The Hill this morning estimated as many as five million workers will call in sick today, hamstringing organizations all across America. I suspect The Hill report was based on a Wall Street Journal Article on the same issue.
Though I suspect the five million figure is little more than a ball-park guestimate, it’s probably not a bad starting point, given the abundance of media articles about various organizations across America curtailing or cancelling services this week due to staff shortages.
It also makes sense given that traces of COVID in Massachusetts sewage are orders of magnitude higher than with previous variants:
We have to suspect that official CDC Omicron stats are only a small subset of actual Omicron cases. The CDC is way behind the curve - AGAIN.
If eighty percent of Omicron cases are asymptomatic, five million workers with symptomatic Omicron means we can guess there are roughly 20 million workers at work today with asymptomatic Omicron blithely spreading it to their uninfected co-workers. For this reason, we should expect a continuation of the previous pattern of Omicron cases doubling every three days to continue.
If five million workers are off sick today, we can therefore expect 20,000 workers to be off work sick six days from today. We can also suspect there will be a further 80,000 workers asymptomatically infected with Omicron by that date.
That will probably be the peak of the Omicron wave, given that we have to assume a significant proportion of those with natural immunity from previous variants will fight off Omicron, as will a significant proportion of those who have had vaccine booser shots. After that, we can expect cases to drop off rapidly. But this week will be full-on CRAZY in America. Be ready.