NJ 2022 01 29

 Approaching the second anniversary of my announcement of a pandemic, next week. Here is the latest. Clearly State and County decreasing from omicron.

Deaths continue to rise. Rate is low but the peak has not been reached. It is 6-10 weeks after peak infection.

Town doubling up a bit, still younger spreading drives the infection.

Now in Nature there is an excellent overview of how little we know of omicron, and perhaps the virus in general. They note:

Little more than two months after it was first spotted in South Africa, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world faster than any previous versions. Scientists have tracked it in more than 120 countries, but remain puzzled by a key question: where did Omicron come from? There’s no transparent path of transmission linking Omicron to its predecessors. Instead, the variant has an unusual array of mutations, which it evolved entirely outside the view of researchers. Omicron is so different from earlier variants, such as Alpha and Delta, that evolutionary virologists estimate its closest-known genetic ancestor probably dates back to more than a year ago, some time after mid-2020 (ref. ¹). “It just came out of nowhere,” says Darren Martin, a computational biologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The question of Omicron’s origins is of more than academic importance. Working out under what conditions this highly transmissible variant arose might help scientists to understand the risk of new variants emerging, and suggest steps to minimize it, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatoon, Canada. “It’s very difficult to try to mitigate a risk that you can’t even remotely wrap your head around,” she says.

 At the heart of science is uncertainty and even more so surprises. We recognized omicron a day after it was identified and said it would explode. There were 30+ mutations, a very large number exceeding the "natural laws" of viral mutations.

In contrast the Bishop of Rome as noted in the NY Times states:

Information based on scientific facts is a human right, Pope Francis said Friday, urging Catholic journalists to help people who were misled by false reports about the coronavirus and vaccines.  “To be properly informed, to be helped to understand situations based on scientific data and not fake news, is a human right,” the pope told members of the International Catholic Media Consortium on Covid-19 Vaccines. An “infodemic” was spreading, the pope said, calling it “a distortion of reality based on fear, falsified or invented news.” Journalists and scientists, he added, should treat those who believe in false information with respect and not place them in “ghettos.” Instead, they should try to build bridges to those who need to hear scientific truths.

 If we know so little and things change so quickly then one must ask what is the truth. Scientific data is an ever changing flow based upon what we can measure and how we interpret it, and false information today may be fact tomorrow. 

All one has to do is review the concept of herd immunity. We denied its existence from the beginning in this pandemic. ssRNA viruses mutate at a phenomenal rate and thus what was fact yesterday is like the Times of yesterday, perhaps good for wrapping rotten fish for the trash.

The omicron virus opens the door on a volume of new questions. It will take time to get some answers.