^
That ain’t going to happen for a long time unfortunately as governments and the news keeps ratcheting the fear porn for rona.

I'm going to Cabo in February. The thought of taking a test 24 hours in advance of my US bound flight and potentially testing positive in Mexico, being forced to quarantine there for 7, 10, 14 days is scary. To bypass that, I bought tickets out of Tijuana. There won't be a need to take a test in Cabo because it's a Mexican domestic flight and then when you land, you walk across the border which doesn't have testing requirements in place.

And another reason, the tickets were about $700 cheaper flying in and out of Tijuana compared to SAN.

The idea is being floated that NYC may castrate its New Years Eve celebration.

:(

Keyword, "may".

Although there might not be a point. Same with closing schools. The peak is coming, the ones that aren't vaxxed will get it, and life will resume. By March, should be fine.

But any sort of restrictions will not stop this. A little late on that bandwagon.

Impact: teens with not much to do decide to start painting rooms in the house.

Everyone is going to get Covid. Everyone. If you haven’t had it yet, you will. If you’ve had it already you’ll probably get it again soon enough. If you are vaccinated, you have nothing to worry about (even the unvaccinated usually have nothing to worry about).

Enough already.

There isn’t even a point to restrictions at this point. A strict March 2020 style lockdown can reduce transmission, for a few weeks, at huge cost, but when it’s lifted cases will just rise again. And more modest restrictions are just for show, and for government to look like it’s doing something. They’re doing to do something impossible, and it’s time to just let everyone get this one variant.

I’ve just returned to London for Christmas. It might be a short visit. If they go back into lockdown here, I’m having movers come and returning to the US permanently.


edit: what is shocking here, just from the airport and taxi through central London, is the sheer number of old people out and about. Not only are the demographic differences stark after being in a much younger US city for a couple weeks, but obviously the first step if there’s any concern about Omicron should be telling old people to stay out of shops and restaurants. It’s December 2020 all over again.

I mean, there aren't a lot of people in South Florida "out and about" as regular pedestrians, of any age.

Yeah, some touristy areas like South Beach, a bit in Brickell and a few other nodes. London is a real city where people of all ages regularly walk, for daily tasks. Who in South Florida is walking for groceries?

this is complete ignorance and fake news. not everyone is going to get covid. not even close. even the spanish flu peak was one third at most.

of course in your case you may very likely personally be the cause of someone getting it, but that is another story. :rolleyes:

^
The world is a much more connected place than it was 100 years ago. Therefor, it is logical to conclude that nearly everyone at some point in the next couple of years will get this largely innocuous virus.

Maybe not infected with severe illness, but I agree that most people will get exposed, if they already haven't. You can't look at Omicron and think most people won't get exposed somehow...... You're living in a bubble if you think there's not a significant chance you get in contact with it at some point. Doesn't mean you need to freak out, but just be aware of how easily this thing can spread.

Anecdotally, I never became symptomatic after recently having a large number of direct exposures. I tested negative about 1.5 weeks ago but haven't tested again because no symptoms, and I'm no longer planning to travel. I assume that all of these cases were omicron, since they were all vaccinated and I'd never personally seen that type of spread among vaccinated during the waves of delta. All of my known direct exposures were about three weeks after I had the booster. Everyone I have spoken to who has been infected in the past two weeks was either not boosted or within 2 weeks of the booster.

you do realize there is quite a wide gap between one third perhaps at peak got the spanish flu and the fey, whiny nonsense that literally everyone will get covid.

not to mention, if it is or fades away to that innocuous as you think, in the end no one will ever really know or care. :shrug:

^
Whiny nonsense that everyone or nearly everyone will get covid? Nearly everyone I know has already had it, Ive had it twice. My gf had it, we both hardly got sick and both of us got more sick with the shot than with actual covid. The majority of cases people dont even know theyve had it. So, its pretty reasonable to deduce that almost everyone has had it or will get it soon. How in the world is that whiny or fey?

i wasnt referring to you -- but i would remind you your remark is very anecdotal. 10-20% of the world may have had covid, which puts it right on the same likely track as spanish flu. of course if its as nothing as you think and your personal experience we will never know.

