Omicron is likely to be a game changer, but possibly not in ways we can immediately anticipate.
There are early, encouraging signs that the severity of disease the variant induces will be reduced compared to Alpha and Delta.
This could conceivably be a consequence of the manner in which Omicron's mutations occurred within the immuno-suppressed HIV+ communities of southern Africa.
An essentially pneumonia-free version of covid, infectious enough to largely displace all its older relatives, could end up saving the world.
At the very least it would save the world's ICU units from overflow while saving governments from having to make unpopular one-size-fits-all dictats in the interests of preserving the healthcare systems they oversee.
But it would represent an unexpected catastrophe for the likes of Moderna and Pfizer, who must already have been anticipating the share price gains from predictably regular boosters and tweaks to their formulas for years to come.
Moderna's CEO has been out jabbering this week, making a lot of people poorer in the short term, but perhaps it is time to cover our ears.
Think of all the investment which has gone and continues to go into the fight against SARS-Cov-2. Not just vaccines , but therapies. If the need for these suddenly became less urgent, imagine how many might be left out of pocket rather suddenly.
It's too soon to say whether this is the scenario which now presents itself, but it is certainly one we should at least be entertaining.
We don't really want to live in a world where vaccine boosters and renewable vaccine passports for basic activities are a near permanent feature of everyday life.
We don't really want covid to be suppressed artificially, we want it to be an endemic pathogen to which we have natural defences and for our most vulnerable groups to be no more threatened by it than say seasonal flu.
Many people can and should continue to wear masks, as many have done in Asia for over a decade, but in the end this should be voluntary where possible.
There may still be some severe economic consequences in the immediate term, but these are perhaps likely to come as a result of a failure to control inflation. (Consumer prices rose 4.9% in the eurozone in November according to an early flash reading, a level not seen since the currency's inception in 1999.)
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The current plague seems to be holding to a standard timeline established in the past, before vaccines, of about two years of mass infection, widespread death and then a tapering off to a more chronic problem that affects only those who catch an old variant.
As to inflation, a good bit of that number is energy, if you look at a ten year priceline, it is a wash. Here in the US, a great deal of the pricing would appear to be: "Let's see what the market will bare". The shortage of labor is driving up wages, wages were too low for many years from a demographic bulge called the boomers-they are aging out of work in droves. We'll see more legal immigration shortly.
The government printing vast amounts of cash and delivering it into almost everyone's bank account would account for the majority of this year's 5% inflation. I understand it was a US infusion of cash but once it is spent here in the US, it is free to slosh out into the world's dollar economy. At least 60% of worldwide tradable goods are priced in dollars. I think the question is: Will it be a one off?
Japan's lack of inflation gives me pause.
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