Thread by @HZiauddeen

🧵 COVID-19: The unbearable 'mildness' of Omicron

The 'Omicron is mild' narrative was seeded very early and is being heavily pushed at the moment by the usual scientists, journalists & politicians.

Students of context should be cautious on these grounds alone.
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I'll link to 🧵s by much smarter people for detailed information but here's a summary.
-Omicron seems, at best, slightly less bad than delta, which remains very bad.
-Omicron can escape immunity acquired from vaccination/previous infection to a significant extent.
(2/15)

-This means that if you are vaccinated or you were previously infected with delta or other variants (vax/inf), it will not protect you from catching Omicron like it would have protected you from catching delta or catching delta again.
(3/15)

(Remember protection IS NOT 100%, it is about significantly reduced risk)
-You are therefore at risk of catching Omicron.
-If you do catch Omicron, being vaccinated/previously infected, does protect you from severe illness, so your illness will be more likely mild.
(4/15)

-So Omicron's very worrying advantage (evading immunity) actually makes it look milder until you realise 'Shit! It's infecting the folks we thought we'd protected!'
-Then factor in that Omicron is growing exponentially (on top of the ongoing delta pandemic).
(5/15)

-Even if the illness is milder, with exponential growth, you'll have more cases, more hospitalisations, more LongCOVID.
(Let's not get into how dire this is for a collapsed healthcare system)
-Given we have relied pretty much solely on vaccines, Omicron is really bad news.
(6/15)

-All the plans of vaccinating some critical %age of the population and then 'opening up' and 'living with the virus', are dealt a major blow by a new variant that is going to evade this main/only line of defence you have put up.
(7/15)

-The nonsensical and dangerous idea of infecting people, especially children, to make them immune is made even more ridiculous than it already was.
-And the vulnerable folk we want to protect most, this will hit them the hardest.
(8/15)

Basically having a new variant that evades immunity, and is growing on top of the delta pandemic is really bad news. Immune escape has been a major fear all along the way. And we now know the vaccine induced immunity wanes over a few months.
(9/15)

So why is this clearly bad news, being spun so ardently as fake positive news?

Well,:
-we have a govt that really does not want to take any steps to control transmission or help the public.
-we have prominent scientists and journalists who are supporting the above.
(10/15)

-with immune escape now here, the window for pushing through 'vaccinate and open up' is limited. 'Herd immunity' and 'focused protection', both complete nonsense, are again revealed to be just nonsense.
(11/15)

-So this is a critical period to resist calls to intervene but also to get 'vaccinate and open up' plans through. Once you've got them through (just like what happened with Freedom Day), it's much harder to reverse.
(12/15)

Thus, 'this is mild' is a crucial narrative to have in place:
-to say that those calling for more interventions are overreacting/being alarmists.
-to present oneself as being balanced and proportionate
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-to continue with infecting children and adults with a novel virus with long term effects is somehow ok because 'it's mild!'.
-to defend oneself at future enquiries and court hearings.

It's not mild. Protect yourself as best as you can.
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🧵s:

https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1474042179110772736?s=20

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1474027198763966515?s=20

https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1473764701553283076?s=20

https://twitter.com/_nickdavies/status/1473941671196905478?s=20

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