Very easily and folks have to understand that it's extraordinarily contagious (this new Omicron).

Not quite Measles but not to far off. Folks will get it!

Seems like the big issue is the Delta, for those at high risk. But yeah... in a nutshell, folks will get it.

Maybe a way to look at it (speaking in general) is to think of the common cold. Almost everyone gets the common cold at some point in their lives. Now... Covid in its dominant forms, the ones circulating, is extremely contagious... so if one has gotten a cold... one sure as hell will get this in time. Unless they take a SpaceX rocket to Mars and live there in isolation. :shrug:

Did they count asymptomatic cases of Spanish flu?

The world is much more connected and much more urbanised today (at the time the US urban population percentage was just over 50%, now it’s over 80%). There aren’t a lot of farmers and rural villages.

More importantly, the Spanish flu isn’t the right comparison. That was a particular strain that caused a pandemic for a limited period of time; it’s like saying that not everyone got Delta which is true. But your chances of evading Covid forever are about as good as never getting “the flu”.

The proportion of people who had had Covid was estimated to have been 20% (1 in 5) back in January 2021. That was halfway through so far, before the full Delta wave or Omicron.

When I say “everyone will get it”, I am both speaking loosely (I do not literally mean 100% of the population) and I mean eventually. Covid will be around forever, like the flu, and at some point you’ll get Covid, just like how at some point you’ll get some strain of flu.

The “Spanish flu” is still around btw. The name of the actual virus that caused that pandemic is influenza A/H1N1 and strains of it still cause seasonal flu outbreaks.

if omnicron winds down to as nothing as photolith seems to think, then we'll never know because covid could fade right off the radar. or if catching that is enough to give everyone "muh natural immunities" to other strains of covid.

one thing is for certain, there is no way this testing crush we are currently seeing for the christmas holiday travel season will keep up that pace after the new year. the best data we will ever have will be from this month.

It would be a wise thing to listen to what actual epidemiologists and virologists have to say about this pandemic... They made some mistakes so far because this branch of viruses is new. They didn't know about the original strain or any possible variant, so they couldn't predict about anything. Nevertheless, they're still the only credible experts because they've been trained and worked for their entire lives on such things and they've always warned the population: when viruses keep on going, they mutate, give birth to tougher variants and the outbreak is harder to stop.

It's funny how ignorant people think they know about everything. In my country, we've seen some inept people to make jokes of themselves by speaking to the media as if they were specialized microbiologists, while they don't know a single thing of what they talk about.

In a nutshell, when you're not qualified at all to solve the problem, you simply shut your mouth and rely on people who've been educated to address the issue.
That's it. That's all you can do.

^ This is a French attitude and not an American one (or even an Anglo-American one). More and more, I think this is a good thing for Americans.

We ask why. If I’m told to do something I want to know what it’s expected to achieve.

And epidemiologists/virologists aren’t the only experts worth listening to. How about economists, psychologists, etc? There has always been a trade off required, we can’t eliminate all deaths from Covid (which will continue forever) and shouldn’t try. The goal is not to prevent every death. I see no evidence so far that Omicron is causing an unacceptably high number of deaths. Neither does the UK government, apparently (though everyone will have their own definition of “acceptable deaths” and mine is probably higher than average).

This is ideology. Not science. Scientists are simply meant to solve problems efficiently by rigorous and strict methods. That's what they're paid for and I have the greatest respect for that.

The rest is mostly politics. Neither economics or psychology are any solid science. Even less so politics.

It all depends on your personal culture, which is nothing much related to any French-ness or American behavior. I'm sure a lot of French would agree with you. They would speak the same kind of speech. It is proven already, by the way.
And a lot of Americans would agree with me as well.

