Omicron is in Retreat

Adding some support to the Vietnam War analogy, today’s New York Times says “Omicron Is in Retreat”, with the implication that any decline in “cases” is due to the efforts of the human army and its generals (the Covidcrats):

In the human v. virus war (it has to be a war because one army is retreating), humans are “winning” and it will be humans who decide on when to “close the books” on the spread of the virus:

Since early last week, new cases in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York have fallen by more than 30 percent. They’re down by more than 10 percent in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In California, cases may have peaked.

“Let’s be clear on this — we are winning,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York said yesterday. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York State, said during a budget speech, “We hope to close the books on this winter surge soon.”

The Tet Offensive of SARS-CoV-2 may continue through Tet (February 1), however:

The Covid situation in the U.S. remains fairly grim, with overwhelmed hospitals and nearly 2,000 deaths a day. It’s likely to remain grim into early February. Caseloads are still high in many communities, and death trends typically lag case trends by three weeks.

On FaceTime last night with a group of friends back in Lincoln, Maskachusetts, a physician said that his hospital was full and transferring patients to other hospitals. Quite a few of the “COVID cases” within the hospital had been acquired in the hospital, due to folks ignoring the April 2020 idea of building renal dialysis-style clinics for COVID treatment (would keep most COVID patients from going to the hospital in the first place). The Democrats in the group then riffed about their dream of denying medical care to the unvaccinated. In their view, it was inconceivable that a vaccinated (“responsible”) human could require hospitalization for COVID-19, but the unvaccinated were nonetheless making it tough for the vaccinated to get ordinary hospital care, e.g., for cardiac issues.

My response to this virtue-based triage system was that, due to American incompetence with keeping medical records and the country’s persistent refusal to implement a chip-in-the-neck system, anyone who was about to be kicked out of the hospital for being unvaccinated (“Djokoviced,” after the first athlete to be banned and deported for not taking drugs) could simply say “I was vaccinated at a Walmart in Punxsutawney,” but lost my vaccine papers. How would the hospital in Maskachusetts be able to check?

A generally conservative member of the group (though he had voted for Obama) pointed out that we did not deny medical care to the obese, to alcoholics, or to drug addicts (I corrected him using CDC preferred terms, such as “Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs” and “Persons with alcohol use disorder”). This was not persuasive, however, and the Democrats still wanted to exclude the unvaccinated from health care, as they are already excluded from public places in Boston. Confirming our loyal reader/commenter Mike’s worst suspicions, I suggested that the final stage of the Democrats’ triage system for the unvaccinated could be a job as an extra in the next Alec Baldwin film.

Speaking of Massachusetts, it look as though the January 15, 2022 implementation of a vaccine paper check requirement was highly effective. Nearly 15,000 cases of COVID-19 occurred on January 14. Excluding the unvaccinated from restaurants, etc., reduced infection to 0 cases on January 15. From Google: