Whilst it is certainly true that omicron more contagious and faster to spread there could be other explanations on why recedual numbers are still higher: winter, higher R-value.. and Delta and other variants are still around. One of the possibilities that it goes very quickly to create 100% proof antibody protection.

We had omicron-like symptoms twice, beginning of December and a month later; both times after coming in contact with infected, YMMV.

The fairly recent widespread rollout of free LFTs and the cessation of confirmatory PCRs tests definitely confuses the situation, which is why Zoe and REACT are probably better indicators. I've been regularly reporting to Tim Spector's Zoe Study since mid 2020 along with another 4.5 million contributors reporting vaccinations, tests, symptoms and general health.

For sure, but there's still also a huge number of totally unvaccinated zombies out there, especially in London where 22% have declined all vaccinations and only 54% have had booster doses.

Totally agree, and whilst we may be past the peak there will probably be another 1.8 million cases reported by the government in the next 30 days.

Current thinking is that there will be another wave, probably late spring. Whilst hugely transmissible, it wasn't a case of Omicron evading the vaccines, more one of antibody protection (our first line of defence) dropping, which allowed infection. But the second line defence of memory B and T cells kicked in with vaccinated and boosted patients, preventing serious illness. It also helped that Omicron affects the upper respiratory tracts rather than the lungs, hence less need for invasive intubation ventilation.

I'm fairly hopeful—that's what happened with Spanish flu, the remnants of which are still covered in our seasonal flue jabs. I read your article link on the relative dangers of Covid and flu and that was certainly true with Alpha and Delta variants, but I am hopeful that once over, this Omicron wave will be viewed as far less dangerous. And will have given the bonus of a pile of natural immunity to those who have chosen not to accept vaccination.

I hope this won't come back and bite me on the bum, but I feel we are approaching the end game. We couldn't have wished for a better variant than Omicron—one that is eminently transmissible and at the same time far less virulent. In the last month both my daughters' families have been infected with Omicron—a bit difficult to avoid with schools and nurseries—but thankfully with minimal discomfort.



Here's how Omicron affects a 2.5 year Spiderman superhero

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Hindsight being a wonderful thing
 

I am amazed at the naivety of some of the comments, statements, so-called 'facts', redirect links etc about this virus and the chatter that 'it's soon over'.doh
How many more posts and how long is it going to take before the penny drops?... :whistling:

Covid is here to stay, in different guises no doubt just, like influenza and we will have to learn to live with it and cope with various frustrations and restrictions it will cause in our lives including travel issues as and when these arise.

The Halcyon days of travel I have had the immense luck to enjoy are mostly over- just like Brexit, Visas, paper work, we will all have to adapt. They are all a pain but the price we have to pay.
Let us not forget that most people who have/had the time and money needed to enjoy motorcycles/4x4's/camels etc to travel with belong to a very privileged group. A massive proportion of Homo Sapiens spend their lives just surviving from one day to the next. That thought alone may well be a 'whinge killer'.

Meanwhile, here is an artists’ impression of the new variant.
Carpe Diem

I was interested in pandemics from a personal safety viewpoint before Covid became a problem and had actually taken a copy of Adam Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion with me as reading material on my Jan-Mar 2020 trip to Morocco. Since then I've taken the view that knowledge and understanding of Covid is the best counter to apprehension and anxiety.

It seems that most pandemics last between 2.5 and 3.5 years, and that over time the virus mutates to become less life threatening and it then becomes an endemic disease that continues to circulate at manageable levels. That's what happened with the 1918-1920 'Spanish' flu pandemic that killed more people than died in the Great War—protection against modern versions of this virus is included in the annual flu jab.

Part of the reason that death rates around Europe were so high in the early Covid waves is that the virus picked the 'low hanging fruit' of the elderly with co-morbidities, running riot in care homes, with many also becoming infected in hospitals. But even when you take these excess deaths into account there's no doubting the dramatic reduction in virulence of Omicron amongst a mostly vaccinated population, as the figures for France so eloquently demonstrate.