Democratic republics have the ideal of the informed layman, which is really where the decision-making is meant to occur. Scientists and similar may well communicate their findings (in appropriately lay fashion) for discussion and debate, but the American (and I think the English as well) ideal is not technocracy.

Plus why should a economist decide what to do for a virus? Probably because that's 10023's job :haha:.

It is mostly based on if people can handle COVID restrictions or not. People that can't handle them will fight tooth and nail/spread misinformation because they can't deal with wearing a mask. If they just say they "don't like" it, then that's fine, but when they flat out lie because they don't like it? F that.

Yep.

Scientists and science are tremendously important, but they should never set public policy. They have a tendency towards tunnel vision about their own fields at the expense of everything (and everyone) else.

My little pocket of Atlanta, East Atlanta Village, EAV, apparently is suddenly awash in the Vid. Dozens of my friends are posting today they've got it; I'm going for a test at 6:10. Nearly all of our bars and restaurants are shut down due to outbreaks of the Vid and the need to test everyone before things can open back up. I've got all the classic Omicron symtoms that arrived out of the blue yesterday. Very frustrating after I've been so damn careful these last two years. I guess I'll find out in a couple hours now.

In San Diego I haven't met one person that has altered their lifestyle in the last year or so from Delta or in the last month from Omicron. When you're fully vaccinated with a booster, nobody cares what the CDC says and AAA has confirmed this sentiment with their latest information on travel. This is the third most busiest travel season ever recorded in the US and is approaching 2019 levels. 14 million Californians are going to travel this week and over 100 million Americans.

The pandemic ended for us on June 15th, which is interesting considering people think it's some sort of lockdown nightmare :shrug:. We were even called "the lockdown state". Very unfair!

Scientists are meant to advise on the facts as they understand them (which of course can change). Politicians make decisions based on a wide range of considerations - disease epidemiology, case rates, and even deaths resulting from these being but one. Even in a technocracy, which as kool maudit says is not our form of government, the views of other experts such as economists, sociologists and psychologists would also be taken into consideration.

The whole problem with this farce may have begun when political leaders decided to outsource decision-making to the public health bureaucracy.

The pandemic ended much earlier in San Diego. We stopped obeying California and SDC's capacity limits and indoor mask orders much sooner than the rest of the state.

Did you guys earn it though? Rural Nor Cal sorta...never really had a lockdown, but had large numbers of unvaccinated that flooded beds for Delta. There still was no mask mandate...
I have no problem supporting places that wanna have some rules though.

Even if you think we should be directed by technocrats, they should be transparent about their level of uncertainty. How many of them predicted the drop off in cases that's happening now in South Africa?

When you point this out usually people say that it's OK because we only care about the worst case. Actually the worst case is that an asteroid destroys the planet 2 seconds from now and none of the epidemiology matters. Merely constructing possible worst-case hypotheticals of unknown probability is not useful for directing rational policy decisions.

In any case, we have now been ordered not to have gatherings of more than 2 households for the second Christmas period in a row (I think last Christmas may have been no gatherings except with at-risk grandparents or something).

Here, any such 'order' would be interpreted as a mere suggestion. No one is going to tell the average American they cannot celebrate the holidays with family and friends. Perhaps a few of those in favor of all the mandates who brow beat others for not complying might sit home on Christmas wearing masks but that's about it.

I just think its insane that we shuttered society from the get go. The residual damage to society has been infinitely worse. No more is this more apparent than America's emotional basket case, Portland. They should have just made everyone wear a mask from the beginning and just kept on trucking. Apparently the entire state of Utah and I agree.

Health and safety policies are always designed around the worst case. You don't want to get on a plane that hasn't been tested for the worst case scenario, or fly with a flight crew that doesn't prepare for worst case scenarios.

Well, looks like my wife and I timed our expected due date (Jan 20) with the likely omicron peak lol. After today, I'm no longer allowed to go to outpatient OB visits (was lucky to have one this morning, including an ultrasound, though the usual ultrasound tech was out sick...), though we're assured I'll still be allowed in labor and delivery.

