What to Watch for during the Omicron Wave
By JIM GERAGHTY
December 27, 2021 9:30 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morni...e-omicron-wave/

People line up for a COVID-19 test in Times Square as the Omicron coronavirus variant continues to spread in New York, December 26, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)



Welcome back. I hope you had a terrific Christmas holiday. The nation’s big newspapers are breathlessly reporting about record Covid-19 case numbers in certain states, but that’s not the problem to watch. No, the problem to watch is how hospitals are coping with patients from the Omicron wave, their own preexisting staffing shortages, and their own staff catching Omicron and needing to stay home. Also, the Washington Post would now like to assure you that catching Covid-19 is not a character defect or a sign that you have poor judgment.

‘Three Days after Christmas, Here Comes the Next Wave’

“The highly transmissible Omicron variant is sending daily caseloads in parts of the United States soaring to levels higher than last winter’s pandemic peak,” warns the New York Times. “Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Puerto Rico are among the areas that have reported more coronavirus cases in the past week than in any other seven-day period, data show.”

(What, none of those states are being accused of an “experiment in human sacrifice” as Georgia was?)

As this newsletter has emphasized with metronomic and perhaps maddening regularity, the big worry is not the number of Covid-19 cases — even though they’ve increased 83 percent in the past two weeks. A skyrocketing case rate was baked in the cake as soon as the super-duper-contagious variant of Omicron replaced the “merely” super-contagious variant of Delta. No, the smaller but still significant worries are that the number of hospitalized for Covid-19 has increased 8 percent over the past two weeks, to a bit over 71,000, and the daily number of new deaths from Covid-19 are up 3 percent, to the still-pretty-darn-high 1,328. (Remember earlier this month, when the U.S. passed 800,000 deaths, and the threshold was seen as a grim milestone? On Worldometers, the U.S. just passed 837,000 deaths. When you’re adding 1,200 to 1,300 new deaths per day, you reach those threshold numerals with depressing regularity. Not only have more Americans died of Covid-19 during the Biden presidency than during the Trump presidency, when this pandemic is done, those figures won’t even be close. Put another way, we will have lost more Americans to this virus after the vaccines arrived than we did before vaccines were available.)-- excerpt, rest at link above --