The recent COVID data for Archuleta County has been encouraging. San Juan Basin Public Health reported only 15 new cases between February 24 and March 23.
Local cases are currently at levels not seen since November 2020, prior to Archuleta County’s first COVID surge. But some authorities are warning of a coming ‘surge’ in the U.S. in the coming weeks or months, based on the arrival of another Omicron ‘subvariant’ named BA.2.
From a March 25 brief by Kaiser Health News, ‘As Signs Of New Variant Reported in U.S., Health Officials Raise New Alarms’:
As coronavirus infections rise in some parts of the world, experts are watching for a potential new COVID-19 surge in the U.S. — and wondering how long it will take to detect. Despite disease monitoring improvements over the last two years, they say, some recent developments don’t bode well: As more people take rapid COVID-19 tests at home, fewer people are getting the gold-standard tests that the government relies on for case counts…
…Outbreaks have erupted across Asia. Massive swaths of Europe, including the United Kingdom — America’s best pandemic bellwether for much of 2021 — are firmly in the grip of a more transmissible Omicron subvariant called BA.2 that’s been simmering stateside for months…
Some fact checking might be in order.
Various reports come at the story from various angles, as we might expect. Most of the articles I’ve found encourage people to continue getting booster shots, as the best protection against winding up in a hospital. Most reports also claim that ‘BA.2’ is more transmissible than the original Omicron flavors, ‘BA.1’ and ‘BA.1.1’.
But no reports indicate that ‘BA.2’ is more virulent than the earlier ‘subvariants’.
White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci — a commentator that many Americans love to hate, and just as many love to idolize — told ABC’s ‘This Week’:
“The bottom line is we’ll likely see an uptick in cases, as we’ve seen in the European countries, particularly the U.K. Hopefully we won’t see a surge… I don’t think we will.”
From the left-leaning New York Times, from mid-January:
For now, the available evidence suggests that Omicron is less threatening to a vaccinated person than a normal flu. Obviously, the Omicron wave has still been damaging, because the variant is so contagious that it has infected tens of millions of Americans in a matter of weeks…
Some reports have suggested that protection from a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, against a symptomatic infection, lasts about three months, as compared to about six months of protection acquired from a natural COVID infection. As I understand it, asymptomatic infections are nearly impossible to track… because they present no symptoms.
If we are to believe Kaiser Health News, however, outbreaks ‘have erupted’ across Asia. Not ‘have occurred’ or ‘have been documented’. They ‘have erupted’.
Nevertheless, The New York Times was able to report, last week:
In the Philippines, tens of thousands are crowding into political rallies in Manila, and the zoo there is packed. In India, millions fanned out last weekend to celebrate a Hindu festival. And in South Korea, 15,000 fans descended on a stadium in Seoul for three nights to see the K-pop band BTS perform for the first time since October 2019.
Many Asian-Pacific countries are dismantling thickets of COVID rules at bewildering speeds, even though the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is still raging in parts of the region. The moves are driven by a mix of medical advice, economic pressures and the sentiment of a pandemic-weary public that enough is enough.
“God knows we need this break,” said Shelly Bacallia, 29, who took her son to the Manila Zoo over the weekend… “We’ve been cooped up for the past two years…”
…In India, where enormous COVID outbreaks once killed hundreds of thousands, restrictions there have largely vanished in recent weeks, except for a requirement to wear masks…
One could easily form the conclusion that what is ‘erupting’ across Asia is ‘liberation’.