We were considering inducing at 39 weeks, but it may not be possible due to hospital staffing constraints.

In other news, my employer is now, fortunately, requiring boosters:

The problem is tail risk is highly asymmetric, and if you only have to lose once for it to be a big problem. How many cylinders would it take before you would be comfortable playing Russian Roulette for $100?

We're not really talking about tail risk (known distribution), we're talking about uncertainty (random things happen). Few to nobody seem able to quantify much or look at the balance of probabilities and nobody has a good track record of prediction. And there's all this pushback against arguing that nobody understands what's going on beyond a few basics (e.g. get vaccinated). I think this tail risk idea (somewhat more colloquially presented as "what if it all goes off the rails" scenarios) is just bias toward random sets of actions we did in the past.

The goalposts have moved too. Here in Canada 80%+ of people are vaccinated but we're implementing a bunch of preemptive measures.

Another point is that the cost of the interventions matters. For trivial costs we usually don't care much but the bar should be higher if the costs are significant. Many people seem to argue that trivial interventions implemented without much evidence are proof we should implement expensive interventions without much evidence.

Adding a scenario to flight crew training doesn't have a very high cost and there's data on the incidents that do occur. Seatbelts are similar. So were preparations for pandemics like the acquisition of PPE.

Once you start talking about broad measures that impact society, like closing down schools or businesses, or telling people not to visit friends and family, the costs are orders of magnitude higher and the evidence bar or expected payoff should be higher. It shouldn't be enough just to say "tail risk".

It's telling that for a segment of society, at least around here, the availability of highly effective vaccines made practically no difference to what measures they think make sense. I believe they have a political impact and have shifted the response so that it is out of proportion with the threat.

I'm not following your distinction between tail risk and uncertainty. An unknown distribution effectively just makes the tail risk worse, since you can't bound it as well and have to integrate over your ignorance when looking at the "balance of probabilities."

The tricky thing though is most of the time when you optimize for avoiding tail risk, you'll have appeared to have taken ultimately unnecessary precautions in hindsight, but that doesn't mean you made the wrong decision.

If you know the distribution you calculate expected value for cost-benefit (assign what cost you want to the tail risk). If you don't you can't do this. Maybe you will implement countermeasures anyway if they are cheap. If they're not cheap and you keep doing that for every low probability threat you will run out of resources and cause more harms eventually. The "odds don't matter, do everything you can" scenario doesn't work well in the real world with many different goals and scarce resources. Obviously there's a lot more to covid and the omicron scenarios but that's one basic intuition to have.

You never know the real distribution except in toy examples or physics (and even then, you often don't really...). You always have to marginalize over uncertainties. If they are large, then yes, your tail risk blows up and that sucks....
And if you ignore every low probability threat eventually (for some value of eventually...) we all die. I agree you should consider catastrophic economic impacts in decision making if they are potentially ruinous (and this calculus differs between societies), but we don't always have good choices. In many interesting ways, this mirrors climate change mitigations, though there we are further complicated that the majority of the risk is in the indeterminate future...

Anyway, at least around here, nobody is proposing any particularly expensive countermeasures for omicron (except perhaps for those who refuse to vaccinate). I don't see the Christmas gathering mandate as particularly economically onerous either (though it is inconvenient, no doubt... this will be my third Christmas away from family in a row, the first because I was at the South Pole, the second because of 2020, and now because of omicron + having a baby due soon).

Sure. I think we are basically in agreement but you need some kind of factor to weight your decision making. You cannot just say there is a tail risk of unknown likelihood (that maybe will kill us all) so you will invest an unbounded amount of resources. You will go broke.

