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[Starver]

Not sure if those articles mentioned it, but tentitively it's been proposed that this'll be the "Nu-variant". 13th Greek letter, ν).

Which sounds like a bad McGuffinesque plot thing by someone slighy wary of using the old "Omega" cliché yet again...

[LordBaal]

Worth reading both to pair the conservatism (here,  ) of the guardian with the sensationalism of deutsche welle. 

What? The virus now reanimates dead bodies?!

[martinuzz]

Our government announced that, because hospitals have become overcrowded, that all hospitals in the country will have to postpone their regular plannable care. This includes cancer treatments and heart surgeries.

This evening there will be a press conference in which the government will announce more lockdown rules, and try to explain to the population how it can be that despite their promises of the vaccin preventing hospital overcrowding and lockdowns, it yet again has come to this.
They're going to have a hard time getting any trust from the population now. No one understands how we can still be so gravely hit by the 4th wave (daily positive tests and hospital admissions are actually higher than during the last wave, back when no one was vaccinated), despite about 90% of the adult population having been double vaccinated.

[LordBaal]

Wife got the second rusky dosis. Now we are officially communists! Long live the sino-soviet empire, death to capitalism arrggh!

[martinuzz]

What did the nurse say?
"I've got something to Putin you"?

[LordBaal]

Nah, just some 5g tracking nano machines that made us both homosexuals?

[martinuzz]

The new South-African variant has already spread outside of Africa: In Belgium, there is one confirmed case (of a woman who recently travelled from Egypt, but has been nowhere near South-Africa), and one confirmed case where the origins of transmission are unknown.

[Starver]

Not sure if those articles mentioned it, but tentitively it's been proposed that this'll be the "Nu-variant". 13th Greek letter, ν).

Which sounds like a bad McGuffinesque plot thing by someone slighy wary of using the old "Omega" cliché yet again...

...it seems they dodged that bullet. It's officially Omicron!

(Which probably makes one think of a planet-sized robot... How little forsight of the Ancient Greeks to not have more than enough characters in their alphabet to leave plenty of sufficiently meme-free letter-names for future use.  )

To get there, they also skipped (or maybe gave to a less significant variation) the Xi, ξ, but surely their next choice is as easy as Pi!

[LordBaal]

Will be kind of awesome really.

[feelotraveller]

Moderna are already testing several booster vaccines against the Omicron variant and developing another desigend hopefully to specifically target it.  Pfizer for their part have said that if a variant proves resistant to their current vaccine that they will only need about 100 days to develop a tailor-made version that targets that variant.

https://www.foxla.com/news/moderna-testing-3-covid-19-booster-vaccines-on-omicron-variant-pfizer-ready-to-adapt

Not so much shilling for them as commenting that vaccine development is ongoing.  And yes, regulator approval will be necessary for new drugs at the national level, as per usual.

[Vector]

I'm already freaking out because I'll be living here alone for about a week over winter break :/

[None]

I wonder (and dread) how fast this variant will propagate. A hundred days is a long time to get by on human courtesy, especially with pandemic fatigue as it is. Also, and it's totally selfish, but I'm worried it covers ground quickly and then I have to cancel on Christmas with my folks again. I'd get by well enough, but I know it hurt my folks that I was absent.

[McTraveller]

Hey Vec, at least you'll be isolated during the break, yeah?

I'm just wondering when people will stop flipping out every time there is another variant. There are going to be variants basically until the end of time.  It really seems like we as a society is overreacting now.

I don't mean stop developing vaccines or having measured hygiene / public health programs.  But panic (see stock markets) and just basically shutting down and giving up.... really?

[Rolan7]

That's true, the virus is going to keep mutating new variants.

...There are a few reasons for that, which I think people should be angry about:
Vaccine rollout (and even production) left the third world unprotected, allowing a safe area for the virus to mutate.

Also, prominent personalities like Alex Jones weakened public trust in *this specific* vaccine which directly resulted in a less effectual rollout.  Countries like the USA and UK continue to breed Covid because of grift.  For money.  I truly believe that those people deserve a fair trial for hundreds of thousands of counts of manslaughter, potentially 7.7 billion.

Edit:  Like, "treason" is a dumb charge because states are meh, but can we get a charge of treason against human life?

[Starver]

Chris Whitty (UK scientific 'front end face' for the government) indeed worries that if the UK has to reactivate various social probibitions then people might rail against them. If it's the PM announcing it (he that "only didn't wear a mask for a moment" whilst visiting a hospital recently, but then also didn't wear one on a train recently, etc) then it'll probably go down badly.

Apart from the "we don't trust experts" lot (who are probably a lost cause), the politicians maybe ought to stay out of it, except as far as needed to get the proper meritocracy onto the appropriate podium to say their bit.



(Just the other day I accepted the other-than-last-year Annual Christmas Invitation from the large extended clan I sit well on the outskirts of. I did say "all else allowing", even before the inkling of this latest developments.)


Oh, and a cinema in Wales that refused to check Covid Passports/take other precautions, is being forced to close. Wales has strong precautions still in place (similar to Scotland, NI... England is currently very lapse, in comparison) but it seems like the owner/manager in this case thought she could ignore them, and also refused to turn up for the initial court hearing she was summonsed to, so the proverbial tonne of bricks is now being dropped upon the establishment concerned. Might be worth seeing where the support/push-back for that comes from, and how much of each.


Mc: We've had maybe twelve other namable variants (Nu would have been the 13th, but if they skipped to the 15th letter I cannot rule out that they skipped some of the first dosen, without checking) and while back when they christened the Alpha one (presumed UK-native) there were lower bars to jump to be "of concern" as it drifts away from the baseline version(s), by now they're probably better at finding small differences but more picky about lumping-and-splitting. Omicron seems to have a load of mutations that have made it out-compete Delta (the one otherwise stull of greatest concern in this part of the world) and seems to suggest it is more of concern.

Not sure about it regarding rate of fatality/debilitatory, but it's good at spreading. Which could be a blessing (displace more harmful strains, and yet still prime people's systems against them) but that's a long-shot. It also acts as a good metric about how careless people still are. Right now, catching Alpha or even Delta could be from any old non-biosecure contact you have in the UK, as the epidemic/endemic borderline is approached. As soon as Omicron is spotted, it shows that some of the comparatively few people who do so are galavanting around overseas and returning/visting here without all the due care they should be taking.