For Those About to Grok

We don’t know enough about omicron to know what to expect. That will take a couple more weeks. But we know some things. We know it spreads really fast. South Africa’s new cases doubled in 24 hours. We know that so far, the cases associated with the new variant have been relatively mild. (We need more time to see if that holds.) We know that Omicron is in the US. We had a case in San Francisco and a Minnesota man who’s been diagnosed with omicron recently attended NYC anime convention at Javits Center. We know that leaders around the world will push for more caution and more vaccinations (Germany is cutting off many activities to the unvaccinated and moving towards mandatory vaccinations, and they won’t be the last country to do so). We know that there will be pushback to these sane restrictions and that there are some folks who seem unconvincible. Uninsured adults, Republicans, and white evangelicals continue to lag in vaccine uptake with one in four saying they definitely won’t get the vaccine. And we know that while omicron could be bad, it could also have an upside. Rachel Gutman in The Atlantic: Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios. “If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news.” (A lot has to go our way for this to happen, so don’t spike the spike protein just yet.)

+ “Biden’s plan to fight the coronavirus this winter is a battle of increments: efforts to get booster shots into the arms of all adults and especially seniors, setting up family vaccine clinics, offering more free and lower-cost at-home testing options, stockpiling antiviral pills and readying strike teams to help states with outbreaks.” (Tests should be available free at every library, government building, pharmacy, etc.)

+ Here are the latest (free) updates from WaPo.