PEAK OMICRON

The Countdown to Normal has Begun

When Governments are a) dysfunctional and b) truth-averse, you have to get your data from alternate sources.

Yesterday Angus Reid released a poll indicating that 9% of Canadians have tested positive for Omicron, and 21% were pretty sure they had had Omicron based on some combination of symptoms and/or testing. (Often Canadians were not able to get tested, two years into the pandemic.)

The survey also confirmed earlier data indicating Omicron is mild: 99% of those infected did not require hospitalization. Even this overstates the risk as the survey sample was almost all symptomatic. If we take into account asymptomatic cases, your risk of ending up in hospital is somewhere between one in two hundred and one in five hundred.

We know from places that do have competent Governments that somewhere between 50% and 80% of Omicron cases are asymptomatic.

If the upper figure is correct, virtually everyone who is going to catch Omicron has already done so. (Roughly 60% of those with natural immunity, and fifty percent of those with recent-but-not-too-recent boosters will not catch Omicron, although they will likely be exposed enough to Omicron to give their immune systems a tune-up and an update.)

If the lower figure is correct and only fifty percent of Omicron cases are asymptomatic, we can then estimate that 40% of Canadians have already had Omicron and recovered.

Exponential growth is really shocking in the final stages. It takes the same amount of time to go from 40% infection to 80% infection as it did to go between 0.4% and 0.8% infection, or between 4% infection and 8% infection.

Most of the interviews for the Angus Reid poll would have been done last weekend. People who were symptomatic long enough to be convinced they had Omicron and/or get tested, would have become infected by last Tuesday at the latest. So the Angus Reid data is already a week out of date in terms of measuring who has been infected with Omicron.

Early on, Omicron cases were doubling every three days. Even if the doubling time has now slowed to five days, that would suggest most of the remainder of the population would have been infected during the last week. (Many of the most newly-infected people won't develop symptoms till later this week.) In that case, today marks the peak of Omicron infections.

The spread of Omicron has been uneven. Some places will have passed the peak two weeks ago, and a few places may not reach the peak till next week, but pretty much everywhere in Canada will start to see the Omicron wave winding down very soon.

A couple of weeks from now, even our clueless Governments will realize what has happened. By then, case numbers will be dropping rapidly. Hospitalizations should have peaked and started to fall.

I suspect by then there will be huge pressure to follow the lead of Saskatchewan and cancel pretty much all of the COVID protocols for masking and social distancing. Yesterday's Angus Reid poll found that 54% of Canadians want to see COVID restrictions lifted. I suspect that number will go up rapidly in coming days.

Perhaps even the vaccine passports will go. (I could be wrong on that. Perhaps our Governments have not yet reached peak irrationality.) Rumour has it that Britain will cancel vaccine passports next week.

That's when things should get really interesting. As we enter a post-pandemic world, where the push to vaccinate everyone and their dog has disappeared, the mainstream media's unwillingness to talk about certain stories will shift. Once the media no longer feels the need to 'protect' people from stories that might cause them to be 'vaccine-hesitant', we can expect to see more coverage of issues related to vaccine side-effects. I'll talk about three of those stories tomorrow.