Tsunammi

Stupid people say some pretty gormless things with an attitude of smugness. But then so too do clever people. 

Next time you hear an expert or, heaven forbid, a scientist, state that Omicron is going to be far worse than any previous variant because more contagious strains, albeit less severe symptom-wise, will always end up killing more people, you might have to tell them to go and stand in a corner until the pandemic ends.

Don’t let them easily bamboozle you with their cherry-picked and sometimes rather abstract charts. 

 

If Delta and Omicron were fresh out of natural selection and lined up together on the starting line, rearing to go, the whole of untouched humanity in their sights, then yes, maybe. But that is not the situation we are in.

Delta started earlier and is now perhaps flagging. The human hosts have been transformed into a more complicated set of populations each with their own essential characteristics, acquired protections, pandemic-conditioned behaviours and so on. The differences of culture, season and geography remain. And the variants may vary quite significantly this time in their basic potential to harm us. And we all remain fundamentally ignorant, one way or another.

Chris Witty himself trotted out a version of the faster+weaker=more deadly paradigm and then added something he must have known undermines it: Delta and Omicron are possibly not even racing against each other, but are instead on different racetracks.

Yet that hypothesis, for which the research will have to play catch up, was surely designed to give us the public on the end of it a sense that TWO pandemics operating in parallel were of course going to double the load on the NHS.

At what point to do we start to tune out of all the screaming about record case numbers? Nicola Sturgeon kicked it all off in the UK with her ‘Tsunami’ alert, but has since gone a bit quiet, and for once the Scottish Parliament is not trying to outdo the English with preventative measures.

 

Meanwhile, London's mayor Sadiq Khan has come up with at least a temporary solution to the absence of a proper crisis, a kind of variation on the Mohammed and the Mountain proverb. If there aren't enough patients heading to the hospitals, don't worry, because the real problem now is that there are now not enough front line staff to receive them due to Omicron-driven absenteeism.