I suspect there will be a great deal of panic and gnashing of teeth among government officials and in the media this week over Omicron.
It you look at Canada's official stats, Omicron has infected only a tiny fraction of Canada's population. I would humbly suggest that this has more to do with how utterly incompetent Canada has been with testing and data tracking, than any accurate tallying of cases. To get any idea of the actual prevalence of Omicron, we need to look elsewhere.
There have been a slew of media reports over the last few days of hospitals, police departments, and fire departments all across Canada with between 5 and 10 percent of staff off sick with symptomatic Omicron. If eighty percent of Omicron cases are asymptomatic, we have to multiply that number by five to get an estimate of the percentage of essential workers who have been infected with Omicron: Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.
Hospitalization rates have been going up rapidly across the country: another indication that Omicron is widespread. I suspect the majority of those Omicron cases in hospital are incidental, i.e., the person came to hospital for some other reason and tested positive during pre-admission screening. (Interestingly enough, ICU admissions are going up much less rapidly.)
If we project forward a three-day doubling of Omicron cases from when cases were low enough to be able to measure them with some accuracy, that would lead us to suspect that roughly one-third of the Canadian population will be omicron-positive by tomorrow.
Some of that group will be pre-infectious. Some will be post-infectious. Some will have symptoms and be self-isolating. If we estimate that one-third of those who are Omicron-positive are neither pre- or post- infectious, nor in isolation, that still means that one person out of every nine that you encounter tomorrow at work, in a restaurant, or at the grocery store will be infectious with Omicron.
Unless you're a complete hermit, I would suggest that, if you haven’t already had Omicron, you will likely be exposed to it sometime during the next week. If you aren't exposed this week, you're almost certainly going to be exposed during the following week.
I suspect that death-rates from Omicron will spike over the next two weeks, and that will cause a huge panic in the media. Governments in Canada will provide Canadians with inadequate information about who is dying, which will feed that panic.
My 96-year-old father died of Omicron on Friday evening. Dad was in a care home. Dad had Alzheimer's and had been on supplemental oxygen for months. Dad's health had been deteriorating pretty rapidly over the past three months. Dad was fully-vaccinated and had had his booster. He died just three days after testing positive for COVID. There are 65 people at his care home infected with Omicron - so far. That's who will die of Omicron - the very old and frail.
Here's our family's experience with Omicron. (Technically, I don't know my wife and I have Omicron but we both tested positive on COVID rapid response tests on Friday, and our symptoms fit Omicron much better than Delta.)
My wife Caty is 47 and fully vaccinated. She developed a sore throat Tuesday afternoon and called in sick to work. By Wednesday she was feeling extremely cold, and thirsty. She's had sniffles, aches, and tiredness over the past four days. For three days her heart-rate was much higher than normal. Today she's pretty much recovered.
Our 11-year-old son, Juan Diego, unvaccinated, developed a sore throat and fever on Thursday evening and was a little under the weather for 36 ours and now seems almost back to normal. Our 14-year-old son Daniel, vaccinated, says he had a sore throat early in the week but thought nothing of it. Other than that he has shown no symptoms other than increased thirst.
I'm seventy, mildly asthmatic and unvaccinated. I had 24-hours starting Thursday morning where I had a headache, a sore throat, and absolutely zero energy. I spent 24 hours in bed. After that I bounced back and felt completely fine for 12 hours. Then I had a second round, with much reduced symptoms.
My wife made us all a hot tea of lemon, honey, garlic, and tumeric. I've been taking lots of vitamins. I've taken Tylenol for the headache. I took 6mg of ivermectin twice a day for three days - all I had - and that really seemed to help. (Human ivermectin, from Ecuador!) I've had some fever - between 37.3 degrees and 38.3. It's gone now.
Like my wife, my heart-rate was elevated - over 100 when resting. My blood oxygen was marginally lower than normal. My heart rate and blood oxygen are now back to normal.
In normal times, I suspect my wife would describe her symptoms as a mild flu. I would have said I'd had a nasty flu, but nothing more. It was a little scary, given all the hype about COVID. But no big deal. I’m hearing very similar stories from other people I know, or know of, with symptomatic Omicron, such as fellow Substacker Mathew Crawford and his wife.
Here's my prediction. Over the next two weeks, we will see the equivalent of an entire flu season of deaths among the very old and frail. A few weeks after that there will be a second, very much smaller spike in deaths among younger patients with comorbidities.
I suspect the hospitals will have difficulty coping, as much from staff-shortages as from any flood of new admissions.
If you haven't already had Omicron, unless you're a complete hermit, you will likely get infected with Omicron sometime during the next two weeks. There's an 80% chance you'll have an asymptomatic infection - you won't even know you've had it. There's roughly a one in five chance you'll have flu-like symptoms similar to what I have described.
It's possible, if you're older and\or have multiple co-morbidities you could have more serious complications. The evidence from South Africa, where the Omicron wave has already passed through, is that the risk of that happening is quite low.
Once you've recovered you will have great natural immunity to COVID. We all will. Maybe in a month we can all get on with normal life. In the mean time: don't sweat it.
PS: My wife said taking the COVID test was as truamatic as taking a pregnancy test as a teenager! Though we posted our COVID tests online with the BC Government on Friday, there’s been zero response. But that’s been the story throughout this pandemic: until and unless you can’t breathe, the BC government pretty much abandons you.
I'm still amazed at how the government has done so little.
I am glad you post frequently so I can have real news, not what the government stuffs in our throats.
At this point, the government is just making the pandemic last longer.