the newest variant, Omicron, and public health experts are paying close attention to the exponentially mounting cases, particularly in the United Kingdom, which in the past has functioned as a canary in the Covid-19 coal mine for the U.S.

. . . [T]he rapidly mounting case numbers and overall transmissibility have been alarming, particularly in the U.K. According to a Dec. 10 government technical briefing (see page 17), Omicron cases were expanding by 35% per day.

But there’s something else different this time around, at least in the U.K.: the statistical relationship between Covid-19 cases and deaths appears to have broken down with Omicron.

. . . In earlier waves, rising death rates would follow an increase in cases; the impact of rising cases on death rates could be seen visually and validated statistically. Deaths would follow cases upward, and peak roughly two to three weeks after new cases began trending downward. With Omicron, however, we not only don’t see the rise in death rates that were associated with the first waves, but we actually see a continuing decline in death rates, despite a radical increase in cases.

As of today, panic porn headlines have taken a hiatus, and over the past week or so, advice from the public health authorities to ban unvaxxed relatives from Christmas dinner has been muted. As of this morning, other than in New York, where Mayor DeBlasio is a lame duck, there don't seem to have been mass cancellations of New Year's celebrations.

I think we're definitely entering the Morning After phase of the 2020 moral panic. In the aftermath, though, we're left with a quiet constitutional crisis.