I am not sure this really makes sense as a government's perspective. Humanity has persisted for a long time despite a lack of tail risk planning. Maybe governments can help, maybe they can't. For covid, the scenario never was "we all die", it was maybe that the outcome would be 2x or 3x worse and 0.5% would die instead of 0.1% or 0.05%. Perhaps very early on we might have said the worst case was 1% dead. Today with vaccines the non-laughable worst case for omicron is lower than that. People will say this is a lot of deaths, which is true, but it is pretty easy to piss away 0.05% of your population's quality of life in other ways (as we have done). And the normal baseline rate of death that we don't manage to prevent is about 1% per year.

The actual death rate due to covid where I live is 0.05% during the entire pandemic while the CFR is 1%.

I think the more laissez-faire parts of the US are better than we are for countermeasures but people in those places often made worse decisions by not getting vaccinated. Around here we have high vaccination rates but lots of countermeasures.

Wait, no gatherings except with at-risk grandparents? Surely it would be the opposite - no gatherings with at-risk grandparents.

For $100 there’s no point. But for a billion dollars I’d be comfortable with six. How do you value leading a normal life?

But it’s a bad analogy anyway. The lockdowns and restrictions were guaranteed downside, and pretty significant ones. For me the actual virus posed an infinitely tiny risk of a more severe downside. I’ve had it twice and it was nothing.

That was a joke but as I said earlier there was at one point (during one of the worst phases of the pandemic) an exception for grandparents to visit their grandkids. Our current social gathering rule is "max 10 or 2 households, only if vaccinated, and keep the group consistent". Probably about what we had in June 2020 when nobody was vaccinated. On paper, if you are eligible but not vaccinated, regardless of your age or whether you had covid already, you are never supposed to visit anybody and cannot go to non-essential businesses. This is in place because we are worried that omicron will hypothetically overwhelm the healthcare system, which like the UK is permanently in shambles. Over 18's are something like 91% vaccinated and over 65 are probably more like 95%+.

I guess you could argue that these restrictions may not be so harmful because people won't follow them but I am not sure that's a good defense of them as public policy.

Back in the spring there was an attitude that the vaccination drive would be the end of the pandemic and if people would get vaccinated (I think the made up number back then was 60-80%) we would go back to normal. With our current approach to hypothesizing about variants and preemptively implementing measures we may never return to normal because there will always be a possibly serious variant and there will be spikes in cases every so often.

Yikes...

According to this Los Angeles Times article, https://www.latimes.com/california/s...-and-questions, Omicron is "sweeping" through California, but somehow we still have "one of the lowest coronavirus case rates in the nation, [and] will be better equipped to handle an Omicron surge than other states that were still reeling from the Delta surge when Omicron started spreading."

No lockdowns are being talked about either in California. I hope there won't be any anymore, at least not in the near future... for selfish reasons, admittedly. My partner and I have the day off tomorrow and already made reservations for our December 24th tapas feast at La Paella. :P

https://www.usalapaella.com/

I'm gonna go tapas crazy if all goes well. :P

I'm surprised that it hasn't happened in California already, but the wave is certainly heading there. A lot of bars and restaurants in NYC have closed this week because so many workers have tested positive.

ETA: Just got an email from a venue in Brooklyn that I hang out at sometime. They are going to hold their NYE party outdoors and then shut down for two weeks after that.

^^^^

Yeah the NYC NYE celebration will also be reduced in its magnitude. I was actually going to go to the city this Sunday with my girl but will postpone, just because it will be wack with all of these restrictions. Fuckin Covid and the panic! :(

I just hope this panic doesn't ruin my Atlanta, GA trip at the end of January.

I had a negative COVID test yesterday and they also tested for Flu A and B and I was negative, but here in the last 30 minutes I've received word that a neice, a newphew, and my sister, have all tested positive for COVID on re-tests. I'm receiving new at home tests via overnight delivery tomorrow and will re-test. I think I have it and now I'm second guessing my negative test yesterday.

We were all at my family's annual holiday party on Sunday evening out in the Atlanta burbs. A condition of entry was same day negative testing which we all did.

^ You’re joking, right?

Don't worry - you're not going to miss much unless you're into strip clubs.