In the 22 months to 31 December 2021 there were 126,000 deaths resulting from just under 10 million recorded covid cases in France.

In the 23 days since 31 December there have been another 6.7 million !! cases with projected fatalities likely to be around 7,000.

World health Organisation Europe Director Hans Kluge stated yesterday that “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame.” Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity... so we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back”.

Other experts have also said there is likely to be other waves later in 2022 and possibly beyond, so yes, I believe the only viruses that mankind has managed to permanently eradicate from circulation are smallpox (last outbreak 1977) and rinderpest (2001), but we do manage to live with other coronaviruses and we will have to live with this one as well.

There is an interesting perspective to question about how long a pandemic will run if you look to the 1889–1890 pandemic called "Asiatic flu" or "Russian flu".

>>
In 2020, Danish researchers Lone Simonsen and Anders Gorm Pedersen noted that the clinical manifestations of the 1889 pandemic—runny nose, headache, high fever, severe chest inflammation, speeding up old respiratory diseases, and primarily killing elderly people—resembled COVID-19, a disease caused by a coronavirus, more than flu. They calculated that the human coronavirus OC43 had split from bovine coronavirus about 130 years before, approximately coinciding with the pandemic in 1889–1890. The calculation was based on genetic comparisons between bovine coronavirus and different strains of OC43. While their research had not been formally published as of November 2020, a team from the University of Leuven in Belgium performed a similar analysis of OC43, identifying a crossover date in the late 1800s.<<

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E...31890_pandemic


>>However, there is not a scientific consensus that the 1889–1890 outbreak was caused by a coronavirus, with one analysis of the literature suggesting that the evidence for this cause is "weak" and "conjectural<<

Quote from: What we can learn from the dynamics of the 1889 ‘Russian flu’ pandemic for the future trajectory of COVID-19 by Harald Brüssow

Source: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.w...751-7915.13916

What is certain is public knowledge of past major outbreaks is quite sketchy. Those interested in WWI might have heard of Spanish flu, I only came across Russian flu a few weeks ago.

Another that was news to me was the typhus outbreaks in London in the 1860s that killed 40,000 at a time when London had a population of 3 million.

In our neighbourhood is an abandoned graveyard that is being left to nature. It looks rather like a Hammer House of Horror film set with gravestones leaning over at angles under the gloomy trees. I noticed three gravestones of the same design in a line, touching each other and was intrigued as I had seen this in Commonwealth War Graveyards when several soldiers had died in a shellburst and it was impossible to identify which bodyparts belonged to whom.


Three children from the same family who died of typhus in March 1862

Interesting comment from

Wow so few? Much better record than BBC

So few what? I'm confused.

Follow link

so few - deaths? Campbell's count is discredited there!

The question on death is a controversial one. It boils down to "what to count as covid related deaths?" For example when early 2020 the sh!t happened in NYC the excess death was x3 times of official covid-19 death rate. Not all of them were dying from covid-19, some from lack of health care, missed surgeries, anxiety, spike in suicide, etc. But many were dying at home without ever seeing doctor or getting tested. And car accident rate was down because people lost jobs and had nowhere to go.

The other aspect is when actually the pandemic started and how many people had died from it prior to 2020 without ever being diagnosed? Were there any distortions in the way death were counted early on? And if someone to die from leukemia tomorrow but got covid and died today, how to count it?

It is known statistical fact that during famine most of the people who do die have health issues and the death rate in following years sharply declines.. So if you look at annual deaths you would get one picture, but if you look at 5 year average picture will be not the same.

My guess it will take a few more years before we see true picture; more time is needed to perform statistical analysis. And even then it will be argued.

As for John voicing this heretic point of view he is a publicist and educator, his profession is to read scientific articles and explain them in layman terms. You don't have to agree but plz don't kill the messanger if you don't like message. Peace.

You (and anyone else that's interested) might like to listen to the BBC's statistics programme's take on this. Here's the link:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013r9w

It's the first seven or eight minutes.

