Covid-2019 - 2021-12-29

CDC Director Walensky (yes, the one who has "feelings of doom" from time to times) defends the agency's new less stringent 5-day quarantine guideline in the Omicron wave: "it really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate." This is an example of what we've been saying: the US government, at this point, has little choice but to recognize that the American people are tired of living in fear and isolation, and under the thumb of unelected bureaucratic dictators.

IMPORTANT DATA NOTE: We'd think enough days have gone by after the Christmas holidays for the new-case data to stabilize, but it's still all over the map. We're worried that our attempts to groom and smooth it are counterproductive, so with today's charts and tables we are displaying it pretty much as it is provided from reliable sources. So be prepared for some crazy-looking numbers. What's really strange is how uneven it is, with seemingly impossible large numbers coming from Europe and the US, with Asia and the developing world looking entirely normal. Oddest of all: there is no correlation between seemingly surging case-loads and the prevalence of the Omicron variant from locale to locale.