He earned a Bachelor of Science in biology, a Master of Science in health science and a Ph.D. in nursing education.

And this kind of education is the reason why you have to look critical to what he says and how he argues. Because he understands more of medicine than the average person and because he has the capability to explain complicated issues in a simple way to these people.

But all these benefits together aren`t a proof that he is absolutely right in what he thinks and understands and in what he says and explains to his viewers.

It`s him who suffered more than once by interdisciplinary science knowledge gaps which ended in false conclusions. And by this way the messenger sadly kills his credibility.

Well for one he was less wrong than Dr Fauci and we still dealing with his opinions.

You need to take into consideration that it is developing body of knowledge; contradictory sometimes. This is a side effect of scientific method.

And yes if you expect to hear gospel every time he opens mouth John Campbell isn't the right source. Doesn't change the fact that omicron wiped out Delta and we are in endemic stage.

First its much too early to state and there is no scientific evidence given up today for the proof of a start into an endemic stage!

Secondly you are totally wrong with your statement that omicron has wipeout delta.
https://covariants.org/per-country

After Omicron, some scientists foresee ‘a period of quiet’
https://www.science.org/content/arti...e-period-quiet



What kind of consequences do you think has a stage of endemic? It`s absolutely not a solution which will bring back your prepandemic life in a short period of time.

The coronavirus is here to stay — here’s what that means
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2

COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x



Science hasn`t allready understood fully how the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 works. So how can we control and manage an edemic stage without this?

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: still up in the air
https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...4067362102794X

cyclopathic didn't explain his comment but I took it to mean that Dr Campbell has an excellent record on accuracy compared to the BBC who use unqualified (medically) reporters to prepare medical news stories. Even though my daughter had 20 years in BBC newsgathering I cringe sometimes at how wrong they get stuff.

-----------------------



I remember watching Dr Campbell's video of 20 January (above) in which the 17,000 Covid-only deaths figure was mentioned and I understood totally what he was saying. I was very interested in the 17,000 without comorbidities figure as this might give an indication why fatalities have been much lower in Morocco than the UK—could this partly be because Moroccans are less overweight and without diabetes?

I didn't think that in any way he was trying to minimise the overall number of fatalities due to deaths with comorbidities. In fact what he says right at the beginning of the video is that it is often thought that the most accurate way to look at deaths is the 127,704 excess deaths above the five-year average, and if you think of that, it would also include deaths through lack of medical treatment for other serious illnesses, as well as suicides.

But the count IS accurate—it was released by the UK's Office for National Statistics in response to a freedom of information request. The problem is that a small minority might have misunderstood what Dr Campbell was trying to put over and the person to blame for the widespread press coverage was MP David Davis who picked up on "pretty interesting" and misunderstood this to mean that 2+2=64.

I also went back and watched Dr Campbell's video about Ivermectin and then tried to find out more information on the subject. It seems the jury may still be out. Five days ago the University of Oxford confirmed it was still running clinical studies on Ivermectin as part of its PRINCIPLE trials however wouldn't comment further until they are ready to report.

The scientific world has moved at a previously unimaginable speed to fight the pandemic with eyebrow-raising shortcuts and their efforts have undoubtedly saved millions of lives, not just through vaccines but also through complementary medicines and treatments. In normal times, scientific papers are only seriously considered when they have gone through formal peer-review and then published in a scientific journal, but in this fast-moving anti-Covid fight, academic preprints have been widely distributed so as to spread knowledge of possible findings as quickly as possible. Dr Campbell's videos have mentioned many of these with appropriate warnings that they haven't been peer reviewed.

Above all, we have to thank the Internet for providing the basis for the fast knowledge interchange without which we would probably still be without vaccines and medicines. I've linked an article I wrote over 20 years ago quoting heavily from Dr Vanavar Bush's 1945 paper for Atlantic Monthly that highlighted the problems scientists faced with data sharing in World War II.

I wrote the extract below on a Moroccan forum at the end of December, addressing the fact that new case statistics in Morocco were unlikely to be reliable with the onset of Omicron.
Two weeks ago I wrote here,
Although the UK government statistics are that new case numbers are down to 82,000 and still declining, the evidence from Zoe is that new UK case numbers are in fact rising with over 200,000 per day and over 2.4 million people currently infected. Zoe's Professor Tim Spector was on TV yesterday saying that the 'R' number is still over 1. Omicron BA.2 is said to be even more transmissible than BA.1 so this may remain at over 1 for some time.



I believe the disparity between government figures falling and Zoe figures rising is because new cases are now only getting reported to the government if they are serious enough to need intervention. In the last few weeks, eight people in my immediate nine-person extended family of two daughters, husbands and children have contracted Covid and tested positive on LFTs. Only one was reported to the government.

However, UK ventilation figures are encouraging. In early November there were over 1,000 (presumably Delta) patients in mechanical ventilation beds in the UK. By early January despite dramatically rising case numbers, this number had fallen to 900. It has since steadily subsided and now stands at 478.

The seven-day rolling average of UK deaths peaked on 16 January at 290 and has since fallen back slightly to 275. Whilst all fatalities are regrettable, this should be compared to January 2021 peak of 1,248 at a time when infection rates were probably less than half of today which implies that Omicron combined with vaccines (though a disproportionate number of those dying are unvaccinated) results in a death rate of less than ten per cent of the Alpha wave.

I don't agree with some of the criticism, and there's quite an uproar on Wikipedia about the entries.

I have to say I'm not surprised that people coming at the epidemiology of the pandemic from different sides / with different agendas are are able to cherry pick statistical information to suit their case. I've just been reading an article in this week's British Medical Journal looking at the numbers of people dying with Covid / from Covid / because of Covid / where its tipped them over the edge etc and how the differing effects of the various different strains have impacted those numbers.

It's very multifactorial, with 'some novel trends' according to one academic. Under such circumstances it's probably inevitable that simplifications for social purpose will emerge. In the way of all such simplifications they're open to criticism.

Factchecking 101:
https://youtu.be/lMf-Zq7xJcY

In Switzerland we are back to normal life since thursday :scooter:

No masks, no certificates, no frequent vaccinations anymore. Not shure if you can get an update for vaccination for free (tax payed) anymore.

starting from march too the two left rules like wearing masks in public transport, and in hospitals are cancelled.

How is the situation in your country?

Surfy

I believe all four countries of the UK have now dropped most or all mask requirements and the last remaining rules around isolation may be scrapped next month in England, although I am not sure about the other three countries.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-60324928

Hopefully travel restrictions will be lifted soon

That's been a long running argument, and like dyno testing the value of any particular measure is less relevant as an absolute and more as a yardstick, to evaluate the increase or decrease caused by particular factors. Personally I prefer "excess deaths" as a measure because it also takes into account deaths caused by associated causes, such as failure to treat other conditions due to covid clogging care systems.

However you measure it the fact remains covid is an extremely dangerous disease that we should not take lightly. The UK seems to have normalised 2-300 people a day dying (within 28 days of a covid diagnosis, for the pedants), which is equivalent to a 9/11 scale death toll every 2 weeks. This staggers me in a country that is still trying to reduce road deaths from an average 4/day. And while people may see this as an acceptable price to pay for not having to wear masks on public transport (yes I'm being sarcastic) building up that sort of endemic situation is storing up trouble for the future until long lasting vaccines are developed, while the NHS has the biggest backlog in its history and chronic staff shortages, and an increasing number of people are suffering from long covid.

For us, I guess the day is coming closer when we can once again go on our extended holidays (let's not kid ourselves we are intrepid explorers) and frankly border closures are irrelevant while the virus is running rampant by community transmission due to inadequate public health measures and low vaccination rates. I reckon by next year fully vaccinated and boosted travellers will find their progress largely unimpeded, but for the world - particularly the poorer parts - the crisis